What are the advantages of Flarum over Discourse?

dorea

I've been working on discourse for weeks and in a position to run it up via DigitalOcean.com by bitnami service automatically. I suddenly heard about Flarum and stop it.

Anyway, now I'm here to know about differences between Discourse vs. Flarum. I would like to choose the most modern app.

Aesahaettr

dorea I'm not a dev, but it seems to me that Flarum is better for several reasons. It is much more lightweight, runs faster, totally free, and has some fantastic UX aspects which make it far easier to use.

It also seems to me to have a much broader vision for the future. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised at all if it were to become nearly as popular as WordPress itself.

Cactus

dorea Flarum is much less of a pain in the ass to install, and takes up much less resources. Discourse has more features but has also been actively developed longer.

I think Flarum will end up being the better choice.

Development-wise, Jeff Atwood's methodology of 'my way or the highway' is really hurting Discourse. Toby isn't like that from what I've seen.

aolko

Aesahaettr nice

SolidOrphan

Flarum works on low end shared hosts.

dorea

spasi PHP

Really, PHP? I was thinking it's fully made on top of JavaScript!

Cactus
Not, really. By https://bitnami.com/stack/discourse you can install it just in less than 1 minute!

Anyway, I'm still waiting for full rtl support by flarum to finally choose one.

najarfermin

Cactus You are absolutely right men !! Since its inception, Jeff Attwood said will create a simple-to-use amazing tool that will be encourage more developers to change to "ruby" and "postgress". Why ? Because his "intellectual correctness " and " geek ego ". Yet if discourse look nice, have good features and look well from the UI point of view, their plan is not to be so open source and even less to be wide adopted: only see the way the complicated things using docker and even having to use a f**ng crazy virtual machine so you can try his forum ... they want to be like the "wordpress guys" but it is evident from miles away that they want to be the only guys in business.

Their ego is so big that they think all the world will change and learn ruby because of their application. I'm glad that there is a option like flarum.

spasi

Using PHP and thus it can be used in shared hosting. 🙂

malayladu

Fastest forum system I have ever seen. And who don't like speed?

I think this might be a big advantage of flarum over discourse.

d

malayladu Fastest forum system I have ever seen

See NodeBB if you want to see fast. Discourse is also faster than Flarum. Do not let your passion for Flarum obfuscate some true facts.

KnownSyntax

Flarum is more lightweight than Discourse (server memory wise and speed wise). It also is new so there are still tons of features that have yet to be added or created, and thus what you see now can only get better and better. Plus, since Flarum was built recently it is using the latest technology to provide a fast, smooth, and seamless user experience without being too much of a pain like other forums are/can be.

Although Flarum is new, Discourse has been around longer and therefore has more of a user base with modifications and what not.

Wombat

Personally, the modernized and mobile compatibility design blows me away. No other forum system is like it on the market today that I know of.

d1a8lo24

As many here said, its easier to install and works right out of the box for me and many others that by itself is the number 1 reason.

I have tried to install Discourse on many different systems and I haven't been able to get it to work at all.

Also not everyone is a server admin, or a web developer or even a web designer so just trying to run discourse becomes almost an impossible task, when it requires so many things just to install it. like ruby, redis and postgres they are a must not only that but they have to be configure right and make them work on whatever machine you have. Just doing that requires for you to be almost like a server admin and that's if you have access to the server and rights to install such programs.

So why is it better, because you want a forum application that you can manage with ease and only worry about your members and content of your forum. Not have to worry about the limitations your server has and having to know what SSH is or how to configure a server or keep an eye on on other technical things.

That is why wordpress has become one of the most popular applications on 99% of servers out there because it just works without having to know 1000 other things, just unzip, follow the install wizard and you're done.

Remember this, not everyone is a server admin, or a programmer, have access to certain server configurations or the rights to install other applications or even the know how.

In my adventures around the internet I have probably stumble upon more PHPBB forums than any other forum application out there and as much as people hate it it is still the one application that people choose to install before any other, why? because its easier to install.

From there ZendForum, MyBB and simplemachines and then the rest.

As far as Discourse forums I have probably seen 3 or 4 and thats because I clicked on a few links on their showcase page aside from that none.

At the end there are probably more Flarum installs when Flarums beta was release than there are Discourse forums running.

Franz

d1a8lo24 At the end there are probably more Flarum installs when Flarums beta was release than there are Discourse forums running.

That's probably not true, to be honest. :-/

Meow

d1a8lo24 You forgot FluxBB, or Flarum -1.0. 😿

BlackSheep

Franz Yeah... Lot of "pros" community are using Discourse. Even if as a UX Designer i feel like they are vomiting in their user mouth, but, eh, that's another debate.

as2ute

Franz Well, THATS about as honest/humble as you can get! ?
However, after running a Discourse instance on Rails for over a year I became very disenchanted come the end - hence finding myself here! I concur that the "my way or the highway" rigidity of the Discourse Devs. is extremely off-putting for anyone looking for a flexible longer-term forum solution.

