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SMF

Simple Machines Forum community bulletin board

Forums & Community ★ 750 stars Easy setup BSD-3-Clause

SMF, or Simple Machines Forum, is a free, professional-grade forum package that lets you run an online community. It is known for stability, a strong permission system, and broad customization.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Granular permission system
  • Mods and themes support
  • Strong moderation features
  • Multilingual support

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • Reliable and well established
  • No licensing fees

Trade-offs

  • Dated default appearance
  • Slower modern development

Is SMF secure?

No known vulnerabilities affect SMF's latest release (v2.1.8). OSV.dev lists 11 past advisories for the project; none of them applies to this release. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

  • Most recent fixed advisory CVE-2026-43621, published 2026-08-26 (49 days ago), fixed in 2.1.7

Source: OSV.dev, checked 2026-10-14. How this is measured.

SMF replaces

Self-hosted vBulletin alternativesSelf-hosted phpBB alternatives

Health badge

Maintain SMF? Add its health score to your README. The badge links back to this page.

SelfHostIndex: 85 · excellent

Markdown
[![SelfHostIndex health score for SMF](https://selfhostindex.com/badge/smf.svg)](https://selfhostindex.com/app/smf/)
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<a href="https://selfhostindex.com/app/smf/"><img src="https://selfhostindex.com/badge/smf.svg" alt="SelfHostIndex health score for SMF"></a>
reStructuredText
.. image:: https://selfhostindex.com/badge/smf.svg
   :alt: SelfHostIndex health score for SMF
   :target: https://selfhostindex.com/app/smf/

The score is recomputed on every nightly rebuild from public repository data — see how it is calculated.

Compare SMF

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