Open-source XenForo alternatives

Discourse is a fully open-source platform for online community discussion. It is aimed at those who prefer to decide for themselves how and where their site runs, and it is written mainly in Ruby on Rails with a JavaScript front end and PostgreSQL. It is released under the GPL-2.0 license.

Discourse lets you start discussion topics, talk live through its integrated chat, change the look with official and community themes, and extend the site with plugins, ranging from chatbots powered by Discourse AI to the Data Explorer plugin for SQL analysis. Current stable versions of the major browsers are supported across desktops, tablets and phones.

You can self-host it on your own infrastructure by following the install guide, or choose the official Discourse hosting if you would rather skip setup and server management. Development setups use Docker or a VS Code dev container and need Ruby, PostgreSQL and Redis. It suits companies, open-source projects and groups running forums and support communities.

Forem is open-source software for building communities for peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends or any group that wants a shared space. It is the codebase behind dev.to, a community of software developers who write articles, discuss and build professional profiles. The project is written in Ruby on Rails and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

The repository includes installation documentation, developer documentation and instructions for deploying with Kamal. Contributors are welcome to open pull requests on any issue, provided they include appropriate tests, with the maintainers currently focused on backend regression tests while frontend changes may need more user review. The project states that AI-assisted pull requests are welcome if they meet quality standards, and it points AI agents to an AGENTS.md file. A vulnerability disclosure process and acknowledgements are also documented.

NodeBB is forum software built on Node.js that keeps the traditional bulletin board format, with category hierarchies, local user accounts and asynchronous messaging, while adding modern features. It uses web sockets for instant interactions and real-time notifications, is mobile responsive, and exposes rich RESTful read and write APIs.

It supports Redis, MongoDB or PostgreSQL as its database. The core contains a common set of basic functionality, and additional features and integrations come from third-party plugins. A theming system extends base templates and styles with SCSS or CSS, and the base theme uses Bootstrap 5. A minimalist theme called Harmony is available for getting started without coding.

NodeBB is released under the GPL-3.0 license and is self-hosted. It requires a recent Node.js release (version 22 or later) plus MongoDB 5 or later or Redis 7.2 or later. Translations are managed with Transifex, and the project invites developers, designers and translators to contribute.

Flarum is a discussion platform for websites, offered as open-source forum software. It aims to be simple and lightweight, with no complex dependencies, and the README says it is built with PHP so that it is quick to deploy.

The interface is powered by Mithril, a small JavaScript framework, and is designed to look consistent and responsive across devices. Flarum can be customized, extended and integrated through an Extension API, which is how most added features are provided. The repository contains Flarum's core code, so anyone setting up an actual forum should start from the separate skeleton repository.

Flarum is licensed under the MIT licence. Support is available through the documentation, the Flarum Discuss community forum and a Discord server, and security issues are reported by email under a published policy. It suits communities that want to host their own forum rather than use a social platform.

Misago is a forum application written with Python and Django that aims to be complete and modern. Its authors say it deliberately departs from common, outdated assumptions about how forum software should work. The repository is licensed under GPL-2.0 and also ships with Docker support and uses htmx for its interface.

It implements the features expected on a live community site. Users can register, set avatars, edit profiles and reset forgotten passwords, and sign-in is available through more than 50 supported OAuth providers. Administrators can require email activation or manual approval, and fight spam registrations with a custom question and answer challenge, ReCAPTCHA, Stop Forum Spam or IP blacklists.

Content is organized into categories with unlimited depth, and messages can be written in GitHub-flavored markdown, a BBCode subset, or both. Presence features show when members are online, with a setting to hide activity. A full moderation toolset lets moderators edit, move, hide, approve, delete or close content, and a ban system can block users, names, emails and IP addresses.

phpBB is a free, open-source bulletin board written in PHP, used to run online discussion forums. The repository is the project's development home and also holds the history of version 2. It is licensed under GNU General Public License v2, and the community site phpBB.com is the place to get a copy, find support and discuss development.

The README is aimed at contributors. It asks them to create an account on phpBB.com, open a ticket if none exists, read the coding and Git contribution guidelines and send a pull request. To run a development build from the repository rather than a pre-built package, you fork the project, clone it and install dependencies, with Vagrant and GitHub Codespaces setups documented as alternatives.

Development documentation covers core, extensions and automated testing. Unit and functional tests guard against regressions, run through continuous integration, and the master branch holds the latest development version while the 3.3.x branch carries development of that release series. Topics tag it as a forum and bulletin board project written in PHP.

Simple Machines Forum, usually shortened to SMF, is free and open-source forum software written in PHP. It is meant for people who want to launch an online community of their own, and the project says an installation can be up and running within minutes using the official release packages.

SMF works with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases. This repository is the development home of the project, with separate branches for the 2.1 and 3.0 release lines. People who work from source rather than a packaged release need Composer 2 or newer to install dependencies, and contributors sign off their commits under the project's licensing terms.

The README states that SMF is licensed under the BSD 3-clause license, while documentation contributions use CC-BY-SA 3 and bundled libraries and image sets keep their own licenses.

Talkyard is a community discussion platform that brings together features from several kinds of tools. Its description names StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit and Disqus as the sources, so one installation can host a forum, question-and-answer boards, chat channels and comments for a blog.

The platform emphasizes thoughtful discussion, with insightful comments rising to the top and the ability to upvote ideas and sort by votes. Question topics let participants select an accepted answer, chat channels offer fairly basic real-time messaging, and an embedding option lets website owners collect anonymous blog comments. The project provides a comparison page against other software, a demo forum, a discussion forum for the project and documentation that it describes as incomplete.

Talkyard is written mainly in TypeScript and Scala with a React front end, and is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Self-hosting is supported through the separate talkyard-prod-one repository, and this repository is where development takes place.

Mili is an open-source community system described by its author as having an elegant interface and rich features. It is aimed at people who want to run their own online community or forum site and gives them a working, production-tested example to adapt rather than a generic forum shell.

The project is actually used on the site mili.com, which the author says demonstrates it can be used to build a real community. Its frontend is built with Vue and iView, while the backend uses TypeScript, Node.js, NestJS and TypeORM, following a fairly standard modern full-stack setup, and it ships with an admin panel for managing the site.

Running it requires Nginx, Node.js, MySQL and Redis at specific versions noted in the README, with configuration done through host entries, an Nginx config and a database config file. It is released under the GPL license and includes default login credentials for local testing of the admin interface.