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.
Platforms
- Online
- Self-Hosted
- Ruby
- JavaScript
- Cloudron
- Docker
United States




The best free alternative to phpBB is Discourse. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Discourse or Flarum. If that doesn't suit you, our users have ranked more than 50 alternatives to phpBB and many of them is free so hopefully you can find a suitable replacement. Other interesting free alternatives to phpBB are Vanilla Forum, Simple Machines Forum, MyBB and bbPress.
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.




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.




A community forum allows you to engage and retain customers, keeping them interested and up-to-date with your latest product or service.




Vanilla provides a standards-compliant, multi-lingual, theme-able and pluggablecommunity forum software that powers discussion forums on 800,000 sites.


Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes.

MyBB is the free and open source, intuitive, extensible, and incredibly powerful forum software you've been looking for.



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.

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...
FUDforum (Fast Uncompromising Discussion Forum) is a free and open source web discussion forum. FUDforum combines an extensive feature set while maintaining the ability to generate forum web pages extremely fast.




miniBB is a standalone, open source program for building your own Internet forum. If you want a lite, simple and stable message board attached to your existing website at the very high integration level, which may include the full customization of the layout to the look of your...




Forem is open source software for building modern and independent communities for your developers, peers, customers, users. Forem is already powering communities that serve over 10 million monthly unique visitors.

ElkArte is a modern, powerful community building forum software. It is completely free to use and is licensed with an open source BSD-3 clause license.
