How does Flarum compare with XF right now?

rnk

We all know that XF was the successor of VB which failed after being taken over by a commercial company. For years it was the best forum software imo but now the development has stalled and looks almost outdated.'

I was thinking, how does Flarum compare with XF right now when it comes to performance and functionality?

Lumeinshin

rnk It really depends on what you're after. Many of the differences are layout or more so conception than being 'better/worse'
There is a lot of options for extensions and such, although there are some common things that arent available/easy on flarum yet.
A common request by my users has been chat functionality, there is Neon Chat. although it doesnt quite match what me or my users are quite after. The standard forum experience is quite good in my experience.

Another thing that you might find quite different is the way tags are dealt with, I believe most xenforo sites and other forums focus on Categories, which cant quite be emulated via flarum in exactly the same way imo, even if you use the categories extension. Although a better admin/dev might be able to make their site feel closer to what I think of.

In my experience flarum has been very fast, although when I first set up my site it had huge slowdown and loading issues. It has improved with updates.
This discussion site has quite a few extensions on. My site does as well, I thought I could attach an image but I cant directly so the link will do: SheepishPatio
Maybe have a tab open with a couple XenForo sites you like and a couple flarum ones, think of mine as what someone who tweaks things a little can do and this site as one with quite a few extensions. If anyone else has a site to add for comparison feel free to reply i'm sure it'll be handy 🙂

Circa

Flarum is extremely barebones out of the box compared to XF. You have to rely on installing tons of extensions to get it up to par with what XF gives you. That can be both a blessing and a curse. On one hand it allows for admins to only install the things they need but if you need a lot, it is a lot to manage, especially when an update breaks an extension or vice versa.

But Flarum is free and open source and XF is not, so there's that too.

The development team is around here and forthcoming with the work they do and it looks like 2.0 will be a great step into competing better with XF, IPB, etc. I think they still have a ways to go to get to that level personally but right now I think they're in a good place. I use Flarum for smaller forum communities as kind of a testing ground before I decide to move my big one from IPB. Waiting to see how 2.0 ends up.