When comparing Flarum vs Disqus , the Slant community recommends Flarum for most people. In the question“What are the best commenting system services?” Flarum is ranked 2nd while Disqus is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Flarum is:
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.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very fast loading time
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.
Pro Open source
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.
Pro Easily expandable
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.
Pro Modern UI
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.
Pro Great community
The community building flarum is fantastic and very helpful!
Pro Mobile Friendly UI
Pro Lots of features
The developers do a great job adding new bells and whistles.
Pro Based on (but not built with) Laravel
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.
Pro Easy installation
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.
Pro Intuitive
Very easy to use and feels very modern, unlike most of the competition out there.
Pro Easy installation on shared hosting services
Available on softaculous (an auto-installer for web hosting control panels like cPanel).
Pro Steadily growing
In the last few months Flarum is experiencing growth like never seen before, it's definitely time to jump on board.
Pro Runs on shared hosting
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.
Pro Can be easily integrated in any website via iframes
Can be easily included into any website using the iframe form.
Pro Seamless design
Seamless design that doesn't require users to leave the page to access features such as profiles.
Pro Wide adoption
There's a large pre-existing user community. Many people already know how to use this comment system.
Pro Works with static sites
Disqus can be used with a static site so it's possible to keep the benefits of a static blog and still have dynamic comments.
Pro Not connected with the Evil Facebook ecosystem.
Pro Clean, minimalist interface & design
The Disqus design is minimalist and is broken down into three tabs - discussion, community and My Disqus.
The discussion interface provides the usual elements, but with unique features like visual indicators of live actions, such as new replies and even when another user is typing. It's possible to sort discussion by new, old and best.
The community tab is designed to help connect commenters together to form a network that keeps them coming back. It is also a great source of traffic from external sites.
My Disqus helps users quickly keep track of activities in their network as well as manage notifications.
Pro Community features
Community features such as Top Commenters, Top Discussions and the ability to form networks around your own commenters
Cons
Con Need composer
Unable to test Flarum because composer is not a standard in vps.
Con Extremely complicated to install
It's extremely hard to install Flarum, especially using anything that is hosted by Amazon. Good luck with a simple install for Amazon.
Con Does not allow you to customize its style
Disqus uses !important
flags in its CSS to prevent you from being able to customize its style at all.
Con Closed-source
Con It may be old
The interface looks very dated.
Con Sponsored comments
Disqus puts ads in their embeds.
Con Tracking users
Mining and selling their data.