Alternatives and competitors

Sites like phpBB

The 20 closest forum software alternatives to phpBB, ranked by what they actually offer, and the 2 technologies behind it.

Looking for an alternative to phpBB? The closest matches are PHP, Drupal and WordPress. We match sites by what they actually offer, from their homepages, Wikidata and a summary by Claude, in any language. Vote on each alternative and leave a short note to help the next person choose.

Neighbours
k = 20
Sites searched
4,032
Vector
384-d
Query
8 ms

01 · Entity

About phpBB

phpBB phpbb.com

Wikidata: open-source Internet forum package written in PHP

Top 10K · #4,424 English 2 technologies Crawled Nov 6, 2026
Visit phpBB

Summary by Claude

Official site of phpBB, a free and open-source bulletin board (internet forum) package written in PHP, offering downloads, extensions, styles, documentation and community support forums.

Who it’s for
Website owners and developers running discussion forums
Business model
Free open-source project, donations

02 · Embedding space

Competitor map

Each alternative by how close its vector is to phpBB’s (x) and how much traffic it gets, how much of the stack it shares, or where it sits in the embedding space itself (y). Lines split each axis at the median. Hover for the numbers, click to jump to it in the list.

similarity × popularity

PostgreSQLpastebin.comgetcomposer.orgGNUMediumphpMyAdminMediaWikiWordPressDrupalPHP

03 · Nearest neighbours

Alternatives to phpBB

Thumbs up if it’s a real alternative to phpBB, thumbs down if it isn’t.

Only in English

We can’t read phpbb.com’s homepage (bot protection page), so it’s compared on what Wikidata and Wikipedia say about it.

  1. 01
    PHP php.net Top 1K English

    PHP

    PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

  2. 02
    Drupal drupal.org Top 10K English

    Client Challenge

    free and open-source web content management system

  3. 03
    WordPress wordpress.org Top 100 English

    Blog Tool, Publishing Platform, and CMS | WordPress.org

    Open source software which you can use to easily create a beautiful website, blog, or app.

  4. 04
    MediaWiki mediawiki.org Top 10K English

    MediaWiki

    free and open-source wiki software, developed by the Wikimedia Foundation

  5. 05
    phpMyAdmin phpmyadmin.net Top 10K English

    phpMyAdmin

    database administration tool

  6. 06
    Medium medium.com Top 1K English

    online publishing platform

  7. 07
    Hardened PHP hardened-php.net Top 10K English

    Hardened PHP - Hardened-PHP

    PHP is far and away the most popular backend programming language today, with more than 80 websites worldwide taking advantage of PHP solutions. All of the most popular CMS platforms – including WordPress, Joomla!, and Drupal (just to name a few) leverage this technology. It’s flexibility and versatility make it a powerhouse programming language, but […]

  8. 08
    GNU gnu.org Top 1K English

    The GNU Operating System and the Free Software Movement

    Since 1983, developing the free Unix style operating system GNU, so that computer users can have the freedom to share and improve the software they use.

  9. 09
    getcomposer.org Top 10K English

    Composer

    A Dependency Manager for PHP

  10. 10
    pastebin.com Top 10K English

    Pastebin.com - #1 paste tool since 2002!

    Pastebin.com is the number one paste tool since 2002. Pastebin is a website where you can store text online for a set period of time.

  11. 11
    DEV Community dev.to Top 10K English

    DEV Community

    A space to discuss and keep up software development and manage your software career

  12. 12
    PostgreSQL postgresql.org Top 10K English

    PostgreSQL: The world's most advanced open source database

    The official site for PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced open source database

  13. 13
    Habr habr.com Top 10K English

    Publications / My feed / Habr

    collaborative blog

  14. 14
    apachefriends.org Top 10K English

    XAMPP Installers and Downloads for Apache Friends

    XAMPP is an easy to install Apache distribution containing MariaDB, PHP and Perl.

  15. 15
    Joomla joomla.org Top 10K English

    Joomla Content Management System (CMS) - try it! It's free!

    Joomla! is the mobile-ready and user-friendly way to build your website. Choose from thousands of features and designs. Joomla! is free and open source.

  16. 16
    Blogger blogger.com Top 1K English

    Blogger.com - Create a unique and beautiful blog easily.

    Publish your passions your way. Whether you’d like to share your knowledge, experiences or the latest news, create a unique and beautiful blog.

  17. 17
    Open Library openlibrary.org Top 10K English

    Welcome to Open Library | Open Library

    Open Library is an open, editable library catalog, building towards a web page for every book ever published. Read, borrow, and discover more than 3M books for free.

  18. 18
    OSF osf.io Top 10K English

    OSF

    tools that make open science practice easier

  19. 19
    PBS pbs.org Top 1K English

    PBS: Public Broadcasting Service

    Watch full episodes of your favorite PBS dramas, find in-depth news analysis and explore documentaries on history, science, art and more!

  20. 20
    SlideShare slideshare.net Top 1K English

    Client Challenge

    American hosting service, owned by Scribd, for professional content including presentations, infographics, documents, and videos

Ranked by score: the cosine similarity of each site’s vector to phpbb.com’s, less a small penalty for generic sites that are close to everything. Highlighted technologies are ones phpBB uses too. Votes and comments come from visitors and don’t change the ranking.

04 · Fingerprints

Technology

What phpBB is built with, and what its closest competitors use, from its homepage’s code and its DNS records.

SimilarSiteSearch

Competitors by meaning, stacks from the source. Data from public homepages and DNS.

About our crawler