head to head · open source
Flarum vs paopao-ce
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars, 1,668 forks, 1 open issues and last shipped 22 days ago. paopao-ce has 4,502 stars, 656 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Flarum leads on adoption by 264% (16,400 vs 4,502 stars). Flarum is written in PHP under MIT; paopao-ce is written in Go under MIT. Flarum has attracted 10% as many forks as stars, paopao-ce 15%. 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 | paopao-ce | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | MIT | MIT |
| Written in | PHP | Go |
| Last push | 2026-08-27 | 2026-08-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.7K | ⑂ 656 |
| 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 paopao-ce if
- You want the paopao-ce feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and paopao-ce 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 paopao-ce
PaoPao is an open source micro community platform that ships a complete social product in a single repository. The backend is written in Go and built on Gin, Cobra, GORM and Mir, while the web client uses Vue 3, Vite and Naive UI. An optional Tauri desktop client is packaged alongside the web application, so the same codebase covers server, browser and desktop delivery. The project is licensed under MIT and lives in the Go ecosystem, with topic tags covering bbs, forum, gin, go, naive, twitter, vue3 and zinc.
read the full paopao-ce overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Flarum or paopao-ce more popular?
Flarum has 16,400 GitHub stars and paopao-ce has 4,502. Flarum has the larger community by that measure.
Are Flarum and paopao-ce free?
Both are open source. Flarum is licensed under MIT and paopao-ce under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Flarum and paopao-ce?
Flarum is written in PHP and paopao-ce 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 paopao-ce?
Choose Flarum if you want the larger community (16,400 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose paopao-ce if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.