Which is Better? Discourse or Flarum?

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My answer to Flarum (or any hobbyist “competitor”) vs Discourse is always this:

Flarum is a beautifully designed piece of software. Flarum and Discourse have taken many design inspirations from one another, so they function very similarly. The biggest difference between the two projects isn’t the code or the features, but rather how each project is run.

  • Discourse has more than 10x 20x as many developers as Flarum, plus a whole support crew. Flarum has two core developers, and neither of them is working on Flarum full-time.

  • Discourse has a growing ecosystem of specialised contractors who can take on jobs like installing, maintenance, theming, plugin development and more.

  • Discourse has been v1.x stable for almost 4 years now. As of this writing, Flarum has yet to go out of Beta.

  • Thanks to big customers and a HackerOne page funded by Discourse.org, Discourse constantly undergoes first-rate security reviews.

  • Although Flarum did attempt to offer premium hosting for a while, they backed out of it. I don’t know the specifics, but I’m guessing they learned it’s really hard. In fact, it’s straight up impossible unless you build a company around it. A team of hobbyists can not run a reliable hosting service.

What I’m getting at is that there’s more to an open source project than the product. Discourse has built a sustainable business around its open source core. It’d take a cataclysmic event to bring us to a halt at this point. With Flarum on the other hand, if just one of the two core developers has to take an extended leave because of switching jobs / moving / relationship / burnout / what-have-you, the project takes a massive hit.

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