I found Flarum when I was looking for a forum software that was supposed to be different and more modern. One of the things that I didn’t like with Flarum is that you had to make sure and setup all of the php backend and make sure you had all the right extensions and then lack of ease of setting it up.
I did like the layout of it and the idea, but as time went on the things that Phenomlab pointed out made it so that I didn’t want to use it either. Which is too bad because I did like it. Then I checked out Nodebb and fell in love with it. Especially since you didn’t have to do any of the extra setup with php. JS just works right out of the box. I still haven’t made up my mind about having to recompile Nodebb after making some of the changes, as that can take a bit of time. But overall I like it a lot.
I would also consider using Nodebb in place of Wordpress as well. It seems to work well on this site to have blog posts and such.