Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Vanilla Forums VS Simple Machines Forum

Compare Vanilla Forums VS Simple Machines Forum and see what are their differences

Vanilla Forums logo Vanilla Forums

Build an engaging community forum using Vanilla's modern cloud forum software.

Simple Machines Forum logo Simple Machines Forum

Simple Machines offers free open source software such as SMF, the powerful and easy to use community forum written in PHP. Start interesting discussions on your website!
  • Vanilla Forums Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-03

  www.vanillaforums.comSoftware by Vanilla Forums

  • Simple Machines Forum Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14

Vanilla Forums videos

Vanilla Forums

More videos:

  • Review - Vanilla Forums: Moderation Queues
  • Review - Using Announcements in Vanilla Forums

Simple Machines Forum videos

Forum Tutorials - Simple Machines Forums, Tutorial and Overview

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Vanilla Forums and Simple Machines Forum)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
67 67%
33% 33
Community Platform
67 67%
33% 33
Social & Communications
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using Vanilla Forums and Simple Machines Forum. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Simple Machines Forum might be a bit more popular than Vanilla Forums. We know about 4 links to it since March 2021 and only 3 links to Vanilla Forums. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Vanilla Forums mentions (3)

  • The (grim?) future of Daoist forums
    I used to use phpBB back in the day. Vanilla forums has seemed interesting to me for a while (https://vanillaforums.com/), I used HostGator back in the day (https://www.hostgator.com/). Source: about 2 years ago
  • 1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults
    That one seems to be built with Vanilla Forums: https://vanillaforums.com/en/. - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Boards.ie hamster has fallen off his wheel
    They're blaming their service provider for not working on the weekend, even though they should have been well aware of that when considering them as a service provider and should have planned their migration schedule accordingly. Source: almost 3 years ago

Simple Machines Forum mentions (4)

  • Just remember forums exist
    Https://simplemachines.org/ This looks nice. Doesn't look like it has tags/flair though. Lots of questions in regards to how it compares to the other options. Source: 12 months ago
  • Is there a painless way to set up a forum website on a raspberry pi?
    I've always been a fan of SMF. Install is pretty straight forward. Source: over 1 year ago
  • The Platformer #25: High-Impact Hacking
    This project, called YaBB — Yet another Bulletin Board (I’ve always been good at naming things) — is pretty much dead. A few months ago the website was still up, but it appears to be down now. Yes, the project was forked into YaBB SE (a direct PHP port), and ultimately evolved into Simple Machines Forum, which still seems to be under development today (and powers Bitcoin Talk — if you’re still into the crypto thing). - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Integrating Forums in an android app?
    Is it possible to integrate forums like Simple Machines Forum in an app or any other forum? Or is there any package/plugin that makes it easier to develop it and integrate it with firebase/firestore. Source: over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Vanilla Forums and Simple Machines Forum, you can also consider the following products

Discourse - Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

Flarum - Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

phpBB - Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit-card sized computer. The official website uses phpBB for their discussion forums. phpBB is not affiliated with nor responsible for any of the sites listed on the showcase.

XenForo - Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.

MyBB - MyBB is a discussion board software that runs on PHP and MySQL

Forumbee - Forumbee offers community forums for discussions, feedback and Q&A.