A list of the best free and premium WordPress Forum plugins for your website.
If you are looking for a plugin to create forums to engage community discussions through your website, here are few of the best Alternatives.
One of the most common plugins for creating interactive communities on WordPress websites is BuddyPress, or bbPress. However, there are different plugins with different features that you can integrate into your website, for different requirements.
In this list are some of the best BuddyPress alternatives that you can integrate into your website:
Free Forum Plugins
All the plugins listed here are free and can be downloaded through WordPress plugin repository. However, some of them also come with a premium version with more features if you like to upgrade in future.
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a plugin designed to work out of box with any theme of your choice. It helps you create a whole network on your WordPress website. This plugin is easy to use and integrate, and doesn’t complicate the process of integrating a fully functional social network on your website.
The members can register on the website and create a profile. The profile management features allow you to manage the account on your website. The registered visitors can share their views, and exchange private conversations.
Therefore, you can create a community for your team, sport team, college group, collaborative partners, friends circle, or any such community.
bbPress
You can create online communities on your WordPress website with bbPress. It is also one of the most popular WordPress plugins for creating online communities through your WordPress websites. This plugin is similar to the forum threads you see on the WordPress.org website.
The plugin is easy to use and can be used to create social networks and discussion forums. You can also make a few topics private, members only. It is hands-down the simplest way to create forums where you can post topics or reply to the topics.
Discussion board Forum plugins
Another way to create simple yet efficient forums on your WordPress website is through the Discussion board plugin. You can create a website where the members can register, post their topics on the forum, as well as look for certain topics in the forum and answer them.
Each of the topic is displayed on a page followed by the discussion/answers, which makes it easy for the readers to understand the topic and the opinions. The plugin is also really easy to install and comes with all the intuitive options to let you manage your WordPress forums. Moreover, there are all the features to let you manage the registration and users on the forums.
The additional feature helps you reduce the spam on your forums, by allowing you to control the number of topic a user can post. There’s also a lot you can do when it comes to styling and changing the appearance of your forums. Also included are useful shortcodes, to make your customizations easier.
There’s also a paid version of this plugin that you can upgrade to for additional advanced features.
Simple Press
Simple Press lets you create your own social network on your website. This WordPress forum plugin has a free as well as premium version with all the great features.
For the free version, you have all that you need to create a functional social community on your WordPress website. There are so many features you get for the free version.
For the topics on the forum, there are features to let you lock them, allow unlimited posts to it, or pin them and fully edit them. Moreover, as an administrator, you get a lot of features to manage the forums on your website. Other important features include registration, login and user management features. You can use the different customization options to change the appearance of your website.
However the private messaging feature in the Simple: Press plugin is only available with the premium version. Besides, there are a variety of different features included in the premium versions.
One of the advantage that they state is that you won’t need multiple addons for different features. All the features and functions are supported by them and therefore, there’s consistency and no compatibility issues.
WP Symposium Pro
You can create your own social network on your website with this free WordPress plugin. It comes with a simple options to let you setup your social network.
This plugin can be used to support community circles, for grouped users, gaming or dating websites, social clubs, etc.
WPForo
The wpForo WordPress plugin is a simple and easy to use tool to create forums on your WordPress website. It allows you to choose from the available layouts and styles. It also comes equipped with all the features that you need to create a social network on your site.
There are so many intuitive dashboard options to let you manage the different aspects of the forums on your website. This plugin also allows the translation of the forums.
CM Answers
Create a question answer style forum on your website using the CM Answers. The result of this plugin is similar to the layout and style of stack overflow. There are so many admin options to let you manage the questions and answers, restrict or allow user access, track user actions, filter the content, and create all the required categories.
There are different options that allow the visitors to upload the media files, send and receive private messages among the users. Moreover, the registered users can also decide to subscribe to certain categories.
This plugin has many other features like view or answer count, notification option, or sorting options, too. With this plugin, you can create support forums, question and answer based knowledge base, and online community of information on your website.
There are a number of add-ons and extensions that you can integrate into your forums. This WordPress theme also has a pro version with many exciting advanced features.
Paid Alternatives
While some of the free WordPress plugins for forums come with the feature to upgrade to the pro version.
Sabai Discuss
One of the question and answer plugin to create forums similar to Yahoo Answers or Stack Overflow with your WordPress website. It includes a discussion stream, voting system, user management, and much more.
Sabai Discuss makes creating community driven discussion forums, or a Q&A style knowledge base with WordPress. You can create unlimited categories in hierarchical format. Just like Stack Overflow, the plugin allows the information submission in form of questions, answers or as comments. Categories and tags can be created, so that the questions can be posted under it.
The content submission form is highly customizable with the included visual form editor. Moreover, there are advanced user management options including access control, role and a user reputation system, where the permission assignment can be based on user reputation.
There are advanced search and filter options for better user experience for your readers. Moreover, there are options to vote the questions, answers, or comment to the answers, and flag, or favorite the questions. For data portability, you can rely on the CSV import/export. This plugin also supports RTL as well as email alert system and ready to use email notification templates.
DW Questions & Answers
DW Question & Answers lets you create a beautiful Question and Answer format website with clean and modern look with many features.
It comes with the feature to let the registered users manage their questions through the front end. For each question, they can submit answer or post a comment. There’s also the feature to set the question as private or public for general access. Just like the most popular question and answer websites, there is the feature to select a question and mark it as the correct answer.
Moreover, voting for a question is also allowed. You can also subscribe to the questions you are interested in so that you get notified about the updates on that question. You can use choose from different themes and styles to customize your question and answer pages.
The instant search features let the browse for the content they are interested in. Besides, there are many other features to manage the users and set their permissions, allowing file upload in the answers or the questions, and spam control features. The plugin can also be used with RTL tempalte. The DW question and answer plugin is an easy to use tool to create fast, efficient and feature packed question and answer forums on your WordPress website.
Download DW Questions & Answers
ForumEngine
This plugin, as the name suggest is one of the ways to integrate the facility of forums on your WordPress website. It is easy to use and has a simple interface for all the forum management options as well as customizations.
There are options to, obviously post question and answers, upload pictures with them, like or dislike the answers, and manage the content posted on your website with easy dashboard options. It is SEO optimized, easy to install and use.
Conclusion
All the forum and WordPress plugins for question and answers are easy to use and lets you create efficient content based sections on your WordPress website.
The best thing about such plugins is their simplicity. Even though all these plugin come with a documentation and some even with video tutorials, you can still use them without any professional assistance. The options are all intuitive and provides you with enough flexibility to let customize and manage the content.