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From chat rooms to forums, and social networks to email, being online allows people to remain connected with each other and find like-minded individuals who want to discuss certain topics. Forums, in particular, have extreme allure because of the conversation logging, community building, and easy integrations with websites. And there are plenty of forums to choose from online. If you like gardening, a quick Google search reveals several forums for you. The same goes for basketball, web design, email marketing, and there’s even a forum for men with long hair. In order to make your own, you’ll have to consider a WordPress forum plugin to integrate the community portion into your current website.

It’s also possible to turn your entire website into a forum, but in that case, you’re most likely going to use a WordPress forum theme instead of a plugin.

The cool thing about forums is that they’ve evolved over the years. Those old forums with long threads and sometimes confusing dialogues are still around, but that’s because the format seems to work. We’ve also started to see several other forum formats, like the question and answer layout on a site like Quora and Stack Overflow, or the up/down vote arrangement on sites like Reddit.

The good news is that you can achieve similar forum styles by utilizing some of the WordPress forum plugin options below. We’ll outline the best features from each plugin and talk about how much it’s going to cost you. Some of the forum plugins are well-known, but there are a few of them that you should take a look at if you’re interested in a forum revamp or you’d like your forum to look unique compared to the millions of other forums out there.

The world of forums is ever growing, and you can be part of it with your very own WordPress forum plugin. So, keep reading to find the one that’s right for you.

Choosing the Best WordPress Forum Plugin in 2019

Plugins require testing to figure out whether you’re going to like the user experience and enjoy the way it appears on the frontend of your site. This is particularly true for forums, since you’ll have to manage the community and make the forum nice-looking so people want to come back for more. So, we put together a quick list for you to scroll through the WordPress forum plugins and test them for yourself. However, we also highly recommend viewing the in-depth reviews compiled below.

1. bbPress
2. BuddyPress
3. WPForo Forum
4. Asgaros Forum
5. DW Question and Answer
6. WP Symposium Pro Social Network Plugin
7. Discussion Board – WordPress Forum Plugin
8. Sabai Discuss
9. Forums from WPMU Dev

From the setup process to the forum management, the features inside these plugins make up the experience you’re going to have on your website. Some of them are lightweight and useful for smaller, simpler sites while others offer robust feature sets for voting, user profiles, and messaging. Let’s see how each one stands out.

1. bbPress

The bbPress plugin is one of the most popular WordPress forum plugins. That’s partly because it’s been around for awhile, so there wasn’t as much competition back in the day. However, bbPress also offers familiarity. The frontend looks like you would expect it, and it has a lightweight build and unbloated interface. The bbPress plugin is kind of like going to McDonald’s instead of a sit-down burger restaurant. It’s not going to blow you away, but you know exactly what you’re getting. This plugin works the way it should and it has the basic customization tools for adjusting colors, making keyboard shortcuts, and enabling a visual editor for when users are writing.

The bbPress plugin is completely free, so you can go to the website and not have to worry about some random upsells popping up along the way. It’s an opensource project, so several developers contribute to the plugin. For the user, opensource means that you often get consistent updates and, of course, the plugin is free. The bbPress website also provides some interesting resources to improve your forum.

For example, one page is filled with bbPress extensions, while another has different themes that work nicely with the forum plugin. You can also find quality documentation and a full blog. As you may have guessed, the support is provided completely through a forum.

What Are The Standout Features of This WordPress Forum Plugin?

• You don’t have to pay for it, and you’ll never have to pay for it in the future. All of the extensions are free as well.
• Speaking of extensions, you can opt to improve your forum with one of the over 200 extensions (they’re technically plugins, but that’s kind of confusing since bbPress is also a plugin). Some of the extensions include basic user avatar support, attachments, social sharing, breadcrumbs, and more.
• bbPress is one of the simplest WordPress forum plugins to set up. It fully integrates with all reputable themes, and it won’t slow down your site.
• It allows for multisite forums where you manage each of your forums from one dashboard.
• The bbPress plugin has several customizable templates, with simple, yet useful settings for changing things like colors and styles.
• Full Akismet support is built into bbPress so that you don’t see any spam going through your forums.
• It’s the closest thing you can get to a traditional forum, and it runs like it should. If that’s what you need, it’s a quality product.

2. BuddyPress

BuddyPress often comes up in the same conversation as bbPess, and that’s because both are the go-to solutions for online communities. Oh yeah, and they’re both made by the same development group. BuddyPress, however, is a little different. It’s for making a social network or online community, where users make profiles, join groups, and send private messages. The BuddyPress interface allows for sending out friendship requests, and you can make special groups for things like sports teams, companies, and schools.

Similar to bbPress, BuddyPress is free and opensource. The interface is easy to navigate and you shouldn’t have any trouble getting it to launch on your website. It’s truly a little social network packed into a plugin, where you unwrap it and start turning your website visitors into an actual community of people. The great part is that you can combine bbPress and BuddyPress to offer a standard forum section along with an area for people to build relationships on a more social level.

Similar to sites like Facebook, BuddyPress has an activity stream for viewing what your friends are up to. Favorites, mentions, and all of the cool features you would typically find on a social network are all included here. The best part is that you get to customize it for your own brand and develop a social site for your niche.

What Are The Standout Features of This WordPress Forum Plugin?

• BuddyPress is free, and the development is ongoing.
• Hundreds of BuddyPress compatible plugins are being developed every day. For instance, you might need a BuddyPress system with registration options. There’s a plugin for that. You may want to integrate BuddyPress with LearnDash–a plugin covers that as well.
• The plugin turns a portion of your website (or the entire thing) into a complete social network. You receive tools for users to make profiles, send private messages, and make friends.
• BuddyPress has been translated i