Flarum is described as 'Is free, open-source forum software with a focus on simplicity. You can use Flarum to easily set up a discussion forum for your website. Flarum is developed openly on GitHub' and is a popular Forum Software in the social & communications category. There are more than 50 alternatives to Flarum for a variety of platforms, including Self-Hosted, Web-based, Linux, Windows and Mac apps. The best Flarum alternative is Discourse. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Discourse or phpBB. Other great apps like Flarum are NodeBB, Vanilla Forum, Invision Community and Simple Machines Forum.
Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. A modern forum, everything's been redesigned to be easy.
Since its creation in 2000, phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB™ 3.2 “Rhea” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.
A compelling community experience. Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.
A community forum allows you to engage and retain customers, keeping them interested and up-to-date with your latest product or service.
Vanilla provides a standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able and pluggablecommunity forum software that powers discussion forums on 800,000 sites.
Invision Community is a flexible, feature-packed and easy to customize platform that powers some of the biggest and best communities on the web.
Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.
MyBB is the free and open source, intuitive, extensible, and incredibly powerful forum software you've been looking for.
vBulletin (abbreviated as vB) is a commercial Internet forum software written in PHP using a MySQL database server.
bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress. Its focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. bbPress will try to keep things as small and light as possible while still allowing great add-on feature possibilities.
WoltLab Suite (formerly Burning Board) is an enterprise grade CMS built for communities and forums.
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The two apps are very similar, but Discourse is more mature and has a richer feature-set thanks to more active, sustainable development.