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Flarum
All
16
Experiences
Pros
13
Cons
2
Specs
Top
Pro
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.
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Con
Need composer
Unable to test Flarum because composer is not a standard in vps.
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Pro
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.
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Top
Con
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.
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Pro
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.
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Pro
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.
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Pro
Great community
The community building flarum is fantastic and very helpful!
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Pro
Mobile Friendly UI
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Pro
Lots of features
The developers do a great job adding new bells and whistles.
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Pro
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.
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Pro
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.
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Pro
Intuitive
Very easy to use and feels very modern, unlike most of the competition out there.
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Pro
Easy installation on shared hosting services
Available on softaculous (an auto-installer for web hosting control panels like cPanel).
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Pro
Steadily growing
In the last few months Flarum is experiencing growth like never seen before, it's definitely time to jump on board.
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Pro
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.
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Specs
Written in:
PHP and JavaScript
Databases:
MySQL or MariaDB
Web Servers:
Apache or Nginx
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Experiences
Free
216
29
AsmBB
All
11
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Con
Bad setup
Terrible experience and bad setup.
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Top
Pro
Very high security level
AsmBB does not create any SQL queries in run time and from user provided data. This way, SQL injection is impossible by design. AsmBB uses very few external libraries, this way preventing exploitation of 3rd party bugs and vulnerabilities.
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Pro
Supports database encryption
Since v2.7 AsmBB supports database encryption.
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Pro
Highly customizable design
The whole design of the forum is defined in external template files that can be easily edited without need to change the code.
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Pro
No library dependencies - everything needed is in the package
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Pro
Easy installation even on shared hosting
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Pro
Mobile friendly
AsmBB provides specially optimized skin for mobile browsers, resulting for best UX on any device.
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Pro
Multiple user selectable skins
The whole look & feel of AsmBB can be changed by using template and CSS files. Several sets of template files can be installed simultaneously. Every user of the forum can select the skin he likes.
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Pro
Real-time chat
Since v1.5 AsmBB includes real-time chat in order to allow instant communication between users for themes not suitable for the "message board" format.
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Top
Pro
Really high performance and low requirements to the hosting
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Specs
Written in:
x86 Linux ASM
Databases:
Builtin SQLite
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Experiences
Free
18
4
Discourse
All
22
Experiences
Pros
16
Cons
5
Specs
Top
Pro
Has a built-in immune system from trolls, spammers and bad actors
Discourse has a simple user trust system that makes moderating the forum a lot easier. Users gain more permissions as they gain more trust, which limits the amount of damage spammers and trolls can do. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded StackExchange, which is the gold standard for gamification/moderation systems so you can also expect Discourse to get better and better at moderation.
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Top
Con
Complicated setup
Compared to standard PHP+MySQL apps, Discourse is more complicated - the app lives in a Docker container. However, a Docker image is available, which reduces the setup time to about 30 minutes.
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Pro
100% free and fully open source
Discourse is powered by Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. The code is licensed under GPL and available on GitHub.
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Top
Con
Leaves out users with shared hosting
Discourse requires sudo, which is only available on a VPS.
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Top
Pro
Modern & polished UI/UX with lots of great smaller features
The best feature is its design: discourse is designed to aid in the creation of high quality online conversations. Flat discussions with well implemented quoting systems, expandable/collapsible replies, infinite scroll, clean UI and many more features come together to form a highly polished forum experience that makes legacy forums show their age.
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Top
Con
Bad noscript support
When using a Discourse forum without scripts the experience is greatly reduced. It's really hard to use and is read-only, meaning that one can't comment or create threads without scripts.
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Pro
Helpful community
Discourse has a comprehensive forum culture support hub at meta.discourse.org.
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Top
Con
It is more "Free to Try" than really free
Discourse is open source free software. The hosting is where the costs come in. Discourse.org hosting starts at $100/mo, but you can pay as little as $5/mo on Digital Ocean or other cloud hosts.
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Pro
Hosted and self-hosted solutions
You can host it yourself in a $5 cloud server or on any Linux server you already have. And if you don't want to deal with this, you can use the hosting platform from the development team.
