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What are the best web forum software packages?

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10 Options Considered

10 Options ConsideredPriceWritten inDatabases
Discourse
RubyPostgreSQL with Redis
NodeBB
Node.jsRedis or MongoDB, others can be added with plugins
Flarum
PHPMySQL
XenForo
PHPMySQL
ElkArte
––
See Full List

Discourse

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thermoplastics
Stuart Kearney
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 e...
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
Top 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.
Dan Dascalescu
Stuart Kearney
Francis Brunelle
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 gamif...
Andris Pelcbergs
Francis Brunelle
Top 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.
Francis Brunelle
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Helpful community

•••
Discourse has a comprehensive forum culture support hub at meta.discourse.org.
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Rafael Santos Silva (Falco)
Andris Pelcbergs
Top 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.
thermoplastics
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
Top 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.
thermoplastics
Tim Etler
Top Pro

Advanced JavaScript app

•••
Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Effective search

•••
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Export your posts

•••
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Extensible via plugins

•••
Alex
Rafael Santos Silva (Falco)
Top 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).
Darren Dub
Top 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.
Dan Dascalescu
Andris Pelcbergs
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.
An_dz
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.
See 16 more Pros & ConsSee 16 more Pros & Cons

NodeBB

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Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
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.
An_dz
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Has live chat

•••
Private Messages (PMs) are live chats, just like messaging apps, allowing real-time conversations with one or a selection of users.
Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
Top Pro

Plugin support

•••
A selection of plugins for NodeBB are available.
Endi Sukaj
Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
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, bookmark...
Tate Untitled
Andris Pelcbergs
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 m...
Tate Untitled
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Multilingual

•••
Built in local support with over 50 translated languages.
Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
Top 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 Fran...
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

24/7 technical support

•••
Julian Lam
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.
Julian Lam
Andris Pelcbergs
Tate Untitled
Top 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 pro...
Endi Sukaj
Eddie Billoir
WhiteLilac
Top Pro

Real-time post streaming

•••
Posts are streamed in real time, if a new post is created it appears without having to refresh.
Eddie Billoir
Top Pro

Installation & maintenance easy

•••
Documentation is complete and detail, otherwise community always find a solution
An_dz
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.
ehf
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.
See 13 more ProsSee 13 more Pros

Flarum

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Francisco
JollyUttu
Top Pro

Very fast loading time

•••
IntuitiveHuehueteotl
Top Pro

Based on (but not built with) Laravel

•••
Flarum was originally based on Laravel and uses the Eloquent ORM. But it is not a traditional Laravel software.
CaringRobigus
Top Con

Slow development

•••
Development moves at a glacial pace.
Alex
ehf
Top Con

Very complicated installation process on shared hosts

•••
This is not a MySQL+PHP application. it is impossible or very hard to install on shared hosts compared to vanilla or phpbb.
See 2 more Pros & ConsSee 2 more Pros & Cons

XenForo

Add Video or Image
Eddie Billoir
Top Pro

Stable

•••
Good stability and functional
Mark
Top Pro

Extensible

•••
XenForo is built to be the most extensible and flexible community software ever.
Eddie Billoir
Top Con

Expensive

•••
140$ for simple use, price can reach 610$ for complete system and service
Eddie Billoir
Top Con

Unique SQL system

•••
Only MySQL system
Danil Kutkevich
Top Con

Closed source

•••
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons

ElkArte

Chloe Montanez
radu81
Top Pro

Responsive design

•••
ElkArte comes out of the box with two responsive styles.
radu81
Top Pro

Easy to install

•••
radu81
Top Pro

Improved Anti Spam measures

•••
Elkarte has BadBehaviour and other measures included into the core to protect your forum from spammers.
radu81
Top Pro

Open Source

•••
It is completely free to use and is licensed with an open source BSD-3 clause license.
Chloe Montanez
radu81
Top Pro

Integrated video embedding

•••
Integrated video embedding for YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.
Chloe Montanez
radu81
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.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

Vanilla

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Dan Dascalescu
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Easy setup

•••
Vanilla is a MySQL + PHP app and can be set up very easily.
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Free and open source

•••
Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on GitHub.
Markus
thermoplastics
Top Pro

Simple forum software

•••
lightweight Internet forum package Embeddable forums Import from other forums
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Fast

•••
PHP may not be the most modern language, but Vanilla is fast.
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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 av...
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Top Pro

