Best Free Community Software

Arena is a market-leading communication platform designed to help brands create AI-powered communities on their websites and apps. It offers features like live blogs, group chats, AI agents, and content streams to engage audiences in real time. The platform supports industries such as publishers, sports, entertainment, and e-commerce by boosting traffic, engagement, lead generation, and audience monetization. Arena provides powerful customization, advanced analytics, and robust security compliant with GDPR. Its no-code integration makes it easy to add interactive community features to any platform. Trusted by top organizations, Arena helps businesses connect with their audiences and grow online.

Apostrophe is a powerful website builder platform built on an enterprise open source CMS. Apostrophe offers in-context live editing and dynamic visual design tools with multisite enablement. At its core is an extensible and modular system in a full stack JS environment ready for traditional or headless deployment. At last, a balance between the developer and editor experience, where side projects thrive and businesses boom.

Rally around common obsessions. Features like our news feed fuse the best of social media with modern community. Publish your thoughts in any form they come. Markdown, rich text, images and video sharing. Empower your users with notifications, rich member profiles, and badges to reward activity. We're pioneers in safe and inclusive community building. We provide best-in-class tooling so your community can do the same. Embedded SEO tooling ensures your highly valuable user generated content will be indexed and discovered by current and future users. The platform enables you to do just about anything through custom pages, from unique static content to running a live conference with thousands of participants. Enable thoughtful, longform, async communication out in the open. Facilitate better product roadmapping through tight feedback loops.

For the businesses who wish to better connect, engage and grow their community. A fully customizable community-building platform that brings the best engagement tools to your fingertips. From custom domains to custom theme colors, Genesiv fully equips you to build your dream community exactly the way you envision it. Genesiv comes with a wide range of different channels to facilitate different types of conversations with your community. From direct message channels to open channels and even to voice and video channels, you will be well-equipped to build a thriving and buzzing community. From disciplining users who misbehave to getting in-depth server statistics on the growth and engagement of your community, Genesiv equips you with all the professional tools you need to really build and grow your community. Whether it is for your inner-circle VIPs or a special channel where you provide product support, Genesiv empowers you to create flexible payment plans your users can subscribe to.

​Kunena is a free, fully integrated forum extension for Joomla that requires no bridges or hacks. Kunena offers easy customization through template overrides and the Hierarchical Model-View-Controller (HMVC) design pattern, allowing developers to tailor the forum's appearance and functionality to their needs. Optimized for performance, Kunena delivers faster loading times, especially when running on PHP 7, resulting in a 200-300% speed increase. It is designed with minimal requirements, is compatible with most web hosting providers, and supports various web servers, including Apache, Nginx, LiteSpeed, and IIS. Kunena continues to evolve, with a dedicated team of volunteers committed to providing a reliable, scalable, and robust forum solution for the Joomla community. ​

Heartbeat is the operating system for community‑led businesses, enabling you to host chats, threads, voice and video rooms, live events, courses, and knowledge‑base style documents, all embedded on your own domain or in invite‑only spaces. Customize channels for deep discussions, launch voice rooms with one click, and see presence indicators to replicate that “in‑room” feel. Turn impactful conversations into permanent docs or articles, and organize learning journeys through built‑in courses. Seamlessly monetize your community with memberships, paid events, offers, and course access, and accept payments via integrated tools. Automate onboarding, matchmaking, workflows, and reminders with powerful workflows and integrations (Zoom, Google Calendar, Salesforce, HubSpot, Airtable, and more). Manage member access through granular permissions and access groups, brand your space, and scale with analytics and community dashboards.

The community platform for the future. The internet was built for communities. But, as the web has changed and improved radically, community software has hardly improved since the heyday of message boards and IRC. Spectrum makes it easy to grow safe, successful online communities that are built to last. By building on Spectrum, communities become easily discoverable through search, curation, and even other community members. It also means no more managing multiple logins or playing whack-a-mole with different notifications and preferences. Everyone wins! Conversations on Spectrum are real-time chat, just like your favorite messaging app. But on Spectrum, conversations continue to provide value to more and more people over time. Every conversation gets a unique link to make it easy for people to discover, share, or save for later.