Rungu vs Fider vs Astuto: three open-source feedback boards compared

Every few weeks someone in r/selfhosted asks for a Fider alternative. The ask is rarely that Fider failed them. It is the deployment surface: Fider requires PostgreSQL 12 or newer, plus an SMTP server or a Mailgun account, before a single visitor can post feedback. On a small VPS where you wanted one more service, that turns into three.

This post compares three open-source feedback boards: Fider, Astuto, and Rungu. Disclosure up front: we build Rungu, so read the comparison with that in mind. Every number below comes from each project's repository and documentation, pulled on September 9, 2026.

The problem with the default pick

Fider is the name that surfaces first, and deservedly so. Over 4,500 stars and 850 forks on GitHub, written in Go, in development for years, with a paid hosted tier if you would rather not run anything yourself. It is the board most people mean when they say "self-hosted feedback".

The trade is infrastructure. Fider's own hosting docs state the requirements plainly: PostgreSQL 12 or newer, and email delivery through an SMTP server or a Mailgun account. Both are required, not optional. Docker is the recommended install path. If you already operate Postgres and a mail relay, none of this is a problem. If you do not, you are adopting two additional systems to collect feature requests.

Licensing matters to some teams too. Fider ships under AGPL-3.0. For a public-facing board that is usually fine, but plenty of companies have a blanket policy against AGPL dependencies, and a feedback portal still counts.

The three boards at a glance

Star counts drift daily; the activity row is the one worth sitting on. Rungu shipped v0.4.0, v0.5.0, and v0.6.0 inside the first eight days of September. Fider's latest release is two months old, which for an eight-year-old project is a quiet month, not a warning. Astuto's repository has seen no pushes since January 2026.

What Fider gets right

Before the case for anything else: Fider is good software. The maturity shows up in ways a star count cannot capture. Sign-in with Google, GitHub, Facebook, and Microsoft. A moderation flow that has survived real communities. Eight hundred and fifty forks mean edge cases have been found and fixed by people who were not the authors.

If you already run Postgres, already send mail, and want a board that thousands of installations have stress-tested, Fider remains a sane default. Nothing here argues otherwise.

Where Rungu bets differently

Rungu started from a different constraint: the board should be the only new thing on the machine. It is a single Rust binary with the SvelteKit frontend embedded inside, and SQLite as the default store. PostgreSQL is supported through DATABASE_URL when you want it. The quick start is one of two commands:

docker compose up -d
# or
cargo build --release
./target/release/rungu --db rungu.db serve --listen 0.0.0.0:3000

There is no SMTP section in the configuration. Identity is handled by OAuth (Google, GitHub, Keycloak, mix and match), and the same email across providers resolves to one user account. Email delivery is simply not on the critical path to a working board.

The second bet is stranger and more interesting: Rungu exposes itself as an MCP server with 26 tools, over stdio locally or HTTP remotely with an API key. An agent running in Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf can list posts, search with FTS5, file a bug on behalf of a user it was just talking to, update statuses, vote, and read analytics. The trending ranking it sees is the same one the board shows: 7-day vote velocity, computed from aggregate counters that store no IPs, no cookies, and no fingerprints.

The rest of the feature list reads like a board should: comments, categories, statuses, roadmap and changelog views, image attachments up to 10 MB, FTS5 search, dark mode, an embeddable widget, HMAC-signed webhooks, and white-labeling through environment variables. The "Powered by Rungu" badge can be removed with a license at $49 per major version or $70 lifetime, and an invalid license only brings the badge back. Nothing gets throttled.

Astuto's position

Astuto sits in the middle with roughly 2,300 stars and an AGPL-3.0 license. Its quick start is a Docker Compose file that brings up the app alongside a postgres:14.5 container, so the footprint story is closer to Fider's than to Rungu's.

The open question is momentum. The last push to the repository landed on January 9, 2026. A feedback board is often install-once-and-forget, and quiet code can be stable code. But if you want the project behind your board to keep shipping, that date is the fact to weigh. Check the repo yourself before committing either way.

Trade-offs, stated plainly

Rungu has 8 stars. That number is printed above without rounding because pretending otherwise would be silly. A young project means fewer eyes on the code, fewer community answers when you hit something odd, and integrations that do not exist yet. Three releases in a week is a pace, not a track record.

What you get in exchange is a footprint decision and an interface decision. The footprint: one process, one SQLite file, no mail infrastructure. The interface: a feedback board your coding agent can operate directly, which neither Fider nor Astuto offers today.

Apache-2.0 instead of AGPL is the quieter differentiator. If your org treats AGPL as radioactive, that alone may settle the choice.

Which one fits you

You already operate Postgres and SMTP, and you want the most battle-tested option: Fider.

You want a board you configure once inside an existing Compose setup, and you are comfortable with a repository that has been quiet for eight months: Astuto.

You want the smallest possible addition to your server, no email services, an Apache license, and a board your AI agents can read and write through MCP: Rungu.

What's next

Rungu's repository carries a 689-line production deployment guide covering Docker Compose with Traefik, TLS, OAuth setup, backup strategy, and zero-downtime updates, plus a CLI reference. Both are linked from the README.

If the comparison is useful, the repo is the place to kick the tires:

• Rungu: github.com/codecoradev/rungu (Apache-2.0, Rust + SvelteKit)
• Fider: github.com/getfider/fider (AGPL-3.0, Go)
• Astuto: github.com/astuto/astuto (AGPL-3.0)

Numbers move. The stars, releases, and requirements above were accurate on September 9, 2026. Re-check the repos before you deploy any of the three.