Updated: 28 September 2026 · Applies to: Open-source forum options, 2026
CentOS 7 is end of life. The open-source edition of Vanilla Forums was officially discontinued in December 2024: its owner no longer provides updates or fixes. We do not recommend new installations.
Maintained forum software
- Discourse: a modern, widely used forum, installed with Docker (needs at least 2 GB RAM).
- Flarum: lightweight PHP forum with a modern interface; works on standard LAMP hosting.
- phpBB: classic, very stable PHP forum; available in Softaculous on cPanel hosting.
- NodeBB: Node.js forum (see "How to Install NodeBB Forum on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS?").
Most of these offer importers for Vanilla, so you can move users and discussions.
Tip: On Ucartz cPanel hosting you can install many of these applications in a few clicks with Software › Softaculous Apps Installer, which also handles updates and backups.
Moving to another application safely
- Back up the old application's files and database, and keep the backup until the new system has run for a while.
- Install the new application on a test subdomain first (for example
new.example.com) and import your data there. - Check the imported data and set up users and permissions.
- Switch the domain to the new application, and add 301 redirects for old addresses that change.
- Remove the old application from the server so it cannot be attacked later.
Prefer not to do it yourself? Our engineers can set this up on your Ucartz VPS or dedicated server as a paid task.
