Flarum competitors

Prosperous

csf I can't get over how well done FluxBB on Textpattern has been modified to look; it's amazing and inspiring.

I agree with your previous point as well. Although Flarum is a new competitor to a long list of available (and stable) forum software, you really have to compare it to other free options. XenForo, IP.Board and Burning Board should be categorised as a paid for alternative but not listed in the same class. But as the topic states, they are still a competitor regardless.

There is no doubt that Flarum already has a large fan base but any more will only improve its foundations. Everyone is waiting for a stable version to hit the shelves so until then, I am more than happy to use the beta software. Having said that, larger communities and ones that rely on their forum will wait it out until a stable version does eventually hit.

It's almost there, I can smell it. And hopefully in time for a new project I have already started planning in the last couple of weeks.

csf

Master-Antonio Flarum is ... missing many features, it is immature.

My experience is different. I've been kicking the poop out of Flarum for many weeks now, and I find it pretty solid and feature-sufficient. As an admin and user, there are only two big things missing that we (CSF) need for our community right now!

User management, namely the ability to easily find/see what user accounts exist, and bring the hammer down on one, if necessary.
Email digests, so members don't have to remember to regularly visit the boards to see if new content was posted — because they won't — and that really hurts growth/interactivity in the early life of a community.

Both are essential features, but missing.

There are a couple of other things that I would like to see addressed soonish too, but are not blockers, and I'd expect to see these come in later stable releases:

A fix to this site identity problem when using a global site header like we are, which is really harming our brand identity in outgoing email notifications.
A change to the core URL pattern and editing behaviour. They could be cleaner and easier to work with, and that will be important for community sites as they get bigger and more active.

I know there may be some bugs I'm not aware of, and anything regarding security should be dealt with, for sure, but as far work-horse usability goes, it's pretty solid. Beyond those things mentioned, we're happy to cruise and use the system while waiting for the rest of good things to come.

meetdilip

Personally, I would have used Flarum on http://APPEN.pw if Flarum were stable. There is not much Burning Board offers than Flarum. But the bugs are currently at an annoying stage, and I do not want to take the headache of updating through beta versions.

Other things I would need are plugin for Google Analytics, Adsense.

charles

Discourse and NodeBB should be included in the first post as they are the main competitors to Flarum in my opinion.

meetdilip

charles I added on in development / will be released in future software in the list. Other than IPB 4.1 , all others are work in progress, just like Flarum.

meetdilip

I have updated the first post with Discourse 1.7 as it is in beta stage and may come to market by the time Flarum goes stable. A worthy competitor, I hope.

Update :

Why filter out NodeBB, the only other main competitor. Added NodeBB as well to the first post.

Mortiferr

Discourse and NodeBB are the only competitors in my opinion. Each has their own draw.

Discourse is the most mature and has the most features. However, you pay for it with rather complicated and expensive setup. It is very resource intensive for a forum software and complicated to alter.

NodeBB I don't know a lot about it but it seems to be relatively mature but I'm not a fan of the design decisions of its developers and it seems a little cluttered.

Flarum is the easier and most cheap hosting and resource wise. It has probably the least number of features but it is the newest and the most promising.

AnthonyM

I like NodeBB. Only problem is that it's too resource heavy for anything other than a very small community. Things get really expensive after 2500 members or so.

webeindustry

AnthonyM

What kind of resources are we talking & how many active members on peak hours? Are you using mongodb or redis?

Prosperous

AnthonyM You shouldn't be paying for forum software in this day and age. Period. Hosting being one of the few things you should ever have to pay for. There are numerous forum software that can provide you with everything paid software does, and without being bias, Flarum does just that.

Flarum is going to skyrocket once a stable version is released.

GOD

Prosperous I share your belief. Back in the day if you wanted something good, you had to pay for it. Today though it seems as though paid developments have become either greedy or lazy. They offer less and want you to pay more and most of their best features often come from free developments.

AnthonyM

Prosperous I apologize for any confusion. The software is indeed free. However you will need to buy expensive hosting after about 2500 members. I ran it at openlayer for 4 weeks. Trying to migrate my community, between 2500 and 2800 users with normal text content and at least 600 users online at any time, I needed to use 8 GB RAM. Any more than that and I would definitely have to use 12 GB. And their forums(nodebb) have members with hosting using 64 GB. We're looking at $500 a month at least in hosting costs. If you want 100k member community you had better have some monetization scheme. You can have triple that on vBulletin or IPB using a $60 a month VPS hosting package.

WaqarKhan

Flarum is Flarum. No one will use the other forum scripts, if once he use Flarum

GOD

NodeBB 1.4.2
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB/releases

WoltLab 5.0
https://community.woltlab.com/

Invision 4.1
https://invisionpower.com/forums/

Flarum 1.0.1 (once released)

webeindustry

AnthonyM

I wonder how that compares to discourse. Were you storing that all with redis on a single host? Maybe something like a clustered mongodb with a couple of app servers would work out better? Do you know what your pageviews were for an average month?

That almost sounds unreal, as if you had some bad actors trying to peg the system out.

Would something like this help out? https://github.com/nodejs/node/wiki/Frequently-Asked-Questions It looks like the nodebb process (one per active logical core if so configured) can balloon up to 1.5G if left to defaults. Perhaps tuning that down a bit could help out.

Prosperous

AnthonyM Oh right, so once you do hit a certain quota you are forced to pay? That's a major catch and quite pricey at the same time. It may be pricey if you stick with your existing host but you should look into alternatives. I have a reseller package where I'm not paying anywhere near that amount and still am overwhelmed with resources.

I'll avoid going further into hosting though purely due to the fact that I don't want to derail the topic.

Free is better than paid forum software. Or at the very least anything you pay for can be made readily available for free.

jordanjay29

I split out the tangent discussion to here.

Prosperous

Great, thanks @jordanjay29.

« Previous Page