⚡ Internet Forum Software in the United States

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.

The United States of America (USA) is a North American country with a population of over 341 million people.

According to our statistics, Internet forum software is used on 0.5% of websites from the United States.

Statistics based on 567K+ analyzed websites. About this data

⭐ Most Popular in 2026

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

The most popular is bbPress with an impressive share of 30.5%, followed by XenForo with 19% and phpBB with 9.9%.

bbPress 30.5%
XenForo 19%
phpBB 9.9%
vBulletin 8.9%
Invision Community 8.7%
Discourse 8.7%
Simple Machines Forum 4.7%
Higher Logic Thrive 2.9%
Discuz! 2.4%
MyBB 1.5%
Khoros Communities 1.3%
Verint Community 0.4%
NodeBB 0.3%
Flarum 0.3%
Other 0.5%

🚀 Highlights

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

4. vBulletin ^(-1)
8. Higher Logic Thrive ^(-3)
11. Khoros Communities ^(-1)
12. Verint Community ^(-5)
13. NodeBB ^(-1)
15. Vanilla ^(-1)
17. OpenACS ^(-1)

✨ Best Internet Forum Software

Below is a more detailed list of 18 Internet forum software solutions used on sites from the United States, 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	30.5%
2	XenForo London, United Kingdom A commercial Internet forum software based on PHP and MySQL. $195+	19%
3	phpBB Marlow, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom An open-source forum software written in PHP. FreeOpen source	9.9%
4	vBulletin El Segundo, California, United States A commercial forum software platform written in PHP that uses a MySQL or MariaDB database. $179+	8.9%
5	Invision Community Richmond, Virginia, United States A commercial, customizable community software built with PHP and MySQL. $99+/month	8.7%
6	Discourse Dover, Delaware, United States An open-source community platform built on Ruby on Rails. FreeOpen source$20+/month	8.7%
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	4.7%
8	Higher Logic Thrive Arlington, Virginia, United States A cloud-based community platform for associations. $10,000+/year	2.9%
9	Discuz! Hefei, China A Chinese Internet forum software written in PHP. Free18,800 RMB+	2.4%
10	MyBB An open-source, community developed bulletin board software built with PHP. FreeOpen source	1.5%
11	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	1.3%
12	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	0.4%
13	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	0.3%
14	Flarum Arnhem, Netherlands An open-source discussion platform written in PHP. FreeOpen source€50+/month	0.3%
15	Vanilla Arlington, Virginia, United States An enterprise online community platform for B2B and B2C brands. $24,000+/year	0.2%
16	PunBB A fast and lightweight PHP-based open source discussion board. FreeOpen source	0.1%
17	OpenACS An open-source toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. FreeOpen source	0.1%
18	WoltLab Suite Potsdam, Germany A commercial software package designed for creating and managing online communities. €129.99+	0.07%

👉 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 567,479 websites from the United States.
We currently track the presence of 20 Internet forum software solutions across the web.
Of these, 18 were detected on websites from the United States.
Statistics were last calculated on April 5, 2026.
For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.