You are here, this means you are interested in starting an online community. Right! You have a tighter budget and don’t wish to spend initially. Are you looking for the Best Free Forum Software in particular? Don’t worry, you are at the right place. We shall give you a brief idea of different free forum software for building an active discussion community.
There are so many open source forum software, when you look around. You just have to stumble upon the right forum software that fulfils your requirements. Free to use and easy to handle forum software, these are the two primary highlights in this post.
Do you know it has become quite easier to set up an online forum. You just have to setup the right community software and start interacting. Of course, you wish to turn your forum into success. For this, you need to have active users to participate in different discussions.
Let’s discover useful details on the Best Free Forum Software that you shall come across.
Best Free Forum Software: Key Features to Look for
What do you mainly look for when selecting a reliable forum software. A straightforward and user-friendly forum. Right!
Ready to analyse & choose the best online forum software. You need to keep few crucial points in mind like:
- Easy Profile & Post Customization
- Great Text editing options
- Easy navigation & useful functions
- Adequate control & moderation features
- Achievement & Reward System for Frequent users
- Spam Blocking Features or Compatible Plugins
5 Best Free Forum Software: Build Online Community
1. phpBB: Free and Open Source Bulletin Board Forum Software
phpBB forum software, a robust free forum software that allows you to create boards wherein registered users post messages. You get access to hundreds of free extensions that enables to add different forum related features. A great theme system and plenty of moderation options are available.
You can customise your forum and give it a fresh look. While the users get numerous options to customise their profiles and posts.
2. Discourse Forum Platform:
Discourse surely ranks higher in the list of Free Forum Software. This one is surely a modern discussion platform to engage users in healthy conversations.
We can share our personal experience here. We have been using Discourse to establish and grow our Techpikk Discussion Forum. This one is really wonderful!
The best part, for regular and trusted users, they keep on earning additional abilities in order to maintain the community. You can offer badges to encourage positive community behaviour.
Its moderation, plugins, dynamic notifications, spam blocking are the main highlights. Further, its mobile-friendly nature & tons of other features are sufficient to attract anyone.
3. MyBB Forum Platform:
MyBB provides various plugin and theme alternatives. This is yet another powerful addition to the best free forum software collection. This open source forum software has some features similar to phpBB. But, this doesn’t give too many extensions.
However, MyBB online forum offers a modern & stylish design giving a fresh look to the users.
4. Vanilla Free Forum Software:
When we talk of popular community software, how can we forget to mention Vanilla free forum software. Vanilla forums provides both open source as well as premium versions. No doubt, the Pro version seems eye-catching for the enterprise-level customers owing to the advance features loaded in it. Its free version also offers good features to run a regular forum.
A basic theme, plugin systems, advance text-editor, auto-save are enough attraction. A number of easy to use options make it secure a strong place in the best forum software.
5. bbPress: WordPress Forum Platform
bbPress is a popular forum software that helps you set up a discussion forum inside your WordPress.org powered website. This is quite easy to install and setup wherein you can divide your site into sections.
Just few simple steps to be followed and you can create and manage a growing community around your WordPress site.
Best Forum Software: Few more to List
Adding to the above free forum software, here are some of the other commonly used community building software:
- Simple Machines Forum
- Codo Forum: Free PHP Forum Software Script
- FluxBB Forum Software
- Flarum OpenSource Forum Software
- Buddy Press WordPress Forum Plugin Software
- ZetaBoards: Free Hosted Forum Software
Just look at the list of free forum software, it’s getting longer and longer.
Not only this, you can further scale-up your community with a bulk of enhanced features and extra benefits. There are a whole lot of Paid or Premium versions of a variety of best free forum software. The upgraded versions of these forum software add wonderful merits to your online discussion platform.
You’ll get numerous alternatives, but you can’t select all of them. You have to zero down the best one for yourself. Analyse and choose the one that perfectly meets your needs and goals.
Which free forum software do you prefer using? Do you have any other name to add in the list of Best Free Forum Software for discussions? Go ahead, build and grow an active online community.
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