Simple Machines Forum is described as '— SMF in short — is a free, professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes' and is a Forum Software in the social & communications category. There are more than 25 alternatives to Simple Machines Forum for a variety of platforms, including Self-Hosted, Web-based, Linux, Windows and Mac apps. The best Simple Machines Forum alternative is Discourse. It's not free, so if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try Discourse or Flarum. Other great apps like Simple Machines Forum are XenForo, NodeBB, Vanilla Forum and MyBB.
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.
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.
A compelling community experience. Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.
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.
MyBB is the free and open source, intuitive, extensible, and incredibly powerful forum software you've been looking for.
vBulletin (abbreviated as vB) is a commercial Internet forum software written in PHP using a MySQL database server.
Invision Community is a flexible, feature-packed and easy to customize platform that powers some of the biggest and best communities on the web.
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.
WoltLab Suite (formerly Burning Board) is an enterprise grade CMS built for communities and forums.
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...
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Flarum is a modernization of the aging forum structure, taht accounts for modern standards and uses (namely, smartphones).