Top 8 Best Forum plugins for WordPress

WordPress is the biggest content management system available in the market. Using WordPress, you can create almost any type of website on the internet. You can create a business website as well as an E-commerce website. It does not matter what kind of business you are running on the internet, communication with users is the most important. It’s even better if users can communicate with each other to discuss about the product. The best way to achieve this is to create a forum where your visitors/customers can discuss.

If you are looking for the best Forum plugin for WordPress, You are at the right place. It is because we have created a list of the best free and paid plugins you can use to create a forum on your WordPress site. Creating a forum on a wordpress site is the best way to communicate with users in terms of question-answer, discussions, problem-solving, etc.

These plugins are powerful and efficient. Each one of them has it’s own pros and cons. We have also listed the main features that a specific plugin provides. You can select the plugin that suits your requirements the best. Finally, Let’s get started with the list and the most popular Forum plugin in WordPress.

1. BBPress

bbpress plugin is one of the most-favored plugins in the market, it’s like a trendy plugin. It is the robust plugin that helps you build a community on your website, trusted by over 300,000 users. The most interesting thing about the plugin is it will try to match your wordpress theme as much as possible.

Bbpress is easy to use, easy to integrate, if you wish to look bbpress demo then you can check its forum page.

BBPress itself has themes and plugins. It means that you can even customize or personalize your BBPress forum according to your requirement. BBPress is completely free to use. It is an open source plugin developed by the WordPress community.

And here is the list of features available in the plugin:

• Easy to set-up and moderate
• Fully integrate
• One-click installation 
• Allow for the creation of a multisite forum
• Fast and lightweigh
• The UI is easy to use and intuitive
• Offers customizable templates

Now, Let’s take a look at the second plugin from the list.

2. BuddyPress

Buddypress allows you to create and manage your online community, in which users can make profiles, join groups, and send private messages. Like bbpress, BuddyPress is also completely free and open-source. However, both plugins were made by the same development groups. BuddyPress interface is easy to use and can launch on your website without getting any trouble.

Buddypress allows you to make a community website for colleges and schools with member profiles, user groups, activity streams, messaging, etc.

If you use BuddyPress then you need to install BuddyPress theme plugins for a better result like youzer, buddyboss wall, BuddyPress user blog, etc. It will help you to create a popular brand, and make good revenue.

Features:

• Users can create and update profiles
• Users can befriend one another
• Users can allow sending private messages
• Users can follow a particular activity stream
• Users can participate in forum discussion

3. Asgaros Forum

Asgaros forum is a perfect wordpress plugin for your site if you want to extend your website with a light-weight discussion board. This plugin is fast and secure for any kind of business. You can add asgaros by inserting a shortcode into the page.

Asgaros forum is a free plugin, there is no premium version of this plugin. Due to only the free version of this plugin, it lags when it comes to depth of functionality. Although it gives you functionality like approval, banning, reporting, notifications, feeds, permissions, reactions, search, statistics, guest posting, and much more.

Asgaros forum lets you create an unlimited forum and organize them in a good manner with different categories. You can also create a sub-forum inside a specific forum.

To set the forum icons, you can choose from the inbuilt dash icons, but you can’t upload your own icons. And here is the list of important features of Asgaros forum.

• Easy to Integrate
• Powerful Editor
• Customizable themes
• Profiles and members list
• Supports complex parform
• SEO friendly

4. DW Question and Answer

It is a powerful plugin that helps you to create question and answer system on your website. You can build up your community with a Question-Answer system.it allows the user to vote for the answer and because of that, the best answer comes to the top. You can also categorize answers as per your requirement.

Once you installed the plugin, it will automatically create two pages in “Pages->All Pages” called “DWQA ask Question” and “DWQA Question” in which you have to include the following shortcodes

• DWQA Ask Question: [dwqa-submit-question-form]
• DWQA Question: [dwqa-list-questions]

This plugin also allows you to set-up email notification regarding new comments, questions, and answer, in which 4 email templates are there which is following:

• New Question
• New Answer
• New comments on Question and Answer
• Subscriber Notification

And here are some important features that this plugin provides:

• Manage questions on Front-end
• Voting System
• Views count system
• E-mail notifications
• Multi-language support (More than 20 languages available)

5. wpForo Forum

wpForo Forum is one of the best forum plugin, used by more than 30k users. It gives you an easy and lightweight solution for your website. wpForo is responsive for all kinds of devices, which means you get a perfect layout on desktops, tabs, and mobiles. It provides 3 layouts: “Extended”, “Simplified”, “Question and Answer” which fit almost all types of discussion needs.

You can create and customize new themes and keep them in the active wordpress theme folder. wpForo is an SEO-friendly plugin with built-in SEO functions. It provides an informative profile system with statistics, bio, and subscription pages. It gives you a fully customizable user rating system based on a number of posts.

wpForo helps you to set parent-child relationships and forum list order by using only the drag and drop system. It provided a dashboard in which you can get to know about “General Information”, “Server Information”, “Board statistic”, and “Forum Maintenance”.

Finally, Here are the important features of this plugin.

• Show admin bar for members
• Extendable
• Member Profile System
• Member rating and badges
• Debug Mode

6. CM Answers

CM answer is one of the most demandable plugin in the market. It comes with great features like enabling users to post questions and answers like stack overflow, upload files, voting, comments, etc.

It can allow your members to start their own conversations. It’s like users can answer the question sent by other users. You can use this plugin as a particular site like stack overflow. Users can filter unwanted content according to most views or the most user votes.

You can replace the comment system with an improved Question and Answer discussion forum. The most important thing is you track all the activity regarding Question and Answer with inbuilt logs and statistics module, this module helps you to understand how well your forum is doing, and improve interaction with your users.

If you use pro mode then you can control which user can view Questions, who can post Questions, Answer, and comments. In the moderation settings, you can control whether Q-A will be automatically added to your site or need to be moderated and approved.

Features:

• Views and answer counts
• Receive a notification when answering a pending question
• Fully customizable templates
• Sorting options
• Charged virtual currency based on use-case
• Total access control

7. Discussion Board

Discussion Board is a free plugin that can help you to create an effective forum. It will automatically create three pages as you need, such as “Topics”, “New Topic Form”, “Log In”. You can simply add those pages to your menu so users can access them easily.

The key feature of this plugin is every topic displayed on its own particular page where other users can reply. You can allow the user to front-end registration and login, which means you have complete access to restrict repost and comments to avoid spamming.

You can set this plugin on any page of your site, although you can also set it on a particular page. We can also notify users of new updates by sending them an email.

Important features:

• User Profile
• Separate discussion board for particular topics
• Ability to follow topics
• Prevent wp-admin access
• Plenty of short-codes

8. SimplePress

Simple:Press comes with a lot of features and that’s why it is the most demandable plugin in the market. It includes 70+ premium modules and hundreds of features. It has lots of options like components, creates user groups, assigns permission, integrates with other plugins, modifies profiles, and many more. It uses AJAX search to find any content in the forum. 

Simple:Press creates SEO-friendly permalinks to rank up your site. You can check your forum rank in component settings. It gives you total control over the user by allowing permission like full, moderate, or no access to use forum features, this module helps you to grow your site meaningfully.

And here are the importat features this plugin provides:

• Theme and template driven
• Powerful user group and permission system
• Toolset for common admin task
• Creates SEO-friendly permalinks
• Extended member profile options