Discourse vs Misskey

Both are self-hosted communication - social networks and forums projects. This page compares how well each one is actually maintained — the part you cannot see from a feature list.

Discourse and Misskey are closely matched on maintenance health (91 vs 88). Neither is the safer bet on activity alone, so choose on features, licence and the stack you already run.
DiscourseMisskey
Health score 91/100 88/100
Commits (11 mo) 6522 1091
Commits (last 3 mo) 1940 396
Stars 48k 11k
Latest release 15 Jul 2026 23 Sept 2026
Licence GPL-2.0 AGPL-3.0
Built with Docker Nodejs, Docker
Typical RAM 2 GB 1 GB

Discourse

Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.

91/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 39/40
Releases 21/25
Community 19/20
Momentum 12/15

Commit activity more than 98% of tracked projects; popularity more than 97%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 556 commits 2025-11: 501 commits 2025-12: 524 commits 2026-01: 403 commits 2026-02: 636 commits 2026-03: 784 commits 2026-04: 555 commits 2026-05: 623 commits 2026-06: 677 commits 2026-07: 680 commits 2026-08: 583 commits

Misskey

Decentralized app-like microblogging server/SNS for the Fediverse, using the ActivityPub protocol like GNU social and Mastodon.

88/100
Thriving

High commit volume, frequent releases and growing activity.

Maintenance 32/40
Releases 25/25
Community 16/20
Momentum 15/15

Commit activity more than 81% of tracked projects; popularity more than 81%. How this is calculated.

Commits, last 11 months

2025-10: 142 commits 2025-11: 155 commits 2025-12: 110 commits 2026-01: 66 commits 2026-02: 18 commits 2026-03: 47 commits 2026-04: 62 commits 2026-05: 95 commits 2026-06: 150 commits 2026-07: 200 commits 2026-08: 46 commits

How to read this

Everything above is measured, not opinion: commit counts and release dates come from the public repositories, and the health score ranks each project against all 1352 projects we track. Read the full method.

What this comparison deliberately does not do is tell you which has the better feature set. Maintenance health tells you which project will still be receiving security fixes in two years. Decide that first, then compare features on the projects that survive the filter.

See every option in this category: self-hosted communication - social networks and forums.