A forum serves as a platform for exchanging ideas and perspectives on specific issues. You can establish a forum on your website or blog where your team, clients, enthusiasts, patrons, viewers, users, advocates, supporters, or friends can engage in public or private discussions, either collectively or in smaller groups.

If you're considering launching a forum and cannot develop your own software from scratch, you can choose from various existing forum applications. Some forum applications permit setting up only a single discussion site per installation, while others support multiple forums within a single installation.

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This article will explore the 10 best open-source forum software options for Linux systems. By the end of this article, you'll know precisely which open-source forum software aligns best with your requirements.

1. Discourse – Discussion Platform

Discourse is a free, open-source, contemporary, highly capable, and feature-packed community discussion tool.

It functions as a mailing list, discussion forum, long-form chat room, and much more. The front end is built using JavaScript and is driven by the Ember.js framework, while the server side is developed using Ruby on Rails, supported by a PostgreSQL database and Redis cache.

It is responsive (automatically switching to a mobile layout for smaller screens), and it supports dynamic notifications, community moderation, social logins, spam blocking, email replies, emojis, and badges. It also includes a trust system and many other features.

Above all, Discourse is simple, modern, excellent, and enjoyable, and it features a one-click upgrade option once installed.

2. phpBB – Bulletin Board Software

phpBB is a free, open-source, robust, feature-rich, and highly extensible forum or bulletin board software. There are numerous extensions and a styles database (hundreds of style and image packages) to enhance its core functionality and customize your board.

It is secure and comes with various tools to protect your forum from unwanted users and spam. It supports a search system, private messaging, multiple notification methods for forum activities, conversation moderators, and user groups.

Significantly, it has an advanced caching system for improved performance. You can integrate it with other applications through multiple plugins and much more.

3. Vanilla – Modern Community Forum

Vanilla is an open-source, fully-featured, user-friendly, robust cloud-based, and multilingual community forum software. It provides users with a modern forum experience, allows posting questions and polls, features an advanced editor for formatting posts with HTML, markdown, or bbcode, and supports @ mentions.

It also supports user profiles, notifications, auto-save, avatars, private messaging, real-time preview, a powerful search function, user groups, single sign-on, and more.

Vanilla can be integrated with social networks for easy sharing, login, and more. It offers numerous plugins and themes to enhance its primary features and customize its appearance and feel.

4. SimpleMachinesForum (SMF)

SimpleMachinesForum is a free, open-source, simple, beautiful, and powerful forum software available in over 45 different languages. SMF is easy to use and highly customizable, featuring a multitude of powerful and effective features. It comes with high-quality and reliable support.

SMF is highly customizable; it has many extensions/packages (under various categories such as security, socialization, administration, permissions, posting, theme enhancements, and more) to modify its core functionality, add or remove features, and much more.

5. bbPress – Forum Software

bbPress is a free, open-source, simple, lightweight, fast, and secure bulletin board software built in a WordPress fashion. It is easy to install and configure, fully integrated, and supports setting up multiple forums on one site installation.

It is highly extensible and customizable and supports several plugins. It also supports RSS feeds and offers spam-blocking functionality for additional security.

6. MyBB – Powerful Forum Software

MyBB is a free open-source, simple, easy-to-use, intuitive yet powerful, and extremely efficient forum software. It is a discussion-oriented application that supports: user profiles, private messages, reputation, warnings, calendars and events, user promotion, moderation, and more.

It ships with a number of plugins, templates, and themes to extend its core functionality and customize its default look and feel, allowing you to set up a fully customized and effective online community forum with ease.

7. miniBB – Community Discussion Forum

miniBB is a free open-source, standalone, lightweight, fast, and highly customizable software for building a web forum. It is suitable and effective for setting up a simple and stable community discussion platform, especially for beginners. It allows for dynamic and content-rich discussions, and you can enable it to be responsive via the mobile template.

It can easily be integrated with your website, allowing you to change its layout to match the look of your website. Additionally, miniBB offers facilities for you to synchronize with an existing membership system. Importantly, it supports guest posts and quick moderation.

8. Phorum – Forum Software

Phorum is a free open-source, simple, highly-customizable, and easy-to-use PHP message board software. It has a very flexible hook and module system for you to customize your web community discussion platform.

You can easily modify its default settings using HTML templates that include simple-to-understand text commands.

9. Flarum – Forum Software

Flarum offers a delightful discussion platform for your website, combining speed and user-friendliness with essential features for successful community management.

It’s intentionally designed to be:

• Swift and Effortless – Free from clutter and complex dependencies, Flarum utilizes PHP for quick deployment and Mithril, a lightweight JavaScript framework, for a responsive interface.
• Elegantly Responsive – Designed with a human-centric approach, Flarum ensures a consistent and intuitive experience across different platforms right out of the box.
• Empowering and Adaptable – Unleash the full potential of Flarum by customizing, extending, and seamlessly integrating it into your community. Its flexible architecture and robust Extension API provide powerful options for tailoring your forum to your needs.

10. PunBB – Bulletin Board Software

PunBB is a free open source, lightweight, and fast PHP bulletin board software. It has a simple layout and design, like most forum software listed above, it supports private messaging, polls, linking to off-site avatars, advanced text formatting commands, file attachments, multi-forums and so much more.

That’s all for now! In this article, we reviewed the 10 best open-source forum software options for Linux. If you're thinking about setting up a forum for your site or blog, by now, you should know which open-source software to use. If your favorite software is missing from the list, let us know via the feedback form below.

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