Looking for the best forum software to start a new forum community in 2025

Reddit Post

Hi guys! I am considering of creating a new forum for a little fun, by hosting a current open-source forum software and making some changes and tweaks . An independent place on the Internet without any outside influence or interference.

I plan to make it a place similar to 4chan in its glory days, without all of the illegality of the forum, as well as without all of the chaos that 4chan known for.

The community would be like a mini Internet, where people can discuss about things, share stuffs and information. A place for everyone to talk about current events, or share their amazing stories and projects with everyone, or meet new friends (as some of the plans for the features of the community). The community would be tightly moderated (so the software needed to have moderation tools) too. It could even be an alternative to Reddit without karma ofc in the future (as an example of mass and usage example) but I only expect at most of 0.1% of Reddit size).

I am considering of self-hosting an open source forum for this project before moving onto my own platform . The forum needed to operate well on a shared hosting (PHP) through, as I am running it through a shared hosting environment, and have good abilities to expand with a larger user base . I also prefer a more modern design (through themes or the native software design itself).

I hope to hear from you guys recommendations in the comment section below on which open source forum software is the best for this. I am currently looking towards MyBB and Flarum too, but I would love to hear the input from everyone.

For shared hosting I guess Flarum would be the best choice. However, if you want to go with more advanced you can use Discourse but it does not work with shared hosting

I mean the obvious answer, given that this is HN, is that you should make it yourself. A basic text forum in PHP wouldn't be super difficult.

But practically speaking, and unfortunately, hosted forums are a dead technology. All of the attention is on social media, Discord and federated solutions like Mastodon and Lemmy. If what you actually want to do is create a community rather than write software, you could consider existing solutions like that.

InVision lets you self-host when you're small, then move to its cloud when you grow:

https://invisioncommunity.com/

It's been around for decades, and allows your forum to be part of the real, open internet. Not locked behind some Discord or Facebook wall.