Apps similar to Simple Machines Forum include Discourse, which is open source and free for personal use. Other options are Flarum, phpBB, XenForo and NodeBB. There's no shortage of Forum Software like Simple Machines Forum, with more than 50 alternatives for self-hosting, the web, Linux, Windows and Mac.
Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. A modern forum, everything's been redesigned to be easy.
United States
Flarum is free, open-source forum software with a focus on simplicity. You can use Flarum to easily set up a discussion forum for your website. Flarum is developed openly on GitHub.
Australia
Since its creation in 2000, phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB™ 3.2 “Rhea” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.
United Kingdom
A compelling community experience. Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.
United Kingdom
A community forum allows you to engage and retain customers, keeping them interested and up-to-date with your latest product or service.
Canada
Vanilla provides a standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able and pluggablecommunity forum software that powers discussion forums on 800,000 sites.
MyBB is the free and open source, intuitive, extensible, and incredibly powerful forum software you've been looking for.
United Kingdom
vBulletin (abbreviated as vB) is a commercial Internet forum software written in PHP using a MySQL database server.
United States
Invision Community is a flexible, feature-packed and easy to customize platform that powers some of the biggest and best communities on the web.
United States
bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress. Its focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. bbPress will try to keep things as small and light as possible while still allowing great add-on feature possibilities.
United States
WoltLab Suite (formerly Burning Board) is an enterprise grade CMS built for communities and forums.
Germany
EU
FluxBB is a fast, light, user-friendly forum application for your website. FluxBB was designed as a lighter, faster alternative to some of the traditional feature heavy forum applications. It is easy to use and has a proven track record of stability and security making it an...
