Flarum is my go-to forum software these days. It combines a modern approach to categorization/tagging (unlike the older generation of forum software like phpBB) with a great design and minimalistic feature set which can be extended via plugins. Many people will argue, that Discourse is much better/faster/whatever – but personally I disagree. I find Flarum to be much more intuitive, minimalistic and more catered towards my specific needs (which are mostly about small scale, private communities).

I have been running Flarum now for 5 years in production on a forum with over 5k registered users. Even before reaching 1.0 it was always fairly stable and I never had any major issues. My favourite part is the extensibility, I don't know much PHP, but I managed to develop some more challenging plugins for my users, like Keybase identity proof. Congratulations on the 1.0 release 🎉!

So much has happened since the first announcement here (https://www.producthunt.com/post...) 6 years ago! It has been a crazy ride. Over hundred contributors worked on Flarum, yet a small team has worked consistently for the past few years to get stable done. This dedication has caused companies like UPC Switzerland, giffgaff and Bunq to adopt Flarum as their community framework of choice. Flarum is: 🧩 extensible first, appealing to small or enterprise communities 🆓 just open source ⚡ very fast, even with a decent amount of extensions enabled 💃 elegant, minimalist design Flarum runs on PHP (Laravel components) and JavaScript (Mithril) and thus works on shared hosting environments (with composer enabled), your own (virtual) server or in the cloud! With this milestone reached we are excited to have our eyes on our future milestones as well as focusing on growing our ecosystem. Want to give Flarum a spin? Try https://demo.flarum.site (which resets daily) or https://freeflarum.com (community driven free hosted Flarum). If you have any questions, feel free to raise them here! Thanks for sharing and upvoting.

Thanks for the product

This is a very fresh approach to forum software. Additionally, this is a PHP-based software making it available for a large audience. Running this is really easy and the extension ecosystem is also great.

Great open source Community solution with a awesome and very engaged community behind the product. What I like about Flarum is - Flexible and adoptable - Great UX - Fast - Lean approach And now on Version 1 :-)

I've been following since the middle of the beta process. It showed that the team is always working hard with new updates every 2-3 months. I think the most important feature of Flarum is that it is innovative. They have progressed without adhering to traditional attitudes. With the 1.0 version, I can now see my way more easily and my confidence in the team has increased. Congratulations. 🥳

This is the best free forum software available out there. Unlimited possibilities. Unrival support. Great mobile UI. Get a feel of it at our forum: https://www.kobocity.com I wish I can give it more than 5 stars

My experience and interest in forum software and running online communities began around 2003. I enjoyed being a member of multiple communities that used phpbb, smf, vbulletin, etc. I also tested out WordPress (I know, not a forum) when it was just getting started. I got really excited when the WordPress community launched bbPress. Back then, bbPress was fresh and modern compared to what existed. Basically, I enjoyed the web before “social media.” 😌 Those were the days… My point is that I’ve watched the evolution of forum software for a long time. For a moment there, I started to think that forum software might never evolve any further. One day, I stumbled upon Flarum. Now, I had already known about Discourse and I had seen other new forum software but it all was built with languages such as Ruby, Go, Node.js, Python, etc. Great languages and ways of doing things. But, for someone who likes to mess around with building websites and code occasionally, just as one of many hobbies, those forums using those languages just weren’t/aren’t for me. When I saw how minimal, yet powerful and modern Flarum was, and then saw it was PHP and JavaScript, I was sold. I set up my first Flarum forum around 2017/2018, and I’ve been in love ever since. I’ve used the beta versions in production and now 1.0+ in production. Flarum feels like running a native app in your browser. Which makes sense since it is a SPA (Single Page App). The small yet important features it has for mobile such as swipe gestures, just adds to the excitement and ease of use. The extensions developers come up with for it are simply amazing. It’s fast too. With the right set up, it’s pretty much as fast as any of the other “modern” forum softwares. Finally, last but not least, the core developers are really nice. This may seem trivial. But, I have seen open source projects where the developers are simply mean. Sure, it’s open source, and maybe I should be more thick skinned and not worry about it if someone is “mean.” But, the fact of the matter is, even though it’s free and open source, having a group, a community of developers who are helpful… that goes a long, long way. Sure, there may be disagreements, and they do this for free so they can’t make everyone happy. But compared to other communities/devs, the folks behind Flarum are very down to Earth, helpful, and fun.