Best Forum Plugins For WordPress – Top 15

Written by Aabdelaziz in General Info,Web Dev,Web Discovery

WordPress forum plugins and themes are the best way to add a forum, a message board and an online community to your WP website.

In this article, I compiled for you a list of the top 15 wordpress forum plugins that you can choose from to add a forum to your WP website:

bbPress

bbPress is one of the most popular open-source discussion boards for WordPress. It is a very simple yet powerful forum software built by the contributors to WordPress and has active installations of more than 200,000.

It works perfectly with WordPress version 5 and higher. It has a supportive community and has more than 190, 5-star reviews.

Moreover, it is available in 52 languages, thus, you can still use it even if you do not know how to read or write English.

Discussion Board

The discussion board WordPress forum plugin provides you with a modern forum that you can place anywhere on your WordPress website. This is very simple to install as all you need is just one click.

Moreover, the user registration process is also very simple. This discussion board plugin has one of the cleanest and most smooth interfaces.

There is an inbuilt spam reduction in the forum which allows you to get most of the junk posts out of your way.

Buddy Press

Similar to bbPress, this is one of the most popular WordPress plugins with around 200,000 active installations.

Buddypress is a go-to solution for online communities and was created by the same development group that created bbPress.

The Buddy Press interface allows you to send a friend request and you can also make a group for school or company. It is perfectly compatible with WordPress version 4.9 and higher.

This is a wonderful option if you are looking for modern social network software as it allows for great add-on features through the WordPress plugin system.

Buddy press also helps developers add community features to their websites. It has more than 230, 5-star reviews and many great positive feedbacks.

WPForo

Wpforo is one of the best free WordPress forum plugins. It is an amazing plugin for those who are interested in finding a plugin similar to BBpress. The threads on this plugin are very nicely organized and very beginner-friendly.

The layout is designed in such a way so that new users won’t get confused. Translations are also available on this forum. The best thing about a Wpforo forum is that it’s designed for both large and small forum communities.

Moreover, it has an amazing built-in SEO function to reach the right people on Google.

DW questions and answers

Looking for a community like Quora or Yahoo Answers then the DW questions and answer plugin is an amazing option for you. On this website, there is a voting system by which the best answers rise to the top.

This is the most crucial difference between a regular forum and a question and question/answer website.

With the DW question and answer, you will have more control over the quality of the content since the haters and all the troll comments are sent down to the bottom of the page.

Asgaros Forum

Asgaros gives you a very easy way to add community forum features to your website. It is a wonderful choice if you are looking for a lightweight forum page. It is great for a solution that helps you find a talented and professional community effectively.

The structure of this forum is very simple and beautiful with an amazing notification system and powerful editor. it is a completely free plugin so you won’t have to spend any money but you can always donate if you want to.

Moreover. Asgaros, you can set permissions, approve pose bans and report users, create user groups and add moderators.

WP Symposium

This is a wonderful social network plugin for WordPress. It is similar to BuddyPress in a way that it turns your WordPress website into a social network. It has around 500 active installations and is compatible with WordPress 5.0 or higher.

With the profiles, unlimited forums, email alerts, friends, and much more it is perfect for schools interest groups for engaging with customers.

It has incredible compatibility with themes and plugins. Moreover, you can customize the layout button labels and text according to your taste.

More features such as private messaging, groups, forum subscription, choose who to share your activity, image, and youtube attachments are also available.

Forum Engine

Forum engine is one of the new popular WordPress forum themes which lets you make a community forum where users can communicate with each other, ask questions, UP vote and download vote topics, posts topics and do much more.

It’s fully customizable and lets you change the layout font size and color scheme of your website. The topic that you want to upload can include questions or opinions shared by other users. It’s also possible to add a link or a picture to a topic.

Sabai Discuss – Q&A forum

Sabai discuss is a WordPress forum plugin that helps you set up your question-answer-style website like quora. It is perfect for creating a discussion forum for our knowledge base for WordPress.

One of the most important features of bi discussion is that users can search questions and answers and filter them using custom fields.

Moreover, users will be able to vote on the questions, answers, and comments. Its automatic spam reduction feature gets rid of the onion necessary questions, answers, and comments.

CM Answers

This is a great WordPress question and answer plugin that allows the user to post questions, give comments, send a private message to vote, and upload files in a discussion format.

It gives you access to change questions and answers, restrict user capabilities and create multiple form categories.

It supports multiple languages like Russian German and Spanish so it is not important to know how to read and write English. Moreover, it’s completely free.

Simple press

Simple press helps to increase engagement by adding forum features to your WordPress websites such as forums, public and private forums, and forum groups.

It has a very simple user management system that will let you restrict users to wp-admin, set permissions, create custom avatars, and create user groups.

Moreover, you will also be able to lock topics, move topics between forums and topics, and editor topics and topic titles. This plugin is completely free, which means you won’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on it.

Forum WP

forum WP is a powerful WordPress forum plugin that helps you build your community forum website without requiring any coding.

You will be easily able to customize your text layout and appearance. The users will be able to subscribe to the forums and topics and receive an email notification.

Forum WP is mobile-responsive which means it can work smoothly with every browser device or screen. Unlike most of the plugins in the list, forum WP is not free; the basic version costs $99 per year.

AnsPress

AnsPress is a plugin that adds a Q&A system to your WP website, similar to StackOverFlow and Quora. You just add a page to your existing site, and then activate this plugin there, regardless of the theme you got on your site.

Also, you can use it as a ticketing system (for customer support), or as a knowledge base for your company (for FAQs and such).

This plugin is fast and extensible, supports multi-languages, short-codes, re-CAPTCHA, push and email notifications, and more.

It also allows for the use of tags, categories, labels, comments on questions & answers, featured questions, multiple sorting options, voting on questions & answers, user-profiles, and a points-based reputation system for the users.

Vanilla Forums

Vanilla Forums plugin allows for customizable forums on your wordpress site, with built-in moderation delegation, so you can allow members to become moderators, and a built-in reward system that promotes member participation.

This plugin also offers paid hosting of your forums and communities, with an integrated native mobile client.

The plugin offers curation features to leverage the blog’s traffic in growing your forum which in turn increases your readership.

Simple Forum

Simple Forum is a responsive bulletin board system (both public and private) for your WordPress website, with built-in moderation delegation & reward system to increase user participation, and allows for a high degree of customization.

This plugin is multilingual and has 4 ad spaces built into it, admins can create pages, categories, users & user badges, and can edit code either through HTML, markdown or bbcode editors.

Furthermore, admins can manage forum statistics, email template files, the list of users celebrating birthdays today, and the list of logged-in users.

Also, users can log in with their social handles, search the forum, and up-vote or down-vote threads, and much more.

Final Words

Well, that’s it for this list, I hope you found it helpful ! This was the top 15 WordPress forum plugins & themes to add a forum, a message board or an online community to your WP site. You can check my other articles about forums or websites in specific niches or for specific audiences:

Aabdelaziz

I'm a senior CS Engineer from Morocco, working as an Independent Consultant and a part-time blogger.

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