Are you looking for the best WordPress forum plugins to build a community for your business?
Whether you’re selling something online or just trying to establish your presence, the engagement of users is one of the primary aspects of the entire business. If your target audience isn’t involved with your content, achieving goals and objectives might become difficult.
Of all the practices, creating a WordPress forum website can be the best way to keep visitors engaged in different conversations and discussions.
However, building a forum might involve a lot of coding, making it complex. This article aims to help you explore some of the best community forum plugins to help you build a community for your online business.
So let’s get started!
What Are Forum Websites?
Just as the name suggests, a forum website is one platform that enables users and visitors to hold discussions over various topics. Not only can people ask questions or answer, but they can also upvote the best answers, depending on the available functionality.
Benefits of a Forum Website:
There’s a variety of benefits that one can gain from a forum website, such as:
- Fostering relationships
- Chatting with customers
- Ensuring better qualitative services
- User-generated content
- Visitor retention
- Increased sales
- Community building
Top 8 WordPress Forum Plugins
Let us now explore the best forum plugins that will help you create you business community:
1. bbPress
When you think about integrating forums into your WordPress website, hands-down, bbPress is the most considerable plugin for this task. This plugin is an additional project of WordPress.org; thus, it’s completely built for the platform and is compatible with the core of WordPress to power forums.
Easy to setup, moderate, and maintain, this plugin is quite clean and fast. Whether you’re a newbie or a professional, you can create a forum with bbPress absolutely quick. With its advanced functionality, it has the potential to help you out better.
bbPress Pros:
bbPress Cons:
bbPress Pricing:
This plugin is available free of cost. You can either download it from the WordPress inventory or their official website.
2. WPForo Forums
This one is a modern and feature-rich WordPress forum plugin that you can use for better output. Suitable for different types of discussion forums, this plugin can be used by both small and large communities. It comes with three different layouts, such as Question & Answer, Simplified, and Extended layout.
Adding more to it, WPForo Forums also comes with five astonishing premium add-ons. These add-ons are Advanced Attachments, Embeds, Private Messages, Ads Manager, and Blog Cross Posting. In the end, you can use this plugin to build a fantastic community.
WPForo Pros:
WPForo Cons:
WPForo Pricing:
Although this plugin is free, the add-ons come with a price tag, starting from $20.
3. BuddyPress
For online communities, BuddyPress is a significant go-to solution. Created by the same development group as bbPress, this plugin is a bit different than the former option. This plugin can be used for creating online communities or social networks where your target audience can make profiles, send private messages, and join groups.
The interface of this plugin lets users send friendship requests. And, specific groups can be made for things like schools, companies, teams, and more. Easy to navigate, you wouldn’t have to face any problems while launching or using this plugin.
BuddyPress Pros:
BuddyPress Cons:
BuddyPress Pricing:
This plugin is open-source and free and can be downloaded from the official website or the WordPress inventory.
4. CM Answers
Another one on the list is CM Answers. It lets you create a powerful forum with questions and answers in WordPress. The basic free plugin provides regular features to set up a forum on your website.
Not only does this plugin let users post questions, but they answer and vote as well. Your audience can also subscribe to categories, upload files, and send private messages. Being the admin, you can customize questions and answers. You can also use manager users to filter out unrequired content.
CM Answers Pros:
CM Answers Cons:
CM Answers Pricing:
Along with the basic free plan, there’s a premium version to this plugin as well. The pro version has three different packages, costing $39, $59, and $99.
5. Asgaros Forum
Asgaros Forum is one such plugin that comes without any cost; however, the developer has put a donation button. So, you can donate if you want for a better cause. Coming to its features, the list is quite long and precise enough to help you create a forum for WordPress.
This plugin allows you to create unlimited forums and sub-forums. With ease to use and moderate, Asgaros Forum also comes with frontend forum moderation and optional file uploads. Moreover, there are striking features like mentions, activity feed, reactions, and much more.
Asgaros Pros:
Asgaros Cons:
Asgaros Pricing:
The plugin is free and can either be downloaded from WordPress.org or the official website. However, you can donate via PayPal to support the developer’s work if you want.
6. Discussion Board
Whether it’s a school website or an e-commerce store, almost every community is going to find Discussion Board as a useful plugin when it comes to developing WordPress discussion forum. Upon activation, it creates pages automatically and inserts shortcodes to attach a working forum to your WordPress website.
This plugin also helps users to register and login on the frontend. To control spamming, users can also make use of anti-spam fields available in the registration form. Moreover, you can also assign new users in a specific role, block registrations from certain emails, and can assign several access levels to different roles.
Discussion Board Pros:
Discussion Board Cons:
Discussion Board Pricing:
The plugin is available in both free and premium versions. The latter one has two different packages, priced at $49/year and $89/year.
7. Simple Press
Simple Press is another substantial forum plugin for WordPress that you can use to craft either a strong public arena or a small forum. Being light and fast, this plugin doesn’t pose any significant problems; instead, it comes with an easy-to-use functionality.
The inbuilt templates and themes allow you to customize your forum the way you want it. Thanks to its robust structure and an extensive plugin library, you can flawlessly create striking forums for your WordPress website.
Simple Press Pros:
Simple Press Cons:
Simple Press Pricing:
Apart from the free version, it has got a premium version that can cost you $99, $149, and $199 a year, depending upon your requirements.
8. WP Symposium Pro
WP Symposium Pro is quite a good option when it comes to creating a social network with the help of a plugin. Similar to Facebook, it enables users to develop activity wall, profiles, set email alerts, add friends, join forums, and much more.
Designed to be compatible with any plugin or theme, you can even add this plugin to your existing website for better use.
WP Symposium Pros:
WP Symposium Cons:
WP Symposium Pricing:
Although the plugin is free of cost, however, its extensions come with a price tag starting from $99.
FAQ
A forum website allows users to engage in discussions on various topics. Visitors can ask questions, post answers, and upvote content, fostering a sense of community and improving user engagement.
Forum websites help businesses build communities, retain visitors, foster customer relationships, and generate user content. They improve engagement, boost sales, and enhance qualitative customer interactions.
BuddyPress is a recommended choice for beginners. It’s free, easy to use, and offers features like profile creation, group joining, and private messaging. Its add-ons further enhance functionality.
Many WordPress forum plugins, like bbPress and BuddyPress, are free. However, some plugins offer premium features or add-ons with varying price tags for extended functionality.
Wrapping Up
When you contemplate creating a forum on the WordPress website, having the right set of tools can help you tremendously complete this job.
Although all of these plugins mentioned above are adequate in their spaces, if you’re confused, you can go with BuddyPress. Not only is it a free plugin, but it also comes with several add-ons to extend the functionality. Therefore, it’d be a wise choice for beginners.
In case you know about any additional plugins, do let us know in the comments section below.
Also, if you liked this article, you can consider reading:
Further, if you want to create any type of versatile website, you can consider using the Cyberchimps Responsive Theme.
2 Comments on “8 Best WordPress Forum Plugins Compared”
Great article. It helped me think about the kind of community I wanted and look at the 3 best options. Thanks
Hey, Akshay,
Great round-up of best community plugins. I mostly like User pro for its huge list of features. But, also like Ultimate membership pro and Users Ultra plugins. These two are also very useful for WordPress users. Thanks for sharing a great list of WordPress community plugins.