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Top
Con
Extremely expensive hosting
Official discourse.org hosting starts at $100/mo and supports the team creating the software. It can also be hosted on a cloud service like Digital Ocean for $5/mo.
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Top
Pro
Live preview while editing the post
The post editor has a synchronized side-by-side preview of the Markdown rendering of the post.
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Pro
User selectable themes
Users can choose between the themes made avaliable on their instances, and even use different themes on different devices (mobile vs desktop, for example).
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Pro
Export your posts
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Top
Pro
Effective search
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Pro
Good to go out of the box yet infinitely tweakable
Discourse has sane, safe out of the box defaults, but a million dials and knobs to tweak.
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Pro
Easy one-click upgrade
Discourse can upgrade itself with one click in the admin panel. Not the same can be said about MyBB, or most other forums.
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Pro
Advanced JavaScript app
Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Official Akismet Anti-Spam Plugin
Official Akismet plugin vets posts by new users to make sure they don’t look spammy before they hit your site. Akismet key purchase required.
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Pro
Extensible via plugins
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Pro
Good on-boarding experience for new users
New users are greeted withe the disco bot which has an interactive experience to teach the basics of using Discourse.
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Specs
Written in:
Ruby on Rails, Ember, JavaScript
Databases:
PostgreSQL with Redis
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Experiences
FREE
163
53
NodeBB
All
17
Experiences
Pros
15
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Free and open source
NodeBB is free for all use cases, although the code is licensed under GPLv3, so the source code must be provided if you are re-distributing (and/or reselling) NodeBB.
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Top
Con
Very complicated installation process on shared hosts
If you do not have root ssh access or node js installed, it is impossible or very hard to install on shared hosts.
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Top
Pro
Has live chat
Private Messages (PMs) are live chats, just like messaging apps, allowing real-time conversations with one or a selectjkkkjkj
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Top
Pro
Plugin support
A selection of plugins for NodeBB are available.
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Top
Pro
Highly customizable themes
NodeBB's themes are more customizable and dispensable; use custom CSS and HTML code, integrate WordPress Themes or use one of NodeBB's themes with easy stylist functions to change colour schemes and category layout.
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Top
Pro
Includes all commonly expected modern forum features
NodeBB bundles real-time updates (new posts/topics, chat messages), the ability to see "who's browsing this topic", recent/popular/unread topics, tags, post sorting, social sharing, notification system, inbound email support/reply-by-email, mobile responsiveness, favourites, bookmarks, spam control, and reputation/karma.
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Top
Pro
Multilingual
Built in local support with over 50 translated languages.
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Pro
Has a variety of gamification plugins
NodeBB’s gamification plugins extend user engagement by motivating users to participate and complete tasks by giving them incentives like achievements, badges, points and virtual currency. NodeBB's gamification and reputation system is more than just badges, the reputation engine is used to promote good content, grant member abilities and achieve rank among leaderboards. NodeBB has several gamifications plugins that gives forum users an RPG like experience: Advanced Dungeon and Rabbits, Minecraft, PVP RPG (Battle, attack & steal points from other users).
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Top
Pro
Social integration through plugins
NodeBBs plugins are built to support features like: Rich media embedding (Youtube/Vimeo), advertising integration (Google AdSense, DoubleClick, etc), third-party single-sign-on, emoji, mobile phone notifications, sound packs, CDN support, rich-text formatting/colours, static pages, galleries, and much much more.
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Top
Pro
Real-time post streaming
Posts are streamed in real time, if a new post is created it appears without having to refresh.
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Top
Pro
Great performance
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Top
Pro
Active and engaging support community
Vibrant community is available to help guide you with installations, advise against common pitfalls, and answer any questions.
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Top
Pro
Installation & maintenance easy
Documentation is complete and detail, otherwise community always find a solution
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Top
Pro
NoScript support
NodeBB is one of the few modern forum software that has good NoScript support. The forum layout is the same and users can register, login, logout and post without scripts.
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Pro
Provides hosting solutions with multiple server locations
In addition to the hosting, NodeBB also provides support ticket access, and automatic deployment of security updates when necessary. NodeBB's servers are located in New York, although instances can be manually provisioned in all of the other regions our hosting provider supports: San Francisco (west coast customers) London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt (European customers) Singapore (China, south Asia, etc)
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Top
Pro
24/7 technical support
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Specs
Written in:
Node.js
Databases:
Redis or MongoDB, others can be added with plugins
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Experiences
Free
57
26
Vanilla
All
15
Experiences
Pros
9
Cons
5
Specs
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.
