Compare the best community platforms for hosting branded forums and member communities.
48 tools
Tools in Community Platforms
Forem — Forem is the open-source, Ruby on Rails community platform originally built to power DEV Community, offering blogging-forward social features, AI moderation tools, and self-hosting for building online communities.
HumHub — Open-source social intranet and community platform for self-hosted or cloud team collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Lemmy — Lemmy is a free, open-source, federated link aggregator and discussion platform built on ActivityPub, offering a self-hostable alternative to Reddit.
Commsor — Commsor is a B2B go-to-market platform that maps sales teams' professional networks to surface warm introduction paths and automate referral programs.
Bettermode — Bettermode is a Toronto-based, white-labeled customer community platform combining discussion forums, Q&A, events, and AI-powered search under a brand's own domain.
Circle — All-in-one community platform for creators and brands, combining discussion spaces, courses, paid memberships, live events, and payments in one branded product.
Mighty Networks — Mighty Networks is an all-in-one community platform that lets creators and entrepreneurs combine memberships, online courses, events, and branded apps into a single network for their audience.
Discourse — Open-source community forum and discussion platform, free to self-host or available as managed hosting, used by companies and communities for forums and support.
Hivebrite — Community engagement platform for building branded member directories, events, groups and monetized communities.
Higher Logic Vanilla — All-in-one online community platform for B2B and B2C customer engagement, support forums, and product feedback.
Khoros Communities — Enterprise online community platform from Khoros for branded customer support forums, product feedback, and peer-to-peer engagement.
Disciple — Disciple (formerly Disciple Media) is a UK-based platform for building fully branded iOS, Android, and web community apps with courses, livestreams, and monetization, no coding needed.
Skool — Skool is an all-in-one community platform that combines discussion feeds, courses, events, and gamified leaderboards so creators and businesses can run a paid or free community from a single link.
Heartbeat — Heartbeat is an all-in-one community platform for creators and businesses, combining discussions, courses, events, a branded mobile app and payments to run paid memberships.
Geneva — Geneva is a free, all-in-one group communication app combining chat, audio rooms, livestreaming, forums, and event planning for clubs and communities, now owned by Bumble Inc.
Forumbee — Forumbee is cloud-based online community software that combines discussion forums, Q&A, a searchable knowledge base, and idea/feedback boards to help businesses build branded customer and employee communities.
Flarum — Flarum is a free, open-source discussion forum platform with a PHP/Laravel backend and a Mithril.js single-page frontend, distributed under the MIT license with an extension ecosystem for adding features.
NodeBB — NodeBB is a modern, real-time discussion forum platform built on Node.js, offered as both free self-hosted open-source software and a fully managed hosted service.
MyBB — MyBB is a free, open-source PHP forum (bulletin board) platform maintained by a volunteer community, used to run self-hosted discussion communities.
phpBB — phpBB is a free, open-source internet forum and bulletin board software package written in PHP, first released in 2000 and now one of the most widely used forum platforms in the world.
Loomio — Open-source collaborative decision-making software built by a worker-owned cooperative, unrelated to Loom despite the similar name.
Decidim — Decidim is a free, open-source platform for participatory democracy that lets governments and organizations run proposals, budgets, and voting online.
Polis — Polis is an open-source, AI-assisted platform for large-scale public deliberation that lets participants submit and vote on statements, then uses machine learning to surface areas of consensus and disagreement among large groups.
Akkoma — Akkoma is a free, open-source, self-hosted microblogging server for the ActivityPub fediverse, forked from Pleroma for faster development and richer features.
Answer — Apache Answer is a free, open-source Q&A platform for building community forums, help centers, and knowledge bases, governed by the Apache Software Foundation.
Artalk — Artalk is a free, open-source, self-hosted comment system for websites and blogs, built with a Go server and a lightweight ~40KB vanilla JavaScript client.
AsmBB — AsmBB is a free, open-source, self-hosted forum engine written entirely in assembly language (FASM), built for speed and minimal server resources.
BuddyPress — BuddyPress is a free, open-source WordPress plugin that turns any WordPress site into a full social network with profiles, groups, and activity feeds.
Coral — Coral is an open-source commenting and community platform for newsrooms, originally built by Mozilla, the New York Times, and the Washington Post, now developed by Vox Media.
diaspora* — diaspora* is a free, open-source, privacy-focused social network built on a decentralized network of independently run servers called pods.
Elgg — Elgg is a free, open-source social networking engine written in PHP that lets organizations build their own private online communities with blogging, groups, and file sharing.
Enigma 1/2 BBS — ENiGMA½ is a free, open-source, modern Bulletin Board System (BBS) package written in Node.js that recreates the classic dial-up BBS experience over Telnet, SSH, and WebSocket for today's internet.
GoToSocial — GoToSocial is a free, open-source, self-hosted ActivityPub server that lets you run your own lightweight, Mastodon-compatible fediverse instance.
Hatsu — Self-hosted, fully automated ActivityPub bridge written in Rust that lets any static site federate with the Fediverse without adding a dynamic backend.
Hubzilla — Free, self-hosted, open-source platform for decentralized social networking, websites, file sharing, and wikis.
Iceshrimp.NET — Iceshrimp.NET is a free, open-source ActivityPub microblogging server rewritten in .NET with Mastodon-compatible client support.
Isso — Lightweight, self-hosted commenting server written in Python that serves as a privacy-friendly, open-source alternative to Disqus.
Misago — Misago is a free, open-source, Django and React-based forum application designed for building fast, scalable, and modern online communities.
Movim — Movim is a free, open-source, decentralized social network and web-based XMPP client that lets people chat, publish posts, and join communities across federated servers.
OSSN — Open Source Social Network (OSSN) is a free, self-hosted PHP script for building custom social networking websites and online communities, with an optional one-time-purchase premium version adding extra features.
PieFed — PieFed is a free, open-source, federated link-aggregation and discussion platform built on ActivityPub, offering a Reddit-like community experience that interoperates with Lemmy, Mbin, and the wider Fediverse.
qpixel — Open-source, AGPL-3.0 licensed Ruby on Rails Q&A community platform that powers the Codidact network, letting anyone self-host a multi-community knowledge-sharing site with voting, reputation-based privileges, and Markdown content.
remark42 — remark42 is a free, open-source, self-hosted commenting engine written in Go that site owners can embed on blogs and articles as a privacy-focused alternative to Disqus.
Scoold — Scoold is a self-hosted, open-source Q&A and knowledge-sharing platform for teams, modeled after Stack Overflow, with a free community edition and paid Pro tiers.
Simple Machines Forum — Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is a free, open-source PHP and MySQL bulletin-board application used to run online discussion communities and forums.
Socialhome — Socialhome is a free, open-source, self-hostable federated personal profile and social networking platform that connects to other servers using the ActivityPub and Diaspora protocols.
Talkyard — Talkyard is an open-source community discussion platform that combines forums, Q&A, idea voting, chat, and embeddable blog comments in one tool.
yarn.social — Decentralized, open-source social micro-blogging ecosystem built on the twtxt format, where users store and control their own posts as plain text files.