Flarum vs AsmBB

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.

AsmBB does not create any SQL queries in run time and from user provided data. This way, SQL injection is impossible by design.

AsmBB uses very few external libraries, this way preventing exploitation of 3rd party bugs and vulnerabilities.

Since v2.7 AsmBB supports database encryption.

The whole design of the forum is defined in external template files that can be easily edited without need to change the code.

AsmBB provides specially optimized skin for mobile browsers, resulting for best UX on any device.

The whole look & feel of AsmBB can be changed by using template and CSS files. Several sets of template files can be installed simultaneously. Every user of the forum can select the skin he likes.

Since v1.5 AsmBB includes real-time chat in order to allow instant communication between users for themes not suitable for the "message board" format.