Best forum chat software

Discourse is open-source forum software that you can in tandem with your existing website and CMS platform. Not only can community members use it on their mobile devices, but they'll also get dynamic notifications, badges, emoji, and more.

Best of all, there's a built-in moderation system to help you protect your community from spam and abuse. Vanilla has an abundance of features -- one of the most notable being the intuitive dashboard that lets you manage every aspect of your community forum. Additionally, Vanilla gives you the ability to adjust permissions of forums or members if you're looking to control access. Best of all, Vanilla offers an on-boarding process with useful checklists, training materials, and help from one of their support reps.

Codoforum is forum software that has a fresh UI with modern design. It's simple, clean, and easy to use. This software provides a responsive layout structure for mobile and desktop, SSO and integration, as well as mention notifications for users. Since it's free to use, Codoforum is a good option if you're still testing out forums or aren't sure whether they'll be useful for your own website and community.

PhpBB is a forum platform that has a typical and intuitive board set-up where users can post public or private messages.

With phpBB, you can create as many internal messaging boards as you want without any additional costs. Additionally, you can use extensions to add new options to your forum community. This makes the software very customizable, and allows you to adapt the software to the growing needs of your audience. Among other things, phpBB lets you create password-protected forums for added security, sub-forums, the option to display active topics at the top of your forum, and the ability to add forum rules at the top of a forum to ensure your community abides by set guidelines.

The software includes tons of great features, including built-in SEO, security, and responsive web design. With VBulletin you can have an unlimited hierarchy of forums as well as private forums. Best of all, VBulletin provides fun and unique features for your community members, including private messaging, a friends list, member birthdays shown on the Forum homepage , and the ability to see who's online.

VBulletin is not known for being the fastest forum, but its design is clean and it offers quality support for its users. IP Board was a very popular forum software that has since expanded to Invision Community, which includes a forum application in addition to its other offerings.

According to the Invision Community website, the forums module powers thousands of message boards around the web, and Invision Community has many other community management apps to help you interact with your audience.

The software allows your users to take control over their own online communities, which you can monitor at your discretion. For instance, Invision Community lets users create and manage their own communities, called "Clubs", which are fully integrated with your website -- these clubs get designated Club Leaders, who can add new forums, calendars, or galleries to the community. Flaurm has a streamlined design that is extremely easy to navigate.

This elegant, simple design is complemented by smooth animations and large buttons which provide an overall professional look. But what truly makes Flarum stand out is its two-pane interface.

This unique feature provides users with a flexible environment where they can participate in numerous discussions without opening a handful of different tabs. Other engagement-focused capabilities include a floating message composer, discussion-organized notifications, live chat , and user mentions. Also known simply as SMF, Simple Machines Forum is an open-source forum software built with large online communities in mind.

Its interface stays clear of flashy decorations, opting instead for a clear and sober approach that gives the platform a professional look. In order to allow for optimal performance and scalability, this free forum software offers a broad variety of customizable features and plugins, along with structured code documentation.

Long gone are the days when these modifications took endless hours and lines of code. Discourse offers a modern take on the notion of forums. This, combined with a long list of available features and integrations and complete mobile optimization, have granted this solution a spot among the best forum software. This results in a self-moderated community where users are rewarded for their engagement and meaningful collaborations. XenForo is a self-hosted forum software created for businesses.

There are more than 2, plugins available in the platform, ranging from enhanced search capabilities to premium area paywalls. This includes social sharing, activity milestones, appreciation tools, and a reward scheme. In addition to the basic yearly license, XenForo offers several premium services users can add to their forums such as a media gallery, enhanced SEO tools, and advanced resource management. Extra additions can be purchased from third-party vendors.

Invision Community is deemed to be one of the best forum software solutions for businesses and enterprises. It combines a fully customizable interface with rich content creation tools and a comprehensive admin panel that makes it easy to set up and manage.

The platform enables users to customize every aspect of their forums, down to the activity feed on a user basis. This flexibility extends to end-users as well, as they can create and manage their own online communities within the forum. Known as clubs, these areas get designated managers and can control private forums, galleries, and calendars. By Judit Ruiz Ricart. XenForo has a recent activity feed so members can quickly get up-to-date. There are also notifications to make it even more straightforward to engage with the community.

It has a sleek, elegant, and professional UI, and built-in SEO optimization to increase forum functionality. There are over 2, add-ons that range from various gamification features to administration, and enhanced search add-ons such as the popular and powerful ElasticSearch software.

They provide a larger range of user permission roles and capabilities. This lets users have more incentive to engage with the community. It also helps that Vanilla Forums has a knowledge base system included, so businesses can cut down on support tickets by having a self-serve option.

MyBB is an open-source, self-hosted forum software best fit for businesses that need an elegant, but cost-effective forum program. MyBB has all the basic forum features you may need, but there are hundreds of free plugins and themes if you want to extend the capabilities, or in case you want to change the design and layout.

For example, caching, minification, CDN, gamification, security, anti-spam, and administrative plugins, and many more. Flarum is a new contender in the forum software market. Flarum is fully responsive and super mobile-friendly. It has larger buttons, infinite scrolling, smooth animations, and a message composer that floats on the screen. So, you can keep scrolling through the page without having to exit the message box and lose what you typed.

Its features are reminiscent of a social media site, for example with the Pusher extension users can live chat. When you throw in the fact that you can post mentions to other users much like Twitter, Flarum goes from an ordinary forum program to one of the best free forum software. It can even rival the best forum software programs that have premium options. A WordPress integration is currently in the works along with many other features such as anti-spam, statistics, keyboard shortcuts, private messaging, gamification options, and more.

Invision Power Board is a premium forum program best suited for businesses. Although, it can still be great for individuals who are public figures or for those who want to be social media influencers. Not only can you use this as a forum, but you can also use it as a support ticket system, eCommerce platform, CMS, file-sharing system, a blog, and more.

Invision Power Board is also incredibly flexible, meaning you can even customize the activity feed on a per-user basis. Its admin panel is intuitive, striking and lets you control absolutely everything about your forum.

The forum itself also has an eye-catching, natural design and layout. It uses cloud hosting to ensure your forum loads quickly.