Waterhole

Toby · May 23, 2023

Hello Flarum community! How's it going?

For those of you who don't know me - I'm Toby, the original Flarum founder. I left the project in 2019, I guess you could say due to open-source burnout.

Congrats on the recent grant announcement - that's an awesome achievement! Kudos for the way you've steered the project, @luceos and co.

When I left I said I was going to work on a new proprietary forum software product, and while it took a bit longer than expected, I'm very excited to be launching today and wanted to share with you all! Introducing: Waterhole.

https://waterhole.dev

Apart from being a completely new product, Waterhole has some philosophical differences from Flarum:

Extensible core, but with more first-party features
Server-rendered; no frontend JS framework
All-in on Laravel and its ecosystem
Paid open-source business model

With the pricing, it's clearly more of a B2B product - but you can still try it out for free.

Thanks for checking it out

hrvoje_hr · May 23, 2023

Hi Toby, congrats on the launch! While I prefer Flarum and open source efforts of the team, Waterhole feels and looks incredible. I especially like how reactions are implemented as a native feature, and SSO out of the box as a first-party extension is nice too.

Wishing you all the best with the project

Yolo · May 23, 2023

Toby Is there a possibility to switch from flarum to the platform? What plugins and options are offered there?

Toby · May 23, 2023

hrvoje_hr Thanks for the kind words!

Yolo Yes, migration from Flarum is supported. It's early days so no plugins exist yet, but there are more features built in to the core than in Flarum.