⚡ Internet Forum Software

Internet forums, also known as message boards or bulletin boards, are online discussion platforms that allow users to start discussions, post replies, and interact in an organized, threaded format.

Internet forum software provides structured topic organization with categories and subforums, search, notifications, and activity feeds. It also usually supports file attachments, user groups and reputation systems, private messaging, and post moderation with spam control.

According to our statistics, Internet forum software is used on 0.5% of all websites.

Statistics based on 3.3M+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

The following chart shows the leading Internet forum software in 2026, based on market share.

The most popular is bbPress with a share of 28.4%, followed by XenForo with 17.1% and phpBB with 14.9%.

bbPress 28.4%
XenForo 17.1%
phpBB 14.9%
Invision Community 8.9%
vBulletin 8.4%
Discourse 5.1%
Simple Machines Forum 4.3%
Discuz! 4%
WoltLab Suite 3.1%
MyBB 2.1%
Higher Logic Thrive 1.1%
Khoros Communities 0.8%
Flarum 0.6%
NodeBB 0.4%
Other 0.8%

You can also drill down by country:

🚀 Country Highlights

Here is a list of softwares that is especially popular in certain countries.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

phpBB is #1 in the United Kingdom ^(-2)
Discuz! is #1 in China ^(-7)
WoltLab Suite is #1 in Germany ^(-8)
vBulletin is #4 in the United States ^(-1)

✨ Best Internet Forum Software

Below is a more detailed list of 20 Internet forum software solutions we detect, ranked by their market share.

Rank	Name	Market share
1	bbPress San Francisco, California, United States A free plugin that adds forum functionality to WordPress websites. FreeOpen source	28.4%
2	XenForo London, United Kingdom A commercial Internet forum software based on PHP and MySQL. $195+	17.1%
3	phpBB Marlow, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom An open-source forum software written in PHP. FreeOpen source	14.9%
4	Invision Community Richmond, Virginia, United States A commercial, customizable community software built with PHP and MySQL. $99+/month	8.9%
5	vBulletin El Segundo, California, United States A commercial forum software platform written in PHP that uses a MySQL or MariaDB database. $179+	8.4%
6	Discourse Dover, Delaware, United States An open-source community platform built on Ruby on Rails. FreeOpen source$20+/month	5.1%
7	Simple Machines Forum Las Vegas, Nevada, United States Open-source PHP forum software used to host and manage online community discussion boards with a SQL database backend. FreeOpen source	4.3%
8	Discuz! Hefei, China A Chinese Internet forum software written in PHP. Free18,800 RMB+	4%
9	WoltLab Suite Potsdam, Germany A commercial software package designed for creating and managing online communities. €129.99+	3.1%
10	MyBB An open-source, community developed bulletin board software built with PHP. FreeOpen source	2.1%
11	Higher Logic Thrive Arlington, Virginia, United States A cloud-based community platform for associations. $10,000+/year	1.1%
12	Khoros Communities Austin, Texas, United States An enterprise-grade community management platform that enables organizations to build, manage, and scale branded online communities. $100,000+/year	0.8%
13	Flarum Arnhem, Netherlands An open-source discussion platform written in PHP. FreeOpen source€50+/month	0.6%
14	NodeBB An open-source forum software built with Node.js that supports real-time streaming discussions, instant notifications via WebSocket, multiple database backends (Redis, MongoDB, PostgreSQL), mobile-friendly responsive design, and a REST API. FreeOpen source$20+/month	0.4%
15	PunBB A fast and lightweight PHP-based open source discussion board. FreeOpen source	0.3%
16	Vanilla Arlington, Virginia, United States An enterprise online community platform for B2B and B2C brands. $24,000+/year	0.2%
17	Verint Community Melville, New York, United States A community platform that provides an integrated suite of applications such as forums, blogs, articles, wikis, and media galleries. $50,000+/year	0.2%
18	OpenACS An open-source toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. FreeOpen source	0.08%
19	Zulip San Francisco, California, United States An open-source team chat and collaboration software available in cloud and self-hosted versions. FreeOpen source$8+/user/month	0.08%
-	Lemmy A decentralized, open-source social link aggregation and discussion platform built on the ActivityPub protocol as an alternative to Reddit. FreeOpen source	<0.001%

👉 See Also

Internet forum

🗃️ About This Data

We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
This report is based on the analysis of 3,359,906 websites.
We currently track the presence of 20 Internet forum software solutions across the web.
Statistics were last calculated on April 4, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.