List of sites running the LiveJournal engine

The software running LiveJournal is open source and primarily written in Perl. Because of this, many other communities have been designed using the LiveJournal software, and have very similar features and formats to LiveJournal itself. However, these sites often have different terms of service than LiveJournal's, making them attractive to users who have become disenchanted with LiveJournal's rules and wish to move their journals to other hosts. the server code of which had just been made open source. Precissi accepted the dare and promptly set up the server code, which was running by the end of the month. DeadJournal immediately adopted a completely contrasting attitude to that of LiveJournal, proclaiming itself as the darker, less friendly alternative, and catering specifically to angry and/or depressed individuals. After LiveJournal, DeadJournal was the second site to use the LiveJournal server code. In its early years, the site often suffered technical errors due to hardware or software failures, resulting in downtime and even data loss. Later, upgrades frequently placed DeadJournal on new equipment, such as larger and faster web slaves and load balancers. Today, DeadJournal is stable, experiencing unplanned downtime only very rarely. After experiencing rapid, uncontrolled growth in its first few months of operation, DeadJournal followed suit with LiveJournal, instituting an invite code system. Unlike LiveJournal, DeadJournal still maintains its invite code system. Though many users see this as an inconvenience, DeadJournal owner and administrator Frank Precissi, among other users, believes it helps maintain the integrity of the service. As of December 14, 2007, DeadJournal had 495,569 users.

* was founded on September 2, 2003 under the url unlimitedrpg.com, offering a journal site for role-playing. It later changed its name to greatestjournal.com and opened to anyone, as an alternative to LiveJournal, offering for free many of the features which LiveJournal offers only to paying users, such as extra icons, voice posts, unlimited styles, and syndication of RSS feeds from other sources. In February 2005 one of the biggest ISPs in the world, ThePlanet, started sponsoring the site's hosting. On June 4, 2005, the site surpassed 1,000,000 users. In August 2005 a new video section was launched. As of December 7, 2007, there were 1.9 million users and communities, , which have eventually led to overload and difficulties.

* : As of December 21, 2007, Blurty had 966,688 members. Blurty also runs on the open-source LiveJournal code and was created in 2002. Users must be 18 or older to join.

* : opened its doors on October 30, 2001 with the URL journal.insanityspeaks.com. Though it was one of the first sites running the LiveJournal engine, for many years InsaneJournal was considered a niche journal site for those who wanted to host their journals at a small relatively unknown site. Then on May 30th, 2007 the same news.com article that told the story of LiveJournal suspending five hundred of their journals listed InsaneJournal, along with GreatestJournal and JournalFen, a possible alternative to LiveJournal. On December 5, 2007 GreatestJournal stopped accepting new accounts and began redirecting their users to InsaneJournal to create new accounts. For a one week period of time, Greatest Journal re-enabled account creation, but then on December 17, 2007 GreatestJournal once again began referring its users to InsaneJournal via their . With the level of publicity that it has received, InsaneJournal has added over 50,000 new accounts and now has over 87,00 user and asylum accounts.

* , founded in March 2003, is only for fans of books, movies, television, music and other forms of entertainment; like Blurty, Journalfen requires its users to be 18 or older. As of November 17, 2007, Journalfen had 14,418 members.

* , founded in September 2007, requires that all users be 18 years of age or older. As of December 21, 2007, Commiejournal had 14,334 members.

LiveJournal, DeadJournal, and InsaneJournal support OpenID, allowing users with accounts on one site to leave signed comments on other sites.

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