It is fair to mention that I had no running issues with Discourse and the design is slick. However, it was such a more modern look, members had a tough time adapting (compared to 'ye olde style forums of old...) The lack of an WYSIWYG editor killed it in the end for my members (even though I personally don't like WYSIWYG as the forum starts to look messy and 'cheap')....

I applaud FLARUM for its lightweight, resource-economic foundation and agree that it is likely to become extremely popular once stable. Of course this then begs the question of "uniqueness" & "individuality" when FLARUM becomes the 'go-to' forum solution...

Wordpress integration is an obvious route, irrespective of whether FLARUM is a PAGE or separate SUBDOMAIN/Multi-site installation - And I think the devs. are right to hold back prior to launching a stable v1.0 product. Forum members are hard to find and are a fickle bunch. They will be very quick to moan and leave (in my experience). Stability and lightness is KEY.

I am confident FLARUM will mature into a much more flexible, easily integrated solution than Discourse, whilst mimicking the crisp, modern style Discourse was (rightly) praised for. Ultimately - We are all looking for a modern forum solution thats quick, dynamic and pleasing on the eye - but no matter how sexy FLARUM might be - IT'S GOTTA WORK PROPERLY!!!

Like so many others, I eagerly await the launch of the first stable version - and would much prefer a quick launch of a stable BASIC version, that can improve over time, over BETA versions with several more features that are problematic etc. We can all then 'go live' and add features with subsequent updates - in the meantime building a larger user base and attracting more dedicated FLARUM advocates.

THANK YOU devs. for all your hard work to date. It is quite apparent that like myself, there are many people here that are extremely grateful for what you are trying to achieve with FLARUM and admire your technical prowess.
10/10 ?

Franz

d Discourse is also faster than Flarum.

Do you have some "true facts" to back that up, though? 😃

Kowlin

d I strongly disagree, I will defend NodeBB to death since I absolutely love the community and the software. But Flarum is just faster.

accalia

d Discourse is also faster than Flarum

in my experience this is not the case.

for one thing Flarum (and NodeBB for that matter) to my knowledge has never caused someone to write a website just to track performance of the forum.

Discourse has caused such a site to be created: https://servercooties.com/#graph

d

Franz I do not want to start a flame war. We tend to be biased towards what we love. Personally I do not run any forum, I only participate on them. I am just interested in technology and follow things that are new; Flarum (F from now on) is one of them.

Based on my own user experience, NodeBB has no match when it comes to speed. It is really hard to beat Redis and NodeJS. F is responsive, but often struggles to render, specially in longer threads, the blank "placeholders" show multiple times. Yet, F is new, barely a beta 2, and has some way to go. I foresee it is bound to get better.

PJH_

Kowlin I strongly disagree, I will defend NodeBB to death

We're looking to move from Discourse, and one of the potential problems we've noticed with NodeBB is the list of supported databases (only redis, mongo and level to save people looking them up,) none of which would likely be suitable for our forum.

Franz

d No worries. I was just (and am still) confused about your statement about Discourse being faster than Flarum. That might even be true, but:

there's no benchmark yet (comparing the two on the same server),
it does not confirm my experience, and
most importantly, Discourse wouldn't even run on servers that support Flarum; thus, most Discourse servers you will encounter are bound to be fast (in terms of pure hardware).

Taking my smartypants off now.

Kulga

d
Franz

I apologize but this is kind of useless quibble until as Franz said, they are both run on the same server.
Logically, you cannot run a fair benchmark until they are even. However, you can run a uneven benchmark
that favors one or the other to make a point.

I have a 512MB 2 core VPS. Logically, I should be at a disadvantage with half the needed ram. I'll be comparing it to the primary discourse try it site (which I assume has 1gb+ of ram)
To make it more even, I am clicking on a discussion with 1 post and no added graphics. Then I mimic this for my demo flarum (so it has similar content - which I actually copy multiple times)
There are a lot of reasons why this is not a valid test, so make your own judgements.
Summary:
~400 response time discourse
~180 response time flarum

Edit: Full disclosure - I run the Beta Breaker flarum site tested above and I have personally optimized it. Originally it was getting like 260ms or so and now I (as seen) get about 180ms. I think if you try this site itself, it will load at about 260ms. This kind of brings us full circle back to it's not just about the forum software, but a great amount is webserver config too.

luceos

Well let's see what performance we get using PHP 7 with Redis caching possibly thread/post/user.

BlackSheep

PJH_ The loading bar at the top of any nodeBB page drive me insane. The Youtube one too. God i hate those things.

d

PJH_ Redis is not really all in memory. I think it will scale just fine to handle your charade, (sticking tongue out).

Filed under: I don't know, therefore I am.

d

PJH_ none of which would likely be suitable for our forum

This one test has almost 24,000 posts. Not suitable for your forum?