What is the best forum software?

[3 MORE YEARS]

I am looking to add a forum for one of the niche services I run. It will run on its own domain. I wanted to find out which are the best respected forum software and what I should look out for?

Because I use Wordpress on so many of my sites, I have been looking at bbpress. However, I don't know if its any good? Has anyone on here used it?

The other one I keep hearing about is phpbb.

Any advice is welcome. Thanks.

 

[arnydnxluk]

phpBB has been around a long time and can be relied on. The big question here is are you only looking for free software or would you be prepared to pay for a license? Some of the paid options are pretty nice. I was always a fan of vBulletin in the past but XenForo seems the popular choice these days. Vanilla (which is free) could be a good choice for more basic forums.

 

[Dan_HiHosting]

I would definitely not recommend phpBB.

It's the most popular free forum software available, but it's buggy, insecure and often the target of hacking.

For free forum software I'd recommend MyBB. We use this and it's incredibly feature rich, and much better written than phpBB.

Another good alternative would be SMF.

For paid software, vBulletin and IPB were the common choice.
UKBF used to run on vBulletin I believe, and now runs on XenForo.

XenForo is modern and lightweight, and normally the go to choice for paid forum software now.

To throw something different into the mix, you could look at discourse.org or nodebb.org

Things to look out for are how resource intensive the software is - e.g. is it lightweight, its anti spam capabilities (either natively, or through plugins), its feature set (do you need particular features), and whether you need it to connect to another system e.g. for shared logins with a WordPress website.

If you're planning to have a standalone forum, I wouldn't recommend bbPress. I wouldn't even recommend it if you were running WordPress to be honest.

Softaculous's demos and reviews can be useful:
https://www.softaculous.com/softaculous/apps/forums

This is generally regarded as the best one click installer, which you can expect any decent host to run.

MyBB and SMF are the highest rated on there.

If you want a forum that'll hold up under high load and lot of users, use XenForo or SMF.
If you want a forum that's feature rich, use vBulletin, IPB or MyBB.

I hope that helps.

Why not install a few and give them a try?

All the best,

Dan

 

[CyberHour.com]

I would strongly suggest you to use bbpress (we are using it and our customers love it).
Bonus : since bbpress is builded from the wordpress devs it is 100% wordpress friendly and there are lot of widgets & plugins for bbpress to make it look more fancy . Also from the SEO side can confirm that Google love it
vBoard would be your next choice but since is not free and is not integrated with wordpress (except one widget for posts feeds)

 

[webhostuk]

Xenforo or Vbulletin would be my choice to select, this forum software are regularly updated so if you are looking for stable solution you can consider anyone of them.

 

[Dan Izzard]

Let me know if you want any info on Xenforo, their own support forum is pretty comprehensive so worth a look. There's always trade off's over different platforms but I've only ever managed to take the forum offline once so far

The admin panel is responsive which is a nice touch and something I use a fair bit. We've got 3 or 4 levels of spam protection which seem to do the job too.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

I am sorry for my delayed response. I have been busy with some things, and I have now selected 2 hosting companies to go with, and hope to sign up tonight or tomorrow. Thank you to everyone who has responded with details about various forum software.

In terms of forum software. I can't see this being a high traffic forum. I'll see where it goes as it won't be my main source for income. I am willing to pay for forum software. I generally don't mind paying for software of its a quality product.

I was expecting to hear loads of bad stuff about bbpress. I would like to see some examples of bbpress forums. I wouldn't also mind seeing some examples of Xenforo since so many people seem to be mentioning their name. If anyone can post links of either bbpress sites and xenforo sites that would be appreciated. I went Xenforo website, but couldn't see any links to example sites. I think someone mentioned that this forum is Xenforo, is that correct?

 

[arnydnxluk]

Correct, UKBF is running on Xenforo - very nicely customised too.

Here's a couple of bland examples:

http://www.ukbusinesslabs.co.uk/forums/
https://xenforo.com/community/

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Thanks. I have an issue which just occurred to me about my hosting plans. I just realised that on one my most important sites, I will be charging people to access videos. Like a subscription service. I haven't worked out all the details. However, since videos will take up a huge amount of space, I assume most hosting plans won't work, or I won't be able to put it on the hosting account. So I wanted to find out how other people who charge to access videos get around this problem?

Thanks.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

After I posted the above comment, I searched online and found Vimeo Pro. Would Vimeo Pro work with a Wordpress Subscription service? I know these are beginner questions, so please don't shoot me down. I am just doing initial research.

I also found some stuff on Wistia. Any other recommendations are also welcome. Thanks.

 

[Alan]

Yep Vimeo would be the way most do it

 

[Dan Izzard]

+1 for some additional marketing options you get with Wistia such as email capture before or during the video.

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Thanks. Wistia seems attarctive. I have also managed find a few other companies who do this.

 

[Parcelhub]

29 forum templates on ThemeForest - https://themeforest.net/category/forums - PhpBB and vBulletin seem the most popular platforms

 

[3 MORE YEARS]

Hi Adrian,

I took a brief look at your site. Interesting product, I didn't realise there were any or many hosted forum services? However, it does seem a bit expensive, but I could be wrong, and it may be worth it as I have never had a forum before, so don't know if the money is worth paying. I suppose it maybe worth the monthly fee if I knew if all the forums software/IT issues/glitches were going to taken care of by the hosted forum service company.