Sujata

Onlne discussion forums are one of the most powerful tools to run online communities. Are you a webmaster and struggling to interact with your visitors ? OR Are you selling products online and want to provide online support in a free and open environment ? OR Are you a gaming enthusiast and want to host a gaming community ?

All you need is a forum software to realize your ideas.

Now you must be thinking of paid forum packages you can use to run your online community. But WAIT!!!! why pay when you can get one for free?

Yup, following is the list of top free forum softwares all equally robust, and each with its own unique features, that give paid forum software a run for their money.

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.
bbPress is lean, mean and ready to take on any job you throw at it.

Vanilla is an open-source, standards-compliant, multi-lingual, fully extensible discussion forum for the web. Anyone who has web-space that meets the requirements can download and use Vanilla for free!

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.

Since its creation in 2000, phpBB™ has become the most widely used Open Source forum solution. Like its predecessors, phpBB™ 3.0 “Olympus” has an easy to use administration panel and a user friendly installation process, which allows you to have a forum set up in minutes.

SEO-Board is a forum software that's fast, free, and search engine friendly. It is the perfect solution for small and medium-sized sites.

Started in 1998, Phorum was the original PHP and MySQL based Open Source forum software. Phorum's developers pride themselves on creating message board software that is designed to meet different needs of different web sites while not sacrificing performance or features.

Simpleboard Forum Component for the Mambo Open Source CMS framework

Ikonboard is a comprehensive web bulletin board system. It transcends the limits imposed by other bulletin board software, allowing you to create a truly unique community on your website. From it's extensive template and skins features to it's complete multi-lingual support, your members will keep coming back for more.

A lot of thought has gone into the MyBB interface to make it easy to use. MyBB uses a standard discussion board structure, so your visitors will feel familiar with the way MyBB works. Your visitors can use the MyBB user control panel to change the way they view discussions. They can also easily start and reply to discussions and markup their posts. The forum administrators and moderators can use MyBB's inline editing and moderation features to control discussion and keep the forum tidy.

Vikingboard is a PHP-based community board designed by the principle of “less is more”, and features a powerful web-based extension-system, a lighting-fast cache system and dynamic web update. Small, but incredibly fast and powerful.

The Snitz Forums 2000 Community is an ever growing group of developers and friends that enjoy working together and learning from each other's experiences in programming. There is also a growing group of people that just like to talk and make friends.

Web Wiz Forums bulletin board system is the ideal forum package for your website's community.

Web Wiz Forums is fast and powerful as a result of over 8 years experience in developing message board software. It has 100s of practical, generic features, yet remains easy to get up and running.

Web Wiz Forums is backed by full-time support and development staff giving you a stable bulletin board engine that you can rely on today and into the future.

PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License. Its primary goals are to be faster, smaller and less graphically intensive as compared to other discussion boards. PunBB has fewer features than many other discussion boards, but is generally faster and outputs smaller, semantically correct XHTML-compliant pages.

Obsessed to make a discussion board where you will be the only one boss? Own a web space and install a message board script written in PHP, free open source forum engine everybody can build an online community on: miniBB, standing for "mini-BulletinBoard". Mini-forum for big people - that's what "mini bb" is all about. Everything begins with choice, and miniBB is not the only right start for running a special community of the common interest, but also forums holder for ages. Security, speed and stability - they are three S's of our software philosophy.

UseBB.net is the official website of UseBB, a light and Open Source PHP 4 and MySQL based forum package, distributed freely under the GPL license. Developed with simplicity and usability in mind, UseBB is ideal for small to medium sized websites which need a clear and efficient forum package.

IceBB is a powerful, fast, free, and open-source forum solution powered by the free PHP and MySQL. IceBB scales well, no matter how many users or posts, due to its clean and efficient code. It can also be fully customized to your needs with full skin and language support. A powerful admin control center, along with easy-to-use moderation tools, allow you to easily manage all aspects of your forum.

nextBBS multi-boards is currently running in public beta at clicdev.com. Single-board versions are running medium-to-big size communities, such as militate.com, sdglive.com, etc. Other organizations integrate nextBBS as part of their hosting offering, such as pearlgaming.com
In December 2006, Portals Magazine compiled the list of SourceForge's 10 most popular Web 2.0-related applications. nextBBS was number 5.

Quick Silver Forums is fast and light, rich in features, 3D permissions system, powerful admin controls, complete skinning, translated into 18 languages, pptimised MySQL interaction, easy to customise, released under the GPL license and free for commercial or personal use.

Distributed under the open source MIT license, OvBB is a light-weight and fast discussion board system that mimics vBulletin 2.x.x in both look and behavior while incorporating new features and functionality.

The TTF Project aims to produce extremely fast and clean web forum software. The forum lacks most features offered by other software—a fact of which we are extremely proud.

YaBB is a leading FREE, Open Source community forum system (bulletin board, message board) written in Perl. Learn how it started, who is on the project team, and what the main features are.