After reviewing hundreds of open source forum software, we have selected 5 top ones for building a forum easily and quickly, all of which are free, rich-featured, easy-to-use and helpful to those people who have little coding skill to write content, improve page ranking and manage their websites and blogs.
For this collection, we have considered many aspects, including admin and visitor usability, security, interface, power and reliability, functions, features, and so on. In below, we have worked out a comprehensive review on the 5 software, designed to help our readers know more about the winners and choose the most proper one according to their likes.
phpBB
phpBB is a free flat-forum bulletin board software solution that can be used to stay in touch with a group of people or can power your entire website. With an extensive database of user-created modification and styles database containing hundreds of style and image packages to customize your board, you can create a unique forum in minutes.
If you have any questions, you can visit their Community Forum where their staffs and members of the community are always be happy to assist you with anything from configuring the software to modifying the code for individual needs.
MyBB
A lot of thoughts have gone into the MyBB interface to make it easy to use. MyBB uses a standard discussion board structure, which makes your visitors feel familiar with the way MyBB works. In addition, you visitors are able to use the MyBB control panel to change the way they view discussions, and easily to start and reply to discussions and markup their posts.
Besides, the forum administrators and moderators are capable of using MyBB’s inline editing and moderation features to control discussion and keep the forum tidy.
Vanilla
Vanilla provides cloud and open source community forum software that powers discussion forums on 711,751 websites. Built for flexibility and integration, this software is one of the best and most powerful community solutions in the world, which allows you to create a customized community that rewards positive participation, automatically creates content and lets members drive moderation.
bbPress
bbPress is focused on ease of integration and use, web standards and speed, which is perfect for those people who have ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got their server hacked. They are keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add-on features through WordPress’ extensive plugin system.
What’s more, this software is easy to set up and moderate, fast and clean, featured with many highlights, including one central account, one unified admin area, one-click installer, multisite forums and single installation.
Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machine Forum is a professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes. Its powerful custom made template engine put you in full control of the layout of your message board. Besides, with their unique Server Side Include function, you are able to let your forum and your website interact with each other.
This software is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database, which is designed to provide users with all the features they need from a bulletin board while having an absolute minimal impact on the resources of the server.
For newbies, it is a little difficult to install these forum software. However, a 1-click script installer can help them break away from a fussy installation process. Having been using web hosting for over 10 years, we have met many reliable web hosts offering 1-click script installer, among which BlueHost, JustHost and WebHostingHub are the most highly recommended ones. In below, we have made a table to list the main features and the price of the 3 companies’ shared hosting plan.
Rank
Company
Highlights
Price
1
BlueHost
1 free domain name
Unlimited site hosting
Free $100 Google AdWords
Credit cards & PayPal
PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SSH
Serving for 2 million sites with 20,000 new clients monthly
To learn more, visit http://www.bluehost.com/
$3.95/mo
2
JustHost
Free domain name
$125 marketing credits
Instant setup
Anytime refund
PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, MySQL, PostgreSQL, SSH
24×7 100% US-based support via telephone, live chat & email
To learn more, visit http://www.justhost.com/
$2.25/mo
3
WebHostingHub
Free domain name
100% customer satisfaction
$47.88/year – annual billing
90 days refund guarantee
cPanel & Softaculous – 1-click script installation.
$200 marketing voucher including Google, Twitter, Bing.
To learn more, visit http://www.webhostinghub.com/
$1.95/mo
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