Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Flarum VS FluxBB

Compare Flarum VS FluxBB and see what are their differences

Flarum logo Flarum

Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

FluxBB logo FluxBB

FluxBB is a fast, light, user-friendly forum application for your website.
  • Flarum Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-27
  • FluxBB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-09-19

Flarum features and specs

  • Modern Design
    Flarum features a sleek, user-friendly interface designed for modern web aesthetics and accessibility. This makes it appealing and easy to use for community members.
  • Extensibility
    Flarum is highly extensible with a robust plugin system, allowing users to customize and expand its functionalities via extensions created by the community or custom-developed.
  • Fast Performance
    Built with performance in mind, Flarum is lightweight and optimized for speed, ensuring a smooth user experience.
  • Mobile Friendly
    Flarum is fully responsive, allowing for seamless use across various devices, including tablets and smartphones.
  • Open Source
    Flarum is an open-source project, which means you can contribute to its development, audit its code, and use it without licensing fees.

Possible disadvantages of Flarum

  • Early Development Stage
    Flarum is still relatively new and in continuous development, which might mean encountering occasional bugs or missing features that are available in more mature platforms.
  • Limited Documentation
    Documentation is still growing, and there may be gaps that can make it challenging for new users or developers to fully utilize all features or develop new extensions.
  • Smaller Community
    Compared to more established forum software, Flarum has a smaller user and developer community, which can result in fewer available resources, themes, and extensions.
  • Hosting Requirements
    Flarum requires a modern hosting environment with PHP and Composer support, which might not be available with all web hosts and can complicate the setup process for non-technical users.
  • Learning Curve
    Due to its modern architecture and use of Composer for extensions, there is a steeper learning curve for users unfamiliar with these technologies.

FluxBB features and specs

  • Lightweight
    FluxBB is known for its lightweight design, which results in faster load times and reduced server strain compared to more feature-heavy forum solutions.
  • Simplicity
    The software is designed to be easy to set up and use, making it accessible to users without extensive technical knowledge.
  • Open Source
    FluxBB is open-source software, which means that it can be freely modified and distributed. The community can contribute to its development and improvement.
  • Security
    The lightweight nature and simpler codebase can reduce the attack surface for potential vulnerabilities compared to more complex systems.
  • Community Support
    Being an open-source platform, FluxBB has an active community that can provide support, share plugins, and collaborate on troubleshooting.

Possible disadvantages of FluxBB

  • Limited Features
    FluxBB may lack some of the advanced features offered by more robust forum solutions, such as extensive customization options, integrations, and plugins.
  • Appearance
    The default design of FluxBB is quite basic and may not be visually appealing to all users. Custom styling requires additional effort.
  • Manual Updates
    Updating FluxBB may require manual intervention, which can be cumbersome for users who are not technically savvy.
  • Smaller Ecosystem
    The smaller user base and developer community might mean fewer available plugins and themes compared to more popular forum software.
  • Customization Limitations
    Due to its simpler architecture, there may be limitations on how extensively the forum can be customized to fit unique needs.

Analysis of Flarum

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Flarum is considered a good forum software by many users.

Why this product is good

  • Flarum is praised for its simplicity, modern interface, and lightweight design. It offers a smooth and fast user experience, and its extensible architecture allows for easy customization through plugins. The open-source nature ensures that the community can contribute to its development, continually improving the platform.

Recommended for

  • Communities looking for a modern and sleek forum solution
  • Developers who want a customizable and extensible platform
  • Organizations seeking a community-driven, open-source solution
  • Users who prefer lightweight and fast-loading web applications

Flarum videos

How to Install Flarum Extensions to Super-Charge Forum?

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Custom pages that open modals and discussion composer (Flarum beta7 extension tutorial)

FluxBB videos

No FluxBB videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Flarum and FluxBB)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
80 80%
20% 20
Community Platform
78 78%
22% 22
Social Networks
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Flarum and FluxBB. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Flarum and FluxBB

Flarum Reviews

  1. GraceyMartin
    · employ at Digital Marketing ·
    BPM Counter

    BPM Counter analyzes the tempo of incoming audio in beats per minute (bpm). The detection circuit looks for any transients, also known as impulses, in the input signal. Transients are very fast, nonperiodic sound events in the attack portion of the signal. The more obvious this impulse is, the easier it is for BPM Counter to detect the tempo.


IndieHackers: Best forum software
I used Flarum when trying to get a community set up for my product (ended up abandoning it to revisit when we have a larger customer base). It worked fairly well and I enjoyed it but it's definitely beta and unless you're fairly tech savvy it's not quite worth the setup / maintenance. Lots of config changes, crashes, huge issues with plugins, and some features missing. I'd...

FluxBB Reviews

We have no reviews of FluxBB yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Flarum seems to be a lot more popular than FluxBB. While we know about 37 links to Flarum, we've tracked only 3 mentions of FluxBB. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Flarum mentions (37)

  • Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025
    Flarum is great [1]. Looks good, works on mobile, continuously updated. Try it out. Edit: Oh wow, downvoted for posting a good recommendation? 1: https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
    Flarum is a really nice open source forum https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months ago
  • Stop Using Discord
    Load quicker than Discourse and feel snappy. [0]: https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
  • Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum
    From a user perspective I really like Flarum https://flarum.org/ Some example forums that use flarum: Flarum itself: https://discuss.flarum.org/ GrapheneOS: https://discuss.grapheneos.org/ Kagi and Orion: https://kagifeedback.org/ https://orionfeedback.org/ Mailcow: https://community.mailcow.email/ Many more can be found here: https://builtwithflarum.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Introducing the new Godot Forum
    Nice! I kinda wish they went with https://flarum.org/ instead of discourse, though. I think Flarum is the better forum software and it is also open source. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

FluxBB mentions (3)

  • Arch Linux Forms Emailing Plaintext Passwords
    There are no passwords stored plain. The platform that powers the bbs is open source and tiny. You can check in <5 min that it's not doing anything shady here. Source: over 3 years ago
  • nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim
    FluxBB [1], the PHP based forum that powers the Archlinux wiki works fine without JS, and IMHO looks fine too. If you are looking for something minimal with threading support, fossil scm [2] includes a forum. You can checkout the forum for fossil itself which is powered by fossil. [1] https://fluxbb.org [2] https://fossil-scm.org/ [3] https://fossil-scm.org/forum/forummain. - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago
  • Looking for a place to find friends?
    Also quick suggestion maybe you should look at https://fluxbb.org/ I found it on Arch Linux forums and it seems to work well. Source: almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Flarum and FluxBB, you can also consider the following products

Discourse - Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

XenForo - Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.

phpBB - Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit-card sized computer. The official website uses phpBB for their discussion forums. phpBB is not affiliated with nor responsible for any of the sites listed on the showcase.

NodeBB - NodeBB Forum Software - A better community platform for the modern web. NodeBB is a next generation forum software that's free and easy to use.

MyBB - MyBB is a discussion board software that runs on PHP and MySQL

Vanilla Forums - Build an engaging community forum using Vanilla's modern cloud forum software.