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Top
Pro
Free and open source
Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on GitHub.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Easy setup
Vanilla is a MySQL + PHP app and can be set up very easily.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Simple forum software
lightweight Internet forum package Embeddable forums Import from other forums
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Top
Con
No sitemap for discussion
Even sitemap plugin cannot add discussion in xml file.
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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.
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Top
Pro
Fast
PHP may not be the most modern language, but Vanilla is fast.
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Top
Pro
Hosted and self-hosted options
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Pro
Single Sign On
Ability to sign in with another system to your forum
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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.
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Specs
Written in:
PHP
Databases:
MySQL
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Experiences
Free
21
16
PHPBack
All
4
Experiences
Pros
3
Cons
1
Top
Pro
Multi-language support
It has been already translated to Spanish and they are adding support for more languages.
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Top
Con
Small community
PHPBack is fairly young (first stable version was releases in July 2015). Currently the community is small, which may make it more difficult to find help/support. However, the developer is active on the github page and generally responds quickly.
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Top
Pro
Easy setup
PHPBack is very easy to setup, all you need is a server with PHP5 and MySQL installed.
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Pro
Open Source
PHPBack is open source, uses GPLv3 license.
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4
1
phpBB
All
8
Experiences
Pros
4
Cons
3
Specs
Top
Pro
Open source
Source code is available on GitHub under GNU General Licence.
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Top
Con
Outdated look and feel
Even the latest version of the software looks like the typical '90s forums which is now pretty outdated.
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Top
Pro
Premium extensions
There are many great developers creating premium extensions to make it go to the next level. With those premium extensions phpBB goes far beyond any other.
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Top
Con
Slow (phpBB 3.0)
phpBB 3.0 was not optimized for slow connections.
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Pro
Extensible
Is built to be extensible and flexible.
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Top
Con
Poor community communication
There is a release lifecycle, but it is not adhered to. Migrations and updates cannot be planned.
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Top
Pro
Huge extension repository
Its the forum software with the most ready to go extension repository.
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Specs
Written in:
PHP
Databases:
MySQL, MariaDB, MSSQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL, SQLite
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Experiences
Free
30
11
ElkArte
All
8
Experiences
Pros
6
Cons
1
Specs
Top
Pro
Improved Anti Spam measures
Elkarte has BadBehaviour and other measures included into the core to protect your forum from spammers.
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Top
Con
Limited themes and extensions
And community is fairly small as it is derived from SMF Forums.
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Top
Pro
Notification centre
ElkArte has a notification center where you can see mentions, likes, quoted messages and other alerts, all included into the core of the software.
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Top
Pro
Responsive design
ElkArte comes out of the box with two responsive styles.
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Pro
Easy to install
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Pro
Open Source
It is completely free to use and is licensed with an open source BSD-3 clause license.
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Top
Pro
Integrated video embedding
Integrated video embedding for YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.
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Specs
Database:
MySQL 5 and newer OR PostgreSQL 8.3 and newer
Written in :
PHP version 5.3 or newer
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Experiences
Free
17
10
Fruum
All
7
Experiences
Pros
6
Specs
Top
Pro
Single Sign On (SSO)
Fruum can tie its user authentication with the authentication system of the hosting website, thus utilize the existing user base without requiring multiple sign-ups.
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Top
Pro
Slack integration
Plays well with Slack out of the box. Get notifications when users post new stuff or use the /fruum command to query the forum.
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Pro
Realtime
All updates in the forum happen real-time. No reloads required.
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Pro
Extensible
New functionality can be added using a plugin interface written in JavaScript.
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Top
Pro
Free and open source
Source code is available on GitHub under Apache License.
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Top
Pro
Embeddable
Can be embedded in any website using a small JavaScript snippet and get activated on-demand as a drawer or be setup as a traditional forum.
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Specs
Written in:
Node.js
Databases:
Elasticsearch, others can be added with plugins
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Experiences
Free
7
6
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4.7 star rating
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