Postiz Alternative, Open Source: You Already Have Open Source. You Want Lighter.

There is a query that looks like a mistake until you think about who types it: postiz alternative open source. Postiz is already open source. It is AGPL-3.0, and on 2026-09-20 its repository shows 36.1k stars and nearly three thousand commits. Nobody arrives at that search wanting a licence.

They arrive after a deployment. They ran the compose file, watched what came up, and are now searching for the thing they actually want but cannot name: something lighter. No list on the first page of results answers that, because every list is sorted by popularity instead of by weight.

Heavy has a definition, and it is three daemons

From the official Postiz self-hosting documentation, read on 2026-09-20: the minimum is 2 vCPU, 2 GB RAM and 20 GB of disk for light single-user use, and the recommendation is 4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM and 50 GB plus a persistent volume for uploads. The dependency table lists PostgreSQL 14 and Redis 6, and then a third entry that changes the character of the whole deployment: Temporal, required since v2.12.0.

Temporal is a workflow orchestration engine. It is excellent software and it is also a service with its own storage, its own upgrade path and its own failure modes. The official compose bundle hides it neatly, which is fine right up to the first time publishing silently stops and you have to work out which of four moving parts is stuck.

The question behind the query is not "which project has a better licence". It is "how many things must stay running at three in the morning for a post to go out".

Weight shows up in the hosted plans too, and in a direction nobody expects. Postiz cloud tiers on 2026-09-20 are $29 for 5 channels, $39 for 10, $49 for 30 and $99 for 100, with AI video allowances of 3, 10, 30 and 60 clips a month. This round its pricing page also published video editing minutes for the first time: 60, 120, 300 and 600 minutes. Divide one by the other and the entry plan gives you 20 minutes of editing per clip, while the top plan gives you 10. Paying more than three times as much halves your per-clip time budget. It is a small thing, and it is a good reminder that a second quota column can reverse the ranking the first one gives you.

That is the axis worth sorting on, and none of the directory sites use it. It also explains why the same person often searches postiz self hosted requirements first and postiz alternative an hour later.

The light and heavy split, using today numbers

All figures fetched first-hand on 2026-09-20 from the vendors and the repositories themselves.

One column is deliberately missing from that table: price per account. All three sell unlimited accounts, so the denominator is infinite and any figure printed there would be theatre. The same goes for a cost-per-post column, because none of these three meters your output. When a tool does not charge by the thing you are counting, the honest move is to leave the cell empty and compare on what it does charge for, which here is networks and running services.

Read the network rows before anything else, because they are where the trade sits. Mixpost Lite cannot publish to Instagram or TikTok. That is not a footnote, it is the entire decision for most people, and paying $299 once is the documented way past it. Postiz, meanwhile, lists more than thirty channels, but a sizeable share of that count is Discord, Slack, Dev.to, Mastodon and similar — genuinely useful, and not the same thing as thirty social networks. Our head-to-head is in Postiz vs Mixpost, and the one-time licence maths in Mixpost one-time pricing.

There is a fourth band that never appears on these lists because it has no repository: the native scheduler inside the platform plus a small script. If you publish to two or three accounts, that combination has no daemons at all, and the only thing you maintain is your own cron entry.

The twenty-second test for whether a project is still alive

Star counts are a popularity number and they lag reality by years. A project that stopped shipping in 2024 keeps its stars. Here is the check that actually predicts whether you will be alone with a broken deployment next spring:

1. Read the date on the most recent commit, not the commit count. Months of silence on a tool that talks to nine changing platform APIs is the warning sign, because the platforms do not stop changing.
2. Open the releases page and look for a tagged release this year. Continuous commits with no release often means the maintainer is mid-rewrite.
3. Sort issues by newest and see if anyone replied. An unanswered issue about a platform login break is the most informative page in the entire repository.
4. Check the number of contributors who are not the founder. One-person projects are not disqualified, they are just single points of failure you should price in.

In the interest of not overstating our own work: we read both repository pages on 2026-09-20 and could confirm the star counts and licences quoted above, but the pages did not surface last-commit dates in what we could fetch, so we are not publishing dates we did not see. Run the four steps yourself before you deploy anything; it is faster than reading another list, and it is the only part of this decision that nobody else can do for you, because the answer changes every month.

The cost that no lighter tool removes

Whichever project you land on, one bill is identical across all of them, and Postiz is unusually honest about it in its own FAQ: "Facebook, Instagram, Threads and YouTube are more complicated and can usually take more than a month with multiple changes in the submissions, privacy policy and terms of service."

Read that sentence as a scheduling fact rather than a complaint. It means the earliest date your self-hosted publisher can post to Instagram is set by a review team you have never met, and it is measured in weeks no matter which repository you cloned. People routinely spend a fortnight comparing projects and then discover the real start date was never under their control.

That queue belongs to the platforms, not the software. Switching from a heavy self-hosted publisher to a light one changes how many services you babysit and changes nothing about how long Meta takes to approve your app. If credentials are what is blocking you rather than RAM, a lighter tool solves the wrong problem — that thread is followed in the credential wall in front of self-hosted Postiz and priced out in the real cost of self-hosted Postiz.

It is also worth knowing that the whole developer-application problem disappears in a different product shape: tools that run on your own desktop and post through accounts you log into yourself, in a local browser, with no vendor app in the middle. NoobClaw works that way, with one fingerprint and one login per account, human-paced timing, human review kept in the loop, and membership pricing published on the website and in the app. It is not a drop-in replacement for a scheduler, and if your bottleneck is genuinely "Temporal is too much for my VPS", the honest first stop is still Postiz open source versus paid.

Questions from people already self-hosting

If Postiz is open source, what does an open source alternative even mean?

In practice it means lighter. Postiz licensing is not the problem people are trying to solve; its runtime is, because the documented dependency list now includes Temporal alongside PostgreSQL and Redis. Search for fewer services, not a different licence.

Is Mixpost Lite a real replacement for Postiz?

Only if your networks are in its list. As of 2026-09-20 Mixpost Lite publishes to Facebook Pages, Mastodon and X, and that is the whole set. If Instagram or TikTok are part of your routine, Lite is not a replacement at any weight, and the documented route past it is the one-time Pro licence.

Can I run one of these on a small VPS?

Postiz publishes a minimum of 2 vCPU and 2 GB RAM with 20 GB of disk for light single-user use, and recommends 4 vCPU and 8 GB with 50 GB plus a persistent volume. Treat the minimum as a demo configuration rather than a production one, particularly once Temporal and media uploads are in the picture.