Vanilla vs NodeBB

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

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.

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

lightweight Internet forum package

Embeddable forums

Import from other forums

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

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

Ability to sign in with another system to your forum

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

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.

Private Messages (PMs) are live chats, just like messaging apps, allowing real-time conversations with one or a selectjkkkjkj

A selection of plugins for NodeBB are available.

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.

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.

Built in local support with over 50 translated languages.

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).

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.

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

Vibrant community is available to help guide you with installations, advise against common pitfalls, and answer any questions.

Documentation is complete and detail, otherwise community always find a solution

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.

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)