A few days ago I began writing early steps to start a successful forum that you can read here. Today I’m going to cover how to choose a forum software.

Step 3: Choose a forum software.

There are several different forum types, some free and others that aren’t. I’ll cover the premium ones first:

vBulletin is the leading forum software on the net and in my opinion the best solution out there. A single license is $160, with multi license discounts going into affect with the more licenses you own. I use vBulletin on every forum I run and have had an incredible experience using it. The community of webmasters that run this software is huge. If you have any trouble using vBulletin and need some help you can ask at the official forums, or at vBulletin.org (which is also home to a huge variety of sweet forum modifications). I will be covering vBulletin a lot on this blog, and truly believe this is the best forum software your money can buy. There are other premium forum solutions, but I won’t cover them on this site because I don’t use them. At $160 per license for vBulletin it can be a little expensive to get started - especially if your pockets are a little empty - if this is the case, free forum software might be a better alternative;

PhpBB is the most widely used open source free forum software. I personally have used it on a couple of my older sites and didn’t care for it. Granted, this was years before I really delved into the forum universe, but I had a ton of trouble with spam and in general didn’t have a great experience with phpBB. I’ve seen other people use it, but in the end it doesn’t compare to vBulletin and after working with vBulletin, I haven’t looked back. There are a few other free forum software solutions out there like Simple Machines and YaBB, but again, I haven’t had experience with these so I can’t comment on them.

In the next installment of my start a forum series, I’ll cover choosing a web host for your forum.