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You may unsubscribe from these communications at any time. For more information, check out our privacy policy. Forums provide the opportunity to build an online community that allows your audience to connect in a place where they know their interests are shared.
This sense of connectedness is more important than ever in a time where more work, communication, and socialization is being done online. Online communities are particularly beneficial for businesses because they allow customers to interact with each other in a smaller circle than they could via social media, which increases engagement and brand affinity. For instance, let's say one of your customers has a very unique problem with your product or service, and posts about it on your forum.
That post is much easier to find than it would be on social media, where millions of users are talking about a million different things. Even better, maybe another forum user has faced that same problem and can answer their question before your service reps even see it. There is an incredible amount of value in reaching and building your community using a forum. Here, we're going to explore the best forum software to get you started.
Using a multi-purpose platform like a CMS to power your online community allows you access to many different software options in the form of plugins and applications. For instance, you might use the bbPress plugin to create multisite forums, and maintain them from one dashboard within your WordPress site. This is a great option if you want to set up a regular website and forum together. Also known simply as SMF, Simple Machines Forum is an open-source forum software built with large online communities in mind.
Its interface stays clear of flashy decorations, opting instead for a clear and sober approach that gives the platform a professional look. In order to allow for optimal performance and scalability, this free forum software offers a broad variety of customizable features and plugins, along with structured code documentation.
Long gone are the days when these modifications took endless hours and lines of code. Discourse offers a modern take on the notion of forums. This, combined with a long list of available features and integrations and complete mobile optimization, have granted this solution a spot among the best forum software.
This results in a self-moderated community where users are rewarded for their engagement and meaningful collaborations. XenForo is a self-hosted forum software created for businesses. There are more than 2, plugins available in the platform, ranging from enhanced search capabilities to premium area paywalls.
This includes social sharing, activity milestones, appreciation tools, and a reward scheme. In addition to the basic yearly license, XenForo offers several premium services users can add to their forums such as a media gallery, enhanced SEO tools, and advanced resource management.
Extra additions can be purchased from third-party vendors. Invision Community is deemed to be one of the best forum software solutions for businesses and enterprises. It combines a fully customizable interface with rich content creation tools and a comprehensive admin panel that makes it easy to set up and manage. The platform enables users to customize every aspect of their forums, down to the activity feed on a user basis. This flexibility extends to end-users as well, as they can create and manage their own online communities within the forum.
For example, you can install a plugin to let users mention other members on other social media platforms, like on Twitter. Automatic daily backups, and unlimited staff and community members also come with all plans. There you have it: Not only are these the best forum software, but some of them are the best free forum software options as well.
Your next steps for building a forum would be:. Were you able to choose the forum software best suited for your needs? What are you looking for in forum software? What do you consider to be the best forum software or the best free forum software? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
Jenni McKinnon Staff Writer. Twitter Facebook. Last updated: Dec 7, 3 Comments. It also has an AI-powered user engagement feature to help your community grow organically. Discourse Free Discourse is certainly one of the best free forum software out there.
Not only that, but it also has built-in security, anti-spam, and caching capabilities. Its user interface UI is clean and simple, making it look quite professional. MyBB Free MyBB is an open-source, self-hosted forum software best fit for businesses that need an elegant, but cost-effective forum program. Its interface is straightforward and this also includes administration pages. All the above makes it one of the best free forum software for businesses and individuals alike.
Convert casual readers into regular contributors. Disqus helps publishers capture readers and keep them coming back for more with robust sign-in options, cross-site notifications and more. Audience Analytics provide actionable audience insights, helping publishers to understand their audience, monitor engagement, and optimize content strategy. Turn engagement into revenue with new inventory through Disqus and highly configurable ad serving from top demand partners on your site.
Reduce your churn rate, deflect calls and tickets and build better products with our Community, Knowledge Base, and In-Product Support products. Discourse Discourse. Free open source forum software. Engage in searchable discussions with your customers, superfans, and team members.
Create a self-service hub of common questions, interesting ideas, and useful discussion. Our automatic trust system lets the whole community help cultivate fruitful conversation. Customize the style, integrate your favorite services, and create the community you need. Chaordix Community Platform Chaordix. The Chaordix Community Platform hosts communities for the world's top brands, connecting them with their customers, members, users or employees.
Welcome to Higher Logic, the industry leading solution for creating online communities. Our platform is designed to increase engagement, loyalty and retention and is scalable and fully responsive to fit the specific needs of your organization. Our platform allows your community to engage and connect with members, customers and volunteers, find answers to burning questions, share best practices, insights, issues and relevant content at any time, on any device.
Join the Higher Logic movement of over , successful communities with over 25,, community members around the world. With an extensive database of user-created extensions and styles database containing hundreds of style and image packages to customise your board, you can create a very unique forum in minutes. No other bulletin board software offers a greater complement of features, while maintaining efficiency and ease of use.
