Discourse vs Flarum
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted social networks options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Discourse with
choose an app… Mastodon Forem Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Lobsters Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy esoTalk Firefish OSSN MyBB Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify Tildes snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc SMF Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy django-machina PieFed kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress YAF.NET Smithereen Discuit Postmarks Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon FluxBB Mastodon Bird UI Wavelog Hollo Gathio Loops Snikket Ktistec Libremdb Mbin Trustroots Akkoma Gancio Honk Socialhome Hubzilla Epicyon Iceshrimp mlmym Wafrn GoBlog Hatsu BuddyPress Sphinx Relay JForum noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Sublinks Throat Buddycloud Phorum Zap bbPress Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Discuz! X Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Compare Flarum with
choose an app… Mastodon Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io phpBB esoTalk MyBB SMF django-machina YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Discourse Flarum Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-2.0 MIT Language Ruby PHP Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 2,048 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 47,619 ★ 6,739 First released 2013 2015 Replaces phpBB, Reddit phpBB, vBulletin
Why pick each one
Choose Flarum if… Fast and clean interface Easy to extend Flarum details
Frequently asked questions Is Discourse or Flarum better? Neither is universally better. Discourse has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Discourse and Flarum free and open-source? Yes. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Flarum under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Discourse and Flarum with Docker? Discourse: yes. Flarum: yes.