1 best alternatives to Discourse + Digital Ocean as of 2025 - Slant

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Vanilla

Top Con

Poor search, unless using Sphinx

The default search that comes with Vanilla produces poor results because it uses MySQL. One needs to investigate integrating with Sphinx for much better results. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on GitHub. See More

Top Con

Vanilla Cloud offering is expensive for bigger communities

The commercial options of other software providers are generally better value-for-money. Vanilla is a cheaper option if you commit to self-hosting. See More

Top Pro

Importer from many other forums

Vanilla Porter can import posts (comments), threads (discussions), users, categories, roles and passwords (hashed) from most other forum software: bbPress, Drupal, MyBB, NoteBB, phpBB, PunBB, SimpleMachines 1&2, Toast, UserVoice, vBulletin, Xenforo, YAF.NET and others. Some importers support avatars, attachments, signatures, and PMs. A few support tags and user notes. Imports aren't flawless, but they do most of the work. See More

Top Con

No post edit history

Old versions of a post are only visible to admins, which may lead to a credibility problem. The amount of time during which users can edit their posts is configurable from a few minutes to indefinitely. See More

Top Pro

Easy setup

Vanilla is a MySQL + PHP app and can be set up very easily. See More

Top Con

Templating could be better

It is difficult to customise Vanilla in a way where it can be source controlled. This may be a benefit for communities who just want to get up and running, but is a drawback for developers. See More

Top Pro

Simple forum software

lightweight Internet forum package Embeddable forums Import from other forums See More

Top Con

No sitemap for discussion

Even sitemap plugin cannot add discussion in xml file. See More

Top Pro

Discussions can be organized in categories and tagged

Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do. See More

Top Pro

Fast

PHP may not be the most modern language, but Vanilla is fast. See More

Top Pro

Hosted and self-hosted options

Top Pro

Single Sign On

Ability to sign in with another system to your forum See More

Top Pro

Deep integration with WordPress

Use SSO with your WordPress site, adds recent discussions widgets and best of all have comments also create discussions in your forum. See More

Specs

Databases:MySQL

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