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Top 13 PHP Forum Projects
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Project mention: Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025 | news.ycombinator.com | 2024-12-26
Flarum is great [1].
Looks good, works on mobile, continuously updated.
Try it out.
Edit: Oh wow, downvoted for posting a good recommendation?
1: https://flarum.org/
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InfluxDB
InfluxDB – Built for High-Performance Time Series Workloads. InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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phpBB
phpBB Development: phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin board written in PHP. This repository also contains the history of version 2.
Hmh, that's a drawback to me. I like to have different accounts for different things and keep them more or less strictly separated. I use two subreddits and each has its own account.
On average I'd say account creation has become harder because everybody and her child tries to shunt you into some social sign-in but it still is not difficult to make accounts. "Modern" password managers make it a breeze to juggle many accounts, and frankly, what Netscape Navigator could do almost 30 years ago was already enough for that.
Same goes for forums. phpbb [1] can run on any LAMP potato and you get a whole boatload of potatoes for 2 EUR/month at Hetzner. I don't know what HN requires, but I guess it's not much more. The hard part of forums are the people needed to keep order and Reddit is not helping there, quite the opposite.
Sorry, I notice I'm grumpy.
[1] https://www.phpbb.com/
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Simple Machines Forum
Simple Machines Forum — SMF in short — is free and open-source community forum software, delivering professional grade features in a package that allows you to set up your own online community within minutes! (by SimpleMachines)
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laravel-forum
A slim, lean forum package designed for quick and easy integration in Laravel projects
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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FUDforum
FUDforum is a super fast and scalable discussion forum. It is highly customizable and supports unlimited members, forums, posts, topics, polls & attachments. It can import XML Feeds and sync with USENET groups and Mailing Lists (bi-directional).
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NOTE:
The open source projects on this list are ordered by number of github stars.
The number of mentions indicates repo mentiontions in the last 12 Months or
since we started tracking (Dec 2020).
PHP Forum discussion
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Ask HN: What forum software do you recommend?
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I'm curious to know what are the main applications that people deploy and use frequently on a daily basis?
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Screw reddit, let's remake digg v4
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A note from our sponsor - SaaSHub
www.saashub.com | 21 Jun 2025
Index
What are some of the best open-source Forum projects in PHP? This list will help you:
| # | Project | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Flarum | 15,828 |
| 2 | Flarum Core | 6,553 |
| 3 | phpBB | 1,934 |
| 4 | MyBB | 1,152 |
| 5 | Simple Machines Forum | 657 |
| 6 | laravel-forum | 629 |
| 7 | spotweb | 603 |
| 8 | agorakit | 428 |
| 9 | core | 209 |
| 10 | Zusam | 205 |
| 11 | forumium | 187 |
| 12 | FUDforum | 41 |
| 13 | GrokBB | 3 |
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InfluxDB 3 OSS is now GA. Transform, enrich, and act on time series data directly in the database. Automate critical tasks and eliminate the need to move data externally. Download now.
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