head to head · open source
Discourse vs Flarum
Discourse has 47,852 GitHub stars, 9,017 forks, 221 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Flarum has 16,400 stars, 1,668 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. Discourse leads on adoption by 192% (47,852 vs 16,400 stars). Discourse is written in Ruby under GPL-2.0; Flarum is written in PHP under MIT. Discourse has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, Flarum 10%. Discourse was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (forum), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Discourse | Flarum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 16K |
| License | GPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-27 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 1.7K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Discourse if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick Flarum if
- You want the Flarum feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and Flarum fits your workflow better
About Discourse
Discourse is a free, open source community discussion platform, built in Ruby on Rails and licensed under GPL 2.0, for organisations and communities that want complete control over how and where their forum is run rather than renting a hosted service.
read the full Discourse overview →
About Flarum
Flarum is an open source forum software project for building and running online community discussions on a website. It is positioned as a simple discussion platform with a fast interface and a PHP based application, and it is distributed under the MIT License. It lives in the PHP web application ecosystem, and its topics include forum, Laravel, and PHP.
read the full Flarum overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Discourse or Flarum more popular?
Discourse has 47,852 GitHub stars and Flarum has 16,400. Discourse has the larger community by that measure.
Are Discourse and Flarum free?
Both are open source. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Flarum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Discourse and Flarum?
Discourse is written in Ruby and Flarum in PHP. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Discourse or Flarum?
Choose Discourse if you want the larger community (47,852 stars) or its GPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose Flarum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.