If you want a add a forum or bulletin board on your WordPress site. Well there are plenty of open source forum Softwares available in internet. But what about integrating into your WordPress blog with your new forum? There are some effective WordPress plugins to help you accomplish this. But choosing the right one is critical. There are many plugins to help you accomplish this, here I will tell you about best WordPress forum plugins.
Recommended:Â Best Forum Softwares/ Bulletin Board PHP Scrips
Best WordPress Forum Plugins
#1. bbPress
bbPress is plain and simple forum software for WordPress, It is  easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean.
and the best thing it’s made by Automattic, who also make WordPress. So you have to no worry about bad codes in this plugin. This plugin is easy to use and integrates seamlessly, so you can manage everything about your forum from within the WordPress dash.
It’s also optimized for speed since it’s incredibly lightweight. Best of all, bbPress is free. But you can add-on features you want with additional plugins. You can add add ons like bbPress Ultimate, bbPress shortcodes for Visual Composer, bbPress Access – Limit Forum Access etc.
#2. BuddyPress
If you’re looking for a step up in terms of functionality from what bbPress offers, there’s BuddyPress, It is an ultimate forum and social media network creator. It comes with all sorts of features you can use to create your own social network that can be expanded upon using other WordPress plugins. It’s powerful, lightweight, and built by Automattic.
BuddyPress allows your users to register and create profile, connect with friends, create groups, hold private discussions, post status updates, and more.
#3. CM Answers
If you’d prefer a more question and answer forum style, CM Answers is a good choice. This plugin, created by CMinds, is mobile responsive and easily integrates into your site’s dashboard, making moderating and monitoring forum activity just another thing you can do on your site’s backend.
With CM Answers plugin, you can auto-create Q&A list pages with display settings based on most responses, most views, and most user votes. Be as hands-on or off as you’d like to keep conversation on track. There’s a Pro version of this plugin available as well that adds more features like social media login, advanced authorship permissions, shortcodes, multiple attachments allowed per post, comment support, categories, access control, front-end text editor for formatting, BuddyPress integration, Micro-Payments integration, statistics, and more.
#4. AnsPress
AnsPress is a wordpress plugin to add a question and answer style forum to your site. This plugin can be used with any theme and any type of site. Some of this plugin’s features include featured question, notifications, sorting options, an Ajax-based form, the ability to flag and moderate posts, q&a voting, tags, categories, labels, comments, reCaptcha, email notifications, user levels, favorites, user profiles, cover photos, a friends system, and a points-based reputation system.
This plugin is free and there are several free extensions available
#5. Simple:Press
Simple:Press is a feature rich forum plugin for WordPress. It fully integrates into your WP based site utilizing the same user records and database and displaying on a single WP page. It is fully customizable and comes with a number of skins and sets of icons to get you started. Current users have shown it to be fully scaleable whether your site membership numbers the tens or the thousands.Through it’s powerful and flexible permissions system it is suitable for those who wish to run private, specialist forums with invited members but is equally able to accommodate open, public forums that allow guest posting.
This forum system is built so that it can be extended in a multitude of ways using other Simple:Press plugins. Plus, it integrates with many other popular services for added convenience, including BuddyPress, Slack, ShareThis, MyCred, SiteMaps, Gravatars, AIOSEO, WP SEO, and TinyMCE.
#6. DW Question & Answer
DW Question & Answer is a Simple Forum Plugin WordPress available to add a Stackoverflow or Quora-style forum to your WordPress site. It comes with many features including shortcodes, email notifications, filtering, comments, answer voting, reCAPTCHA, multi-language support, private Q&As, sticky questions, keyword searches, and more.
You can also get the add-on for this plugin that allows you to embed questions on different places of your site and share questions and answers on social networks.
#7. MiwoVoice
MiwoVoice is a Premium WordPress User Feedback plugin that provides a platform to share, vote and discuss ideas through your users and/or visitors. Let the visitors discuss and decide which idea will be the best for you.
Some of the features included are the ability to share unlimited ideas, an intuitive and interactive design, an Ajax-powered interface, support for avatars, Gravatars, social sharing, and shortcodes, as well as migration tools and a profanity filter. It also allows for customization and includes automatic upgrades.
#8. Sabai Discuss
SabaiDiscuss is a also another premium questions and answers plugin for WordPress. The plugin features the ability for users to ask and answer questions similar to Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers. SabaiDiscuss is an ideal tool not only for building a community driven question-and-answer website but also for building a discussion forum, a knowledge base, or even a helpdesk portal for WordPress.
#9. WP Pro Forum System
The WP Pro Forum system plugin allows you to add a clean and user-friendly forum to your website. It has many powerful features to create a professional looking forum/helpdesk with ease! The forum is created to work on the frontend of your website but admins are able to manage all forums, topics, replies, categories and tags from the admin area as well.
#10. Groups Forums
Groups Forums provides a powerful and yet light-weight forum system for WordPress sites. This premium plugin adds a very lightweight forum to your site that’s based on the free plugin, Groups. With Groups Forums, you can maintain an unlimited number of forums with their own rules. For instance, you can create a forum where anyone who signs up can post. Or, you can create a forum where only members of a particular group can post.
#11. ForumEngine (Recommended)
We recommend ForumEngine to build forum site with wordpress. But first you know this is not a WordPress plugin, Its a powerfull theme to build Forum site. if you thinking to add on your working wordpress site. SO you can create subdomain like https://forum.yourdomain.com to add forum and use this theme..
ForumEngine is a WordPress theme and one of the Best Forum Software for WordPress, designed for creating dedicated forum sites right out of the box. It has a modern design that requires little customization and is built entirely with discussion in mind. It includes frontend admin features for easy moderating and customizing and supports all screen sizes for easy viewing.
Some other features include sticky threads, the option to choose between infinite scroll or pagination, social media login, quick search previews, threaded replies, title badges, the ability to follow threads and ban users, and so much more.
