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Serendipity vs Dotclear: catalog facts
Serendipity	Dotclear
Free Free and open source under the BSD 3-Clause licence.	Free Free and open source under the GPL-2.0 licence.
Self-hosted	Self-hosted
Long track record since 2002 Plugin and theme repository installable from the admin	Long history, in development since 2002 Self-hosted, so you keep control of the blog
Smaller community than WordPress Classic PHP blog design rather than a modern headless setup	Community and documentation are largely French-speaking Needs a PHP web server to run
Self-hosted	Self-hosted
Open source	Open source
License: BSD-3-Clause	License: GPL-2.0
Not stated if an account is needed	Not stated if an account is needed
Not stated if it works offline	Not stated if it works offline
Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026	Official website Full listing and sources Checked October 2, 2026

Catalog facts only. Anything “not stated” is unconfirmed. Check full listings for details.