Forums made simple. Modern, fast, and free!Forums made simple. Modern, fast, and free!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. | 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. | 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. | 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. | Great community: The community building flarum is fantastic and very helpful! | Mobile Friendly UI | Lots of features: The developers do a great job adding new bells and whistles. | 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. | 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. | Intuitive: Very easy to use and feels very modern, unlike most of the competition out there. | Easy installation on shared hosting services: Available on softaculous (an auto-installer for web hosting control panels like cPanel). | Steadily growing: In the last few months Flarum is experiencing growth like never seen before, it's definitely time to jump on board. | Need composer: Unable to test Flarum because composer is not a standard in vps. | 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. | 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. | Still in Beta: Wonderful software with great future, but on current build status still lack of some must have features like nice search engine, installation/update script or proper user management. | Slow development: Development moves at a glacial pace. | Complicated installation process on shared hosts: PHP Composer is used as a dependency manager. Because of that SSH access is needed which makes Flarum harder to install than, for instance, Vanilla or phpBB. Especially on shared hosts where no SSH access is available or where shell access is severely limited. | Simple things (eg email authentication) still broken: Simple things that should be automatically included in any forum software - are still obtuse at best and completely broken otherwise; such as email support/authentication.

discourse is not really a forum . phpbb is. I choose phpbb