15 Free Best Open Source Forums

Pradeep Kumar · 05/11/2024

I was about to start a forum for HBB, but due to my semester exams and tight schedule, I was not able to make it unfortunately.

I made a list of good free and open source forum software for using and I thought I can make this as an article, so here it is. In this article, I mentioned 15 free best open source forums. But personally, I recommend bbPress and phpbb. If you know any other good forum, please share it in the comments!

Best Open Source Forums

P.S. Description of each forum taken from respective sites. Credit goes to them!

1. phpBB Forums

Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used open source bulletin board system in the world. phpBB is released under the GNU General Public License, you may make changes to the code without first having to obtain permission from the phpBB Group.

2. bbPress Forums

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress. Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked? bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed.

3. Discourse

Discourse is a popular open source forum software. They are famous for their minimalist ‘conversation’ style forum threads. Discourse provides paid hosting for using their forum or you can install Discourse on DigitalOcean, which is pretty much cheap compared.

4. Vanilla Forums

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able, pluggable discussion forum for the web. With over 450 plugins so far, Vanilla is ideal for custom community solutions. Vanilla has been adopted by over 300,000 businesses, brands, and fans.

5. Simple Machines Forums

Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional-grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board and with our unique SSI – or Server Side Includes – function you can let your forum and your website interact with each other.

6. miniBB Forums

miniBB® is a free standalone open source software for building Your own Internet forum, written in PHP and using a mySQL database as the backend. It’s developed with a pretty simple purpose of posting and getting messages, which includes answering questions, spreading opinions, providing users support and another kind of online public communication between website owners and their visitors, and between visitors themselves.

7. YetAnotherForum

YetAnotherForum.NET (YAF) is The Open Source Discussion Forum for sites running ASP.NET. 100% written in C#, YAF (pronounced like “laugh”) is a unique combination of Open Source, Microsoft’s .NET platform and an international collaboration of the .NET developer community. Growing and changing daily, the YAF project is lead by Jaben Cargman of Tiny Gecko. YAF runs on any web server that supports ASP.NET v2.0 (and above) and SQL Server. YAF is licensed under GPL.

8. IceBB Forums

IceBB is a powerful, fast, free, and open-source forum solution powered by the free PHP and MySQL. IceBB scales well, no matter how many users or posts, due to its clean and efficient code. It can also be fully customized to your needs with full skin and language support. A powerful admin control center, along with easy-to-use moderation tools, allows you to easily manage all aspects of your forum.

9. YaBB Forums

YaBB is a leading FREE, Open Source community forum system (bulletin board, message board) written in Perl. Learn how it started, who is on the project team, and what the main features are. This system is the first and most popular open-source Perl forum software and it runs very fast.

10. MyBB

MyBB is a discussion board that has been around for a while; it has evolved from other bulletin boards into the forum package it is today. Therefore, it is a professional and efficient discussion board, developed by an active team of developers. The MyBB history has been recorded and is available for the interested to read. You can also read more about the MyBB team and why they develop MyBB in their spare time.

11. DeluxeBB

DeluxeBB is a powerful open source bulletin board, which helps you create your own web communities in less than 10 minutes. The board is written completely in PHP and uses a MySQL database to store its content. All pages are optimized for speed and security. What we believe is not necessary to overload the software with features like many other forum providers, we always keep the speed, security and easy handling as our primary objectives.

12. punBB

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

13. FluxBB

FluxBB is a fast, light, user-friendly forum application for your website. FluxBB was designed as a lighter, faster alternative to some of the traditional feature heavy forum applications. It is easy to use and has a proven track record of stability and security making it an ideal choice of forum for your website.

14. Phorum

Phorum gives the web designers the power to rearrange the data in any shape, form or fashion they could want. The templates are in pure HTML with simple to understand text commands embedded in them. You can use the provided templates as a starting point or start from scratch. The power is in your hands. Phorum has a very flexible hook and module system.

15. UseBB

UseBB is an Open Source forum package developed in PHP 4 and using the popular MySQL database back-end to store data. Unlike other popular forum systems, UseBB does not strive to have as many features as possible, but to be one of the easiest and most usable forum packages, limiting the basic feature set to only the essential. UseBB is pure forum software.

15. XMB: eXtreme Message Board

XMB is a lightweight PHP forum software with all the features you need to support a growing community. With outstanding community support and contribution, you will find XMB to be easy to setup, customize, and enhance. It offers the key features you need to get your message board up and running

Forums are useful for several reasons including buy/sell activities, you can get premium domain names, grow real Instagram followers and much more.

These are some of the best free open source forums we came across, we might have missed some, so if you know any, feel free to let us know in the comments below.