head to head · open source
Flarum vs kun-galgame-forum
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars, 1,668 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. kun-galgame-forum has 1,973 stars, 76 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. Flarum leads on adoption by 731% (16,400 vs 1,973 stars). Flarum is written in PHP under MIT; kun-galgame-forum is written in Go under AGPL-3.0. Flarum has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, kun-galgame-forum 4%. kun-galgame-forum 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
| Flarum | kun-galgame-forum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 2.0K |
| License | MIT | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-27 | 2026-09-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 76 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Flarum if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick kun-galgame-forum if
- You want the kun-galgame-forum feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and kun-galgame-forum fits your workflow better
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 →
About kun-galgame-forum
kun galgame forum is an open source forum application for visual novel and galgame communities. It is built as a pnpm workspace monorepo with a Go Fiber v3 BFF and REST API, a Nuxt 4 SSR frontend, and PostgreSQL. The project is licensed under AGPL 3.0 and is a downstream application of nextmoe infra, which supplies identity and shared services.
read the full kun-galgame-forum overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Flarum or kun-galgame-forum more popular?
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars and kun-galgame-forum has 1,973. Flarum has the larger community by that measure.
Are Flarum and kun-galgame-forum free?
Both are open source. Flarum is licensed under MIT and kun-galgame-forum under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Flarum and kun-galgame-forum?
Flarum is written in PHP and kun-galgame-forum in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Flarum or kun-galgame-forum?
Choose Flarum if you want the larger community (16,400 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose kun-galgame-forum if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.