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 50 alternatives to Simple Machines Forum for a variety of platforms, including Self-Hosted, Web-based, Linux, PHP and Windows 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.
FUDforum (Fast Uncompromising Discussion Forum) is a free and open source web discussion forum. FUDforum combines an extensive feature set while maintaining the ability to generate forum web pages extremely fast.
Forem is open source software for building modern and independent communities for your developers, peers, customers, users. Forem is already powering communities that serve over 10 million monthly unique visitors.
United States
ElkArte is a modern, powerful community building forum software. It is completely free to use and is licensed with an open source BSD-3 clause license.
AsmBB is high performance web forum software, written entirely in assembly language. It is very lightweight, but provides decent set of features and ultimate performance.
Feature-rich and lightning fast forums. Works standalone or as a Rails engine. Markdown by default, with plugins for code highlighting, KaTeX math, and BBCode. No JavaScript required. Easy deployment on Heroku or with Ansible.
YaBB is a free Perl forum (bulletin board) system that has rivaled professional message boards for years. YaBB provides chat for visitors where they can post any time and reply to anyone!.
Plush is the most polished, user-friendly forum experience ever, featuring real-time discussions, beautiful design, an integrated blog, member directory, private messaging, paid subscriptions and a world-class mobile experience.
United Kingdom
ForumWP is the best forum plugin for WordPress. Use ForumWP to add a forum to your website and create an online community.
ForumFree allows you to create a forum or a blog in a few simple steps. You have a completely free site that also allows you to earn money with advertising. You can use one of the themes already created by our users, or you can customize your own.
PunBB is a fast and lightweight PHP-powered discussion board. It is released under the GNU General Public License.
Phorum is open source forum software with a penchant for speed. Phorum's very flexible hook and module system can satisfy every web master's needs.
