The ‘forum’, or ‘discussion board,’ plays a major part on most successful Websites, providing a place for regular visitors to discuss topics the site covers. This creates a community and adds ‘stickiness’ to your site, giving people an incentive to come back time and time again. Take a look at the many hundreds of thousands of Websites with forums, and you'’ll see that various systems are employed to provide the discussion board featuring– posting, voting, private messaging, and thread categories, all of which play a part in the standard feature list for the big forum systems.

phpBB

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.

Key Features

• Supports popular database servers
• Unlimited forums and posts
• Multiple language interface
• Private or public forums
• Powerful search utility
• Private messaging system
• Complete customization with templates

vBulletin

vBulletin is a powerful community solution that makes it easy to add a forum messaging system to your web site. vBulletin is developed using PHP and MySQL (a highly efficient open-source database). This solid back end technology allowed us to develop a product that is both amazingly fast, yet reassuringly stable.

General Features

• Scalable solution - database server and web servers can reside on separate machines.
• MySQL back-end database
• vBulletin can be run on any machine that can support PHP and MySQL (Solaris, BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac)
• Written in PHP which makes for a fast and efficient product
• Admin Control Panel
• Moderator Control Panel
• User Control Panel
• Compliant with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998. See this page for more information:

License is required

SMF

Simple Machines Forum - SMF in short - is a professional grade software package that allows you to set up your own online community. Its powerful custom made template engine puts you in full control of the lay-out of your message board SMF is written in the popular language PHP and uses a MySQL database. SMF is the next generation of forum software, and best of all it is and will always remain completely free! SMF also offers CMS bridges to easily integrate this forum into a Joomla or other CMS site. It is also highly supported in the webmaster community offering a multitude of themes, modifications and feature enhancements.

FIREBOARD

Fireboard for Joomla is a very rich and mature addition to any website. It will take on the look and feel of your website and yet customizable.  FireBoard Forum seamlessly integrates into your Joomla instance, using the same users table of your Joomla instance, such that users need not register in both places. This also means that FireBoard Forum does not need its own database. And, you administer FireBoard Forum in your familiar Joomla back end.

Understand that you will not get the same level of sophistication as you will with PHPBB/vBulletin/SMF, but sophistication is not necessarily the most important thing. With FireBoard you will get a nicer looking solution that is easier to administer, easier for users to use, and looks better because it is part of your Joomla website.

Unless you expect thousands of visitors and really want to become a forum moderating wizard, FireBoard forum is an EXCELLENT alternative.