NodeBB vs Flarum

NodeBB is free for all use cases, although the code is licensed under GPLv3, so the source code must be provided if you are re-distributing (and/or reselling) NodeBB.

Private Messages (PMs) are live chats, just like messaging apps, allowing real-time conversations with one or a selectjkkkjkj

A selection of plugins for NodeBB are available.

NodeBB's themes are more customizable and dispensable; use custom CSS and HTML code, integrate WordPress Themes or use one of NodeBB's themes with easy stylist functions to change colour schemes and category layout.

NodeBB bundles real-time updates (new posts/topics, chat messages), the ability to see "who's browsing this topic", recent/popular/unread topics, tags, post sorting, social sharing, notification system, inbound email support/reply-by-email, mobile responsiveness, favourites, bookmarks, spam control, and reputation/karma.

Built in local support with over 50 translated languages.

NodeBB’s gamification plugins extend user engagement by motivating users to participate and complete tasks by giving them incentives like achievements, badges, points and virtual currency. NodeBB's gamification and reputation system is more than just badges, the reputation engine is used to promote good content, grant member abilities and achieve rank among leaderboards. NodeBB has several gamifications plugins that gives forum users an RPG like experience: Advanced Dungeon and Rabbits, Minecraft, PVP RPG (Battle, attack & steal points from other users).

NodeBBs plugins are built to support features like: Rich media embedding (Youtube/Vimeo), advertising integration (Google AdSense, DoubleClick, etc), third-party single-sign-on, emoji, mobile phone notifications, sound packs, CDN support, rich-text formatting/colours, static pages, galleries, and much much more.

Posts are streamed in real time, if a new post is created it appears without having to refresh.

Vibrant community is available to help guide you with installations, advise against common pitfalls, and answer any questions.

Documentation is complete and detail, otherwise community always find a solution

NodeBB is one of the few modern forum software that has good NoScript support. The forum layout is the same and users can register, login, logout and post without scripts.

In addition to the hosting, NodeBB also provides support ticket access, and automatic deployment of security updates when necessary.

NodeBB's servers are located in New York, although instances can be manually provisioned in all of the other regions our hosting provider supports:

• San Francisco (west coast customers)
• London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt (European customers)
• Singapore (China, south Asia, etc)

The extensibility allows you to install and enable only the extensions that you desire. This is beneficial to the performance. In addition it's a SPA so js and css are loaded once and retained.

Released under the very permissive MIT license, the source is freely available on GitHub and the Flarum Foundation was set up to guarantee the open source nature of Flarum as well as guarantee independence.

Most of the features are extensions, you have free control to en- or disable and remove extensions according to your needs. That keeps Flarum thin, lean but also extremely suitable for all types of communities.

Designed to be mobile-first, while still allowing a rich interface on desktop. Flarum is created from the ground up to be intuitive and simple to work with.

The community building flarum is fantastic and very helpful!

The developers do a great job adding new bells and whistles.

Flarum is based on many components from Laravel (like Eloquent) and Symfony, thus providing a sense of familiarity to developers with experience in those frameworks.

As long as you have access to composer, installation is a breeze. This also makes extension management install/removal very easy as the two processes are one and the same.

Very easy to use and feels very modern, unlike most of the competition out there.

Available on softaculous (an auto-installer for web hosting control panels like cPanel).

In the last few months Flarum is experiencing growth like never seen before, it's definitely time to jump on board.

Easily runs on low end shared hosting hardware as long as you have SSH access for plugins. Also available on Softaculous for auto install which makes it a 1 click job.