Software Alternatives & Reviews

Flarum VS XenForo

Compare Flarum VS XenForo 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.

XenForo logo XenForo

Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.
  • Flarum Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-07-27
  • XenForo Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-18

Flarum

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website flarum.org
Pricing URL-
Details $

XenForo

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website xenforo.com
Pricing URL Official XenForo Pricing
Details $-

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)

XenForo videos

What is xenforo?

More videos:

  • Review - [Review] Phần mềm download resource free trên xenforo.com

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Flarum and XenForo)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
56 56%
44% 44
Community Platform
57 57%
43% 43
Social Networks
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Flarum and XenForo. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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  1. User avatar
    olidev
    · almost 4 years ago
    · Reply

    I have used both since they are based on PHP. In my experience, flarum is a better option today.

    First, it is built on Laravel framework, which has great codebase and architecture. It gets patch regularly.

    Second, it gets the inherited security and performance features from Laravel, which makes it more secure than xenforo.

    Third, the UI is modern and minimal, unlike Xenforo which feels like it is from 90s.

    I have tried installing both on my Cloudways server. Flarum was installed without any problem. I ran into few issues when trying to install Xenforo because their documentation is not updated.

    I recommend - Flarum.

Reviews

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

Flarum Reviews

  1. 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...

XenForo Reviews

Top 10 Best Free Open Source Forum Software to Setup own Discussion Forum
XenForo is one of the most intuitive extensible and highly flexible community software which provides speed, durability, and compelling community experience. It offers a wide range of useful features such as integration with Facebook for easy sharing of the content, allows members to follow each other and see the recent activities of your forum, style property editor to...
Source: technofizi.net
IndieHackers: Best forum software
If you don’t mind paying the most powerful and my personal favourite is https://XenForo.com constant updates and an overall great product with a good community marketplace!

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Flarum should be more popular than XenForo. It has been mentiond 34 times since March 2021. 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 (34)

  • 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 / 2 months 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: 4 months ago
  • Show HN: Booklet – modern discussion forum for professional groups
    Not sure yet how this compares to Flarum - https://freeflarum.com/ you can self-host too https://flarum.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Don't Use Discord as a Forum
    Https://flarum.org/ is a nice modern alternative, also free. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Ask HN: What forum software do you recommend?
    Https://flarum.org/ is really nice and modern. I donated to https://freeflarum.com/ and used my custom domain for their hosted free offering. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
View more

XenForo mentions (10)

  • How to Create a Discussion Forum Using PHP and MySQL?
    XenForo (https://xenforo.com/) XenForo is a popular commercial forum software application that is widely used for creating and managing online discussion communities and forums. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Poll Results & Re-Opening the Subreddit
    For the longer term migration options, I would like to recommend we set up a Xenforo forum one last time. It would be quick and easy to do, it's a well designed and maintained solution that has all the technical features we need and works well for communities like this, as demonstrated by the Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity forums. Finally, this community will only be free of interference if we go to a place... Source: 10 months ago
  • Some forum software written in Rust
    Obviously forums aren't as popular as they used to be, so this topic might not be of interest to many. For folks that want to run a forum, they'd most certainly go with Discourse (Ruby), Flarum (PHP), Xenforo (PHP), NodeBB (Javascript), Nimforum (Nim) and maybe Casnode (Go). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Best way to create a community website
    For something simple, I'd look into bbpress. For something more complex (but that can still integrate with WordPress, check out Xenforo (my favorite) or Vanilla. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Any forum/community dedicated to software and DevOps?
    Obligatory Lobsters[0] link. You may know it well already though. If you really need to scratch that itch, maybe start your own community based around those topics? I wouldn't build it from scratch though, and use something like XenForo[1]. The web needs more forums, there's not enough of them around! [0] https://lobste.rs/ [1] https://xenforo.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

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

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.

Simple Machines Forum - Simple Machines offers free open source software such as SMF, the powerful and easy to use community forum written in PHP. Start interesting discussions on your website!