Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Flarum VS Listmonk

Compare Flarum VS Listmonk and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Flarum logo Flarum

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

Listmonk logo Listmonk

Send e-mail campaigns from a powerful dashboard. High performance and features packed into one app.
  • Flarum Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-27
  • Listmonk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2024-08-30

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.

Listmonk features and specs

  • Open Source
    Listmonk is free to use, modify, and distribute. This can offer significant cost savings compared to proprietary email marketing solutions.
  • Self-Hosted
    Allows you to have full control over the software and your data, providing enhanced security and customization possibilities.
  • Scalability
    Designed to handle millions of subscribers and messages effectively, making it suitable for both small and large-scale email marketing campaigns.
  • Multilingual Support
    Supports multiple languages, making it accessible for users from different linguistic backgrounds.
  • API Access
    Provides a comprehensive API, allowing for excellent integration with other software and platforms.
  • Flexible Database
    Supports both PostgreSQL and SQLite, catering to different user needs and technical requirements.

Possible disadvantages of Listmonk

  • Technical Expertise Required
    Being a self-hosted solution, it requires a certain level of technical knowledge for setup, maintenance, and troubleshooting.
  • Hosting Costs
    Although the software itself is free, you will need to incur costs for hosting and maintaining the server where Listmonk is installed.
  • Limited Built-In Templates
    May not come with a wide variety of pre-designed email templates, requiring users to create their own or import from other sources.
  • Community Support
    Unlike commercial solutions, support is primarily community-driven, which may lead to slower issue resolution compared to dedicated support teams.
  • Learning Curve
    The initial setup and configuration can be complex and may require a time investment to understand all its features and functionalities.

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)

Listmonk videos

Listmonk

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Flarum and Listmonk)
Forums And Forum Software
Email Marketing
0 0%
100% 100
Forums
100 100%
0% 0
Newsletter Marketing
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Flarum and Listmonk. 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 Listmonk

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...

Listmonk Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Flarum might be a bit more popular than Listmonk. We know about 37 links to it since March 2021 and only 27 links to Listmonk. 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 / 4 months ago
  • Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?
    Flarum is a really nice open source forum https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Stop Using Discord
    Load quicker than Discourse and feel snappy. [0]: https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 11 months 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

Listmonk mentions (27)

  • Ask HN: Self hosted Waitlist with Landing page?
    "Preferably using shadcn/react/supabase. I don't want to reinvent the wheel here." Respectfully, you don't need supabase for a landing page with waitlist especially when you don't want to reinvest the wheel. You have several options: 1. Find a WordPress theme that has the form built in. The fastest out of the box setup you will find. 2. If you don't want WordPRess or deal with PHP etc, then there are plenty of... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Ask HN: Cheap way to run a small newsletter?
    You can use https://listmonk.app or https://sendy.co and use a provider lke SES under the hood. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Show HN: I made an open source Mailchimp RSS-to-Email alternative
    Listmonk is a seriously awesome piece of software! Have used it to run multiple newsletters, over various version upgrades (almost all stress free), and even written some custom integrations with the API. https://listmonk.app. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Bots Invaded My Newsletter. Here's How I Fought Back with ML ⚔️ 🤖
    I have mainly name and email fields in the newsletter signup and there is no verification. Then I manually blacklisted all the bots in the email service Listmonk. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • My Open-Source toolkit for 2024
    Listmonk – An open-source alternative to Mailchimp just released version 3. It’s great as a stand-alone newsletter. Also seems like a low lift for capturing leads for side projects. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

MailChimp - MailChimp is the best way to design, send, and share email newsletters.

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

Sendy - Sendy is a self hosted newsletter app that sends emails 100x cheaper via Amazon SES

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.

TinyLetter - Start writing your own newsletter instantly.