General Best Non-Self-Hosted Forum Software

[2TonWaffle]

I've dabble a bit with Mighty Networks as they offer similar features and services as Circle. It's not bad if you have a community set up or in the midst of rapid growth. I found it to be useful for those that offered courses as well as keeping the community organized within one spot and, its not a Facebook group.

Just looking back on their prices and wow, they have increased the pricing of the Community plan by like $20 per month to $50 per month.

 

[Jason]

It seems like ProBoards is the best, regarding software of that type that cannot also be self-hosted.

 

[Sinistra Sensei]

Live topics, the real time trending stuff, courses - those are the big ones. I know Zapier got included when it was originally slated for cloud only, and I'm not sure off hand about the AI stuff (e.g. AI image detection)

Just downloading IC 5 beta now to take a look if anything else is missing. These things are not important to everyone but I know for some folks they are make-or-break functionality (especially courses)

The courses can be made via a Database I use a database setup for my tutorial section on Anime Social I can get the same functionality without having to shell out 80 to 160 a month on cloud hosting. I tried the whole invision cloud a month ago I wasn't impressed. I am on a fixed budget so spending that kind of money just for live topics (discord or their failed chat that they tried in the 3.0 days) or the courses which can be made with a database, custom fields, and categories, I don't see the hype.

 

[Arantor]

You can't so readily do the status tracking stuff that courses do, but depending on your needs this might not matter.

Certainly I'm not convinced it's worth the extra to go to that - if I wanted an LMS at this point I'd integrate Moodle and call it a day, but I recognise I'm an outlier there.

 

[2TonWaffle]

Was seriously thinking of moving to the cloud myself @Sinistra Sensei it's the fact of the pricing I was getting stuck on. True in that you would no longer have to deal with the backend admin stuff but still, $99 per month for what I currently use is a bit much.

 

[Ravenfreak]

Hands down it's gotta be Jcink. It's one of the only few free forum hosts that allows you to make database backups of your community. If you ever want to move off their platform you can. Though since the forum runs on a modified IPB 1x, you'll need to convert to older software and then upgrade to the latest version of whatever software you've converted to. (phpBB 2 is the easiest to convert to. I've done this and was eventually able to convert my forum to an old version of SMF and then the latest version.)