head to head · open source
Flarum vs nimforum
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars, 1,668 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. nimforum has 785 stars, 70 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. Flarum leads on adoption by 1,989% (16,400 vs 785 stars). Flarum is written in PHP under MIT; nimforum is written in Nim under MIT. Flarum has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, nimforum 9%. Flarum 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 | nimforum | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 785 |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Nim |
| Last push | 2026-08-27 | 2026-07-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 70 |
| 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 nimforum if
- You want the nimforum feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Nim
- You evaluated both and nimforum 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 nimforum
NimForum is a lightweight forum implementation written in the Nim programming language and positioned as an alternative to Discourse. It provides a single page application built with the Karax and Jester frameworks, while using SQLite as its database, and it is used by the Nim community at forum.nim lang.org.
read the full nimforum overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Flarum or nimforum more popular?
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars and nimforum has 785. Flarum has the larger community by that measure.
Are Flarum and nimforum free?
Both are open source. Flarum is licensed under MIT and nimforum under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Flarum and nimforum?
Flarum is written in PHP and nimforum in Nim. 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 nimforum?
Choose Flarum if you want the larger community (16,400 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose nimforum if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.