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Vanilla Forums

Open-source community forum software

Social Networks Archived ★ 2.8k stars Medium setup GPL-2.0

This project is archived. Upstream development has stopped, so expect no new features or security fixes. Consider an actively maintained social networks alternative.

Vanilla is an open-source community forum and discussion software written in PHP. It powers Q&A communities, idea boards, and traditional forums with a plugin and theme ecosystem.

Official siteSource code

Key features

  • Discussions, Q&A, and ideas
  • Plugin and theme system
  • Social sign-in
  • REST API

Pros & cons

Strengths

  • Flexible community formats
  • Established platform

Trade-offs

  • Best features in cloud edition
  • Setup can be involved

Is Vanilla Forums secure?

OSV.dev lists 6 published advisories for Vanilla Forums. It doesn't publish GitHub releases we can match, so we can't say which of them apply to the current version. No known vulnerabilities is not proof of security: it means none have been publicly catalogued.

  • Most recent fixed advisory CVE-2020-8825, published 2020-02-10 (2438 days ago)

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

Vanilla Forums replaces

Self-hosted phpBB alternativesSelf-hosted Discourse alternatives

Compare Vanilla Forums

6 head-to-head comparisons.

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