Any recommended forum software?
We're looking to build a a forum for our website, and we're looking for a solution that can connect to our SSO, look good and not be too pricey, checked a few options that cost $100K a year, without setup fees...
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Discourse --> https://www.discourse.org/
You can host it yourself with Digital Ocean for $5/month, and easily integrate SSO.
It also has a tone feature and a super active community.
Second this. A lot of large organisations are running their communities on discourse. Amazon is running their seller central forums/community on it.
Unless someone has unusual requirements, Discourse is generally the best choice for forums. They are also adding a chat feature.
Third, it also has a great API if you want to customize it
Tribe.so, Circle.so ?
super interesting, have you used any of these in the past?
I've used tribe.so i can solidly recommend it to anyone
can you share a link to what you've build with Tribe, super curious
I’ve used circle great product. Tribe looks like they’re moving to a 2.0 version that looks solid. If you go to there website they have their own community which you can check and companies that use them like convert kit.
Yes. I tested both. Both work great.
any chance you can share examples?
Hey, @yoavush check-out Habitate.io.
To taste the feel of how it works, check out communitycoldcoffee.com :)
thanks! looks good!
Tribe.so is good.
$600/month, not very indie
What about Forem?
https://github.com/forem/forem
+1 Forem 💚🌱
Depends what you needs are but XenForo is a good platform as well.
https://xenforo.com/
I use NodeBB, it’s free and open source, and I’m pretty happy with it.
https://nodebb.org/
Here’s my forum:
https://support.sweetpproductions.com/
looks good! will check it out! free is good :)
I remember the good old times of phpBB... 😃
There are so many options, free, almost free, or cheap. For example:
https://flarum.org/
https://hivebrite.com/
https://www.habitate.io/
https://mattermost.com/
https://playgroup.community/
https://www.crowdstack.com/
https://www.tryfave.com/
https://www.group.app/
I know of some big forums that run on xenForo.
Might not be the best solution for something more "indie" though.
Still, pricing seems quite reasonable.
You mean the website of the community, there is this kind of list https://www.lelinta.com/blogs/tutorials/how-to-build-community-online
Hey, @yoavush 👋
I work at Tribe (tribe.so). Happy to arrange a 1-on-1 demo.
Many exciting updates are getting released soon. Here is one recent update you might find interesting:
Developer Portal (https://bit.ly/3HqkBqi) - allows you to extend the functionality of the community and embed the community into your site/app.
Now called Bettermode, starting at $600/month with no non/not for profit/startup options? Yikes, this is "indie hackers".
Hey! happy to chat and see a demo, including the dev portal. can you shoot me an email at [email protected]?
Thanks! Sent an email.
Circle.so
Playgroup.community
my first suggestion is always Peerboard for this :)
https://peerboard.com/
@yoavush - I've built large community in the past; and I've even built a custom forum software myself. I've experience with a ton of forum software as well.
I can give you a good recommendation; but you'll need to answer the following -
Answer those and I'll make a good recommendation to you. Thanks!
Thanks for the help
Thanks, based on your responses I've following recommendations: -
Circle.so - This covers up most of the things and is scalable. You don't have to worry about hosting it, so it would be my #1 recommendation.
XenForo: You'll have to host it yourself, and spend time and money in making it match the looks and SSO. However, you'll own all the data and they do a great job with SEO. Plus, you can tweak it to suit your needs (QnA, Voting etc.)
Flarum: This one is simple and self-hosted; and it gets the job done nicely.
I hope you find this useful. Thanks!
Depending on your use case, a product feedback forum such as Noora (https://noorahq.com) might also work for you.
I wish there was a React open source forum using Firebase I could suggest here. If anyone knows one I’d love to learn about it.
I’ve been working on Reslant.com if you want to check us out! Lightweight and inexpensive (we have a robust free plan) and targeted at small startups
It looks pretty nice! But why don't you allow downvotes?
It's something we're considering! Our current customers haven't really asked for it so it's low on the radar, but including it as an optional feature is on the roadmap.
Your customers will never ask for it because they are just owners of the forums.
happy to learn more about it, does it feel like a native community forum? can it connect to our own user signup system (meaning connecting to our SSO)? any examples you can share?
Yeah, custom auth is currently a beta feature available on our Teams plan. We're setting up Reslant with Commotion at https://community.commotion.page and someone for fun made Dogbook with Reslant https://dogbook.page
Can you share a few examples that you looked at ?
Looked at Khoros, Vanilla, Insided. so far got the pricing only from Khoros.
Got it . We are also building a Community Forum product . Here's our first forum customer : http://healthoki.com/ - this is still WIP - there are a bunch of UI changes that we are gonna release (v1.0) in a couple of days.
If this design style interests you we could work together and build it out for you. We could get on a call and help you with a demo.
Looking, thanks!