Hosted and self-hosted options

•••
Janie Smith
Top Pro

Single Sign On

•••
Ability to sign in with another system to your forum
Janie Smith
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Andris Pelcbergs
Dan Dascalescu
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.
Endi Sukaj
Jonathan
Mukul Kalra
Top Con

No sitemap for discussion

•••
Even sitemap plugin cannot add discussion in xml file.
See 10 more Pros & ConsSee 10 more Pros & Cons

AsmBB

JohnFound
Top Pro

Mobile friendly

•••
AsmBB provides specially optimized skin for mobile browsers, resulting for best UX on any device.
Endi Sukaj
JohnFound
Top 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.
JohnFound
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.
Paolo
JohnFound
Top 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.
Alex
JohnFound
Top 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.
thermoplastics
JohnFound
Top Pro

Easy installation even on shared hosting

•••
thermoplastics
JohnFound
Top Pro

No library dependencies - everything needed is in the package

•••
thermoplastics
JohnFound
Top Pro

Really high performance and low requirements to the hosting

•••
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 7 more ProsSee 7 more Pros

Fruum

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Jonathan
Nikos Vasileiou
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.
Nikos Vasileiou
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.
Nikos Vasileiou
Top Pro

Realtime

•••
All updates in the forum happen real-time. No reloads required.
Nikos Vasileiou
Top Pro

Extensible

•••
New functionality can be added using a plugin interface written in JavaScript.
Nikos Vasileiou
Top Pro

Free and open source

•••
Source code is available on GitHub under Apache License.
Nikos Vasileiou
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.
Know any negative aspects of this option?
See 5 more ProsSee 5 more Pros

phpBB

Add Video or Image
jeroen T
Top Pro

Open source

•••
Source code is available on GitHub under GNU General Licence.
WhiteLilac
Eddie Billoir
Top Con

Slow

•••
Not optimized for slow connections.
Kovah
Top Con

Outdated look and feel

•••
Even the latest version of the software looks like the typical '90s forums which is now pretty outdated.
jeroen T
Top Con

Not really well maintained

•••
See 2 more ConsSee 2 more Cons

Muut

Add Video or Image
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Fast

•••
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Uncluttered

•••
Dan Dascalescu
Top Pro

Responsive

•••
Dan Dascalescu
Top Con

No post edit history

•••
Posts can be edited for 2.7 minutes. After that, they remain fixed forever. This makes it impossible for the original post to be updated to reflect the current consensus, the latest version of a software being discussed etc.
Scott
Top Con

No Self-hosted option

•••
Muut uses a system similar to Disqus where your forum, comments etc. reside on their servers.
See 3 more Pros & ConsSee 3 more Pros & Cons
See flagged products

173 Community Recommendations

James Harris
Markus
Aziz Khoury
Kovah
John Redding
Danil Kutkevich
An_dz
Dan Dascalescu
Fabián Heredia Montiel
Jacob Gadikian
Jeff Atwood
+114
Request recommendations from the community
Darren Dub
Darren
Contributor for 8 months
4
Total 
Recs.
90
Total 
Karma
Discourse
Recommended a month ago
Discourse helps make forum posts conversational. It is highly configurable, but at the same time comes with sane defaults. It's built on ROR, so if you are familiar with this framework, it's pretty easy to dig in and understand how everything works when the documentation may be lacking in some areas.
Pro
 100% free and fully open source
Pro
 Good to go out of the box yet infinitely tweakable
Pro
 Modern & polished UI/UX with lots of great smaller features
Pro
 Discussions can be organized in categories and tagged
Pro
 Effective search
Pro
 Live preview while editing the post
Pro
 Good on-boarding experience for new users
1See full
IndependentDaphne
IndependentDaphne
Contributor for 3 months
1
Total 
Recs.
100
Total 
Karma
Discourse
3 months ago
HORRIBLE customer service. And they just announced that they are closing channels of communication for customer support. The setup is very complicated for anyone who is not a developer and they do NOTHING to make this easier. Rude responses to valid questions from support.
Con
 Bad noscript support
See full
Darren Dub
Darren
Contributor for 8 months
4
Total 
Recs.
90
Total 
Karma
phpBB
a month ago
Customizing and theming is really difficult.
Con
 Outdated look and feel
Con
 Slow
See full
CooperativeTumatauenga
CooperativeTumatauenga
Contributor for 4 months
1
Total 
Recs.
0
Total 
Karma
phpBB
Recommended 4 months ago
very good
See full
Currently displaying 4 out of 173 total recommendations.
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