Whether you want to start your online forum, or you are researching about free forum software, this article will give you the top ten best forum software that is just superb.

You just need to choose one of these, and you can start your discussion board in no time. Picking the one you need is always tricky, but this effort will help you build an online community that can be attractive with proper efforts. With a good start, you can also think of something big.

My first option will always be phpBB as a free choice and vBulletin as a paid one. So, let’s see more options that are free and paid what all things do they have in their kit.

This list of best forum software is based on my experiences, and hence I have ranked them accordingly.

Best Forum Software 2018:

1. Simple Machines Forum

It is a free software package which allows you to make an easy, elegant, customizable and high-quality discussion forums. It is PHP based forum which uses MySQL as backend. It has tons of plugins, extension, and add-ons and you will never look another forum software if you start using it.

2. vBulletin (Paid)

vBulletin or vB is one of the most popular paid forum software on the internet. Many of the prominent websites using forum have taken vB as their first preference. It has so many great features like – photo albums, groups, event and task management, blog sites, calendar, forum and much more.

With its latest version, you can get three types of elements – Publishing Suite, mobile suite and a classic panel that makes it possible for every forum publisher to grab their audience. A must-have for professional forum need.

3. phpBB

This is a free package manager which allows you to make fast, high-quality customizable forums. They provide an extendable support to their users.

4. Tribe Community Platform

It is a new forum platform, that runs on a cloud-based community platform. With Tribe, you can easily integrate inbound marketing strategy that helps in building organic and target traffic with user-generated content. Its an interesting option worth trying in 2018.

5. Vanilla Forums

This is a package of free open source, standard and customizable forum. This site follows “Sales Up, Cost Down” approach. They provide you full flexibility for your forum design, single-sign-on capability for external sites and applications and flexible architecture which allows customized plugins.

6. XenForo

This paid forum software runs on PHP as many other ones. It has developed by a senior vBulletin developer and has a serious competitive environment at a lesser price. This forum system has some pretty good SEO features that we get to use in our daily routine of forum postings and managing.

7. bbPress

This is a PHP/MySQL based forum software developed by the creators of WordPress. This is simple, fast, secure and easy to use and easy to administrate.

8. Plushforums

A modern community platform, featuring real-time forum discussions, user-friendly design, integrated blog, member directory, private messaging and PayPal integration for content monetization.

PlushForums is a fast, secure cloud-hosted service that requires no plugins or technical knowledge to use.

9. Phorum

This is a PHP and MySQL open source forum software. Here you get the freedom to create your message board and do whatever you want. You can even rearrange your data in any form.

10. MyBB

This open source application has some unique features that allow you to extend your forum functionality to a supreme CMS. MyBB also has a large community where you can discuss your issues, and get help on various plugins and themes.

11. IP Board

Another paid forum platform that makes discussions more engaging in the forums point of view. It has almost all the features you will require to run a forum plus it has add-ons that support user shares and promoting content from your site.

This lists of best and free forum software don’t end here. There are many such websites which provide you free forum software, and we will be listing more of them, so keep coming back to this article and tell us which one do you consider is the best.