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Add to SafariWhen comparing Vanilla vs Fruum, the Slant community recommends Vanilla for most people. In the question“What are the best web forum software packages?” Vanilla is ranked 8th while Fruum is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose Vanilla is:
Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on [GitHub](https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla).
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Free and open source
Vanilla is a free PHP+MySQL application that's licensed under GPLv2 with source code available on GitHub.
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.
Pro Easy setup
Vanilla is a MySQL + PHP app and can be set up very easily.
Pro Simple forum software
lightweight Internet forum package
Embeddable forums
Import from other forums
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.
Pro Fast
PHP may not be the most modern language, but Vanilla is fast.
Pro Hosted and self-hosted options
Pro Single Sign On
Ability to sign in with another system to your forum
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.
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.
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.
Pro Realtime
All updates in the forum happen real-time. No reloads required.
Pro Extensible
New functionality can be added using a plugin interface written in JavaScript.
Pro Free and open source
Source code is available on GitHub under Apache License.
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.
Cons
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.
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.
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.
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.
Con No sitemap for discussion
Even sitemap plugin cannot add discussion in xml file.
