⚡ Internet Forum Software in Japan

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.

Japan is an East Asian country with a population of around 125 million people.

According to our statistics, Internet forum software is used on 0.1% of websites from Japan.

Statistics based on 159K+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

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

The most popular is bbPress, which dominates the market with an overwhelming 90.3% share.
It is followed by Discuz! with 3.8% and phpBB with 1.7%.

bbPress 90.3%
Discuz! 3.8%
phpBB 1.7%
XenForo 1.3%
Discourse 1.3%
Simple Machines Forum 0.4%
vBulletin 0.4%
NodeBB 0.4%
Flarum 0.4%

🚀 Highlights

Here is a list of the top solutions that is more popular in Japan than worldwide.
Differences between global and country rankings are shown in parentheses.

2. Discuz! ^(-6)
5. Discourse ^(-1)
6. Simple Machines Forum ^(-1)
8. NodeBB ^(-6)
9. Flarum ^(-4)

✨ Best Internet Forum Software

Below is a more detailed list of 9 Internet forum software solutions used on sites from Japan, 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	90.3%
2	Discuz! Hefei, China A Chinese Internet forum software written in PHP. Free18,800 RMB+	3.8%
3	phpBB Marlow, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom An open-source forum software written in PHP. FreeOpen source	1.7%
4	XenForo London, United Kingdom A commercial Internet forum software based on PHP and MySQL. $195+	1.3%
5	Discourse Dover, Delaware, United States An open-source community platform built on Ruby on Rails. FreeOpen source$20+/month	1.3%
6	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	0.4%
7	vBulletin El Segundo, California, United States A commercial forum software platform written in PHP that uses a MySQL or MariaDB database. $179+	0.4%
8	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%
9	Flarum Arnhem, Netherlands An open-source discussion platform written in PHP. FreeOpen source€50+/month	0.4%

👉 See Also

🌎 Internet Forum Software in other countries

🗃️ 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 159,506 websites from Japan.
We currently track the presence of 20 Internet forum software solutions across the web.
Of these, 9 were detected on websites from Japan.
Statistics were last calculated on April 5, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.