Best of all, phpBB is completely free. We welcome you to test it for yourself today. If you have any questions please visit our Community Forum where our staff and members of the community will be happy to assist you with anything from configuring the software to modifying the code for individual needs.
Learn more about phpBB. OpenWeb OpenWeb. Your top users drive your business. Our complete Community Platform helps you build, segment and monetize your core audience. Recirculating traffic and engaging users automatically translates into pageviews. Areas with user-generated content become monetizeable with advertising. Forget Comments and say hello to our "Conversation".
User engagement creates data. From sentiment analysis to defining custom audiences, we help you monetize your community. Reduce your human moderation efforts with high-quality, brand-safe conversations.
Our machine-learning moderation technology, removes illicit comments, spam and seamlessly integrates with leading security technologies. Identify your core audiences and allow them to connect amongst themselves, with key contributors.
Drupal Drupal. We're the leading open-source CMS for ambitious digital experiences that reach your audience across multiple channels. Because we all have different needs, Drupal allows you to create a unique space in a world of cookie-cutter solutions.
Crowdstack Social Strata. Crowdstack is a hosted SaaS community and membership platform designed to help engage, retain and grow audiences. Site owners have complete control of their data. There is also a turnkey Premium Member ship service where site owners can earn revenue. Everything needed to run an online community. Crowdstack Pro is a customizable and easy-to-use customer engagement platform.
As a SaaS, there's no coding, it just works. Easily collaborate and communicate with fans, volunteers, constituents, customers, employees, and influencers. With eXo Platform, companies can connect, engage and reward their employees, customers, and partners with its social, engagement and gamification capabilities. Jostle Jostle Corporation.
At Jostle we believe organizations should feel less complex. Employees should find it easy to plug in and do great work. So we designed an intranet that helps fix complexity instead of adding to it. Now work life is simpler. People can actually connect, align, and find information. Gluu Gluu. Encourage team collaboration and improve business processes with Gluu, the process success platform.
With Gluu, businesses can take advantage of three products in one integrated platform, which lets them make any process or task easy to understand, execute, and improve. Gluu can be used for business improvement initiatives, including compliance and auditing, knowledge sharing, risk management, continuous improvement, and systems implementation. Supportbench Supportbench Services. Deliver exceptional customer support with Supportbench, a powerful customer service management software.
Supportbench offers enterprise-level tools that enable small to mid-sized businesses provide customer support at an affordable price. Supportbench offers features such as customizable surveys, seamless integrations with popular apps, real-time analytics, built-in scheduling tools, knowledge bases and user forums, support ticketing system, and more.
KronoDesk Inflectra. KronoDesk is a cloud-based customer support platform that is suitable for businesses of all sizes. With KronoDesk, users can gain access to desk ticketing, a online knowledge database, and customer support forums. KronoDesk allows businesses to receive customer queries and send them to relevant knowledge base articles.
KronoDesk is accessible via mobile devices or a desktop computer and installable on the users' servers or the cloud. Answerbase Lumin Creative. With Answerbase, businesses can allow their users to ask questions, receive answers, and discover relevant content to get the information they need about certain products and services. Twine Twine. Helping fast growing companies bring their workplaces together. Twine is comms tool for the modern workplace. These play nicely with your existing systems too: sign-on using Okta and Active Directory, pull in files from Dropbox, Google and Box, and much more.
It's all built on a modular basis, so you can pick and choose the features you need and start building your ideal digital workplace. NodeBB is modern forum software. It is highly customizable, and combines all the advantages of today's mobile and social web with the deep community engagement of classic Internet bulletin boards.
Built on the high-performance Node. The Hub Pancentric Digital. Securely share resources, boost employee engagement and improve internal comms with features like polls, surveys, intelligent forms, group forums and more. Every Hub enables you to create unlimited communities, building private intranet environments with unique branding, content and users - perfect if you need a portal branded to each of your clients or partner companies.
There's no extra feature charges or upgrade fees. Your Hub comes with total access to every new and existing feature, and you will be automatically upgraded to the latest version every time we release a new feature. Our intranet consultants work with you every step of the way to help you build and launch an intranet designed around you.
Mobilize Mobilize. Communities don't just build themselves. Successful communities are more process than product. With Mobilize, you have not only the right technology — but the right experts and methodology — driving the key outcomes that are most important to your org.
The Mobilize method creates a value chain — action steps and strategies that each produce an incremental driver of value — in support of your desired end goals.
Unmatched support, up-time QuestionPro Communities QuestionPro. QuestionPro Communities provides a platform that allows companies to create engaged customer communities, collect real-time customer insights and impact customer experience.
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