Vanilla Forums vs Symphony

Our great sponsors

InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale

WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS

SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews

Our great sponsors

Vanilla Forums		Symphony
	Project
5	Mentions	-
2,818	Stars	12,474
0.4%	Growth	-
5.0	Activity	9.4
about 21 hours ago	Latest Commit	over 4 years ago
PHP	Language	Java
GNU General Public License v3.0 only	License	-

The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Vanilla Forums

Posts with mentions or reviews of Vanilla Forums. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-07-23.

Ask HN: What forum software do you recommend?
3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 Jul 2023
Are Vanilla Forums OSS having problems?
1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2023
Best way to create a community website
2 projects | /r/Wordpress | 10 Jan 2023

For something simple, I'd look into bbpress. For something more complex (but that can still integrate with WordPress, check out Xenforo (my favorite) or Vanilla.
Use forums rather than Slack/Discord to support developer community
20 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Nov 2021

(Not sure if the latest version supports digest emails though)
https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
16/30 Google results contain SQL injection vulnerabilities
1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jul 2021

I’m a tech lead for Vanilla Forums (recently acquired by Higher Logic).
We have a few PHP positions open (remote or onsite). The core product is open source https://github.com/vanilla/vanilla
If your looking to stick with PHP you can check the open positions. https://www.higherlogic.com/about/company/jobs/

Symphony

Posts with mentions or reviews of Symphony. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects.

We haven't tracked posts mentioning Symphony yet.
Tracking mentions began in Dec 2020.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Vanilla Forums and Symphony you can also consider the following projects:

Reddit

Discourse - A platform for community discussion. Free, open, simple.

dyu/comments - A real-time, markdown-enabled comment engine powered by leveldb with oauth support

Flarum - Simple forum software for building great communities.

Socialhome - A federated social home

MyBB - MyBB is a free and open source forum software.

Mastodon - Your self-hosted, globally interconnected microblogging community

nodeBB - Node.js based forum software built for the modern web

phpBB - phpBB Development: phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin board written in PHP. This repository also contains the history of version 2.

BuddyPress - BuddyPress DEVELOPMENT repo. This repository is just a mirror of the development SVN at https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/. Please include a link to a pre-existing ticket on https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ with every pull request.

Lemmy - 🐀 A link aggregator and forum for the fediverse