Forums are online platforms where people can interact and engage in conversation over various topics. There are lots of forums available online at this very second, catering to in-company messaging, shared-interest communities and even company customer support. An HTML expert can manually create these sites for your target audience. However, keep in mind that this involves a lot of coding and can add unnecessary costs to your company, especially if the platform isn’t going to serve a massive number of users.
Hence to eliminate this sort of difficulties, we are going to present you some of the most excellent forum software. By using it, you can easily opt for forum creation and management system. These help you host such a community engagement platform either in-house or online.
Not only that but, it comes with a versatile set of features including likes, comments, user customization, saving posts/threads among others. These might just help you trim down those added expenses to the budget.
Here is the list of some of the prominent forum software of 2019:
1. Verint Community
Formerly known as Telligent company, Verint is a world most flexible platform for powering innovative online communities and forums for engagement, support, web self-service, and insights. Furthermore, this forum software offers an amazing web self-service and peer-to-peer collaboration to helps you capture customer data and insights in real-time. This means that you’d be able to view the topics that your community is engaging in, make decisions based on current data and help drive traffic to your business and its website. Besides, it also gives your social audience the services they’d need including forums, question and answer threads, and rich blogging experience. 
Features
- Verint allows you to easily set up discussion forums where you can digitally engage with your customers.
- Using this platform user can easily generate content while simultaneously offering history as well as the version control.
- Moreover, you can set up events and reminders via its calendaring capabilities.
- On the online community platforms, you can easily share files and other media.
- Based on their community activity, users earn points and badges, encouraging them to participate more.
Pricing
You can get access to a free demo of the entire platform before actually purchase the Verint forum software.
- Free Demo Version: The free version offers the full experience of Verint community except for customer support and SaaS hosting. You’d have to host the platform on your own premises.
- Premium Version: The premium version additionally offers email and phone support. Not to mention, you can host the platform online as well. You can further contact the service provider for more details.
2. Plush Forums
The website proclaims it to be an easy way to build a great community. Indeed, when you happen to take a look at the mega-functionality of this software it gives an abundance of excellent elements. Besides, you require absolutely no technical knowledge to utilize this versatile set of tools. Whether it’s a perfectly integrated blog, private messaging, member directory, paid subscriptions, member profiles or other polished forum features, you can set up all of them with ease. You can get the best commercial service at absolutely low prices. Furthermore, CMScritic.com awarded Plush Forums the best commercial forum management software in 2014 for these very reasons. 
Features
- Plush Forums allows users to engage in real-time conversations and let them posts without the need to refresh the page. As a result, new content arrives on your feed seamlessly.
- A built-in blog into your platform sparks discussions randomly and allows your stories to be published and provide the users with a comment section for further use. With the Plush Forums, you don't need any flimsy and glitchy plugins.
- Members of the site can easily engage in private messaging with unlimited access to media sharing, whether that’s files, images or videos.
- It lets the users switch on live notifications which help them keep in the loop with everything that’s going on with their feed. They can also opt into email notifications as well.
Pricing
There is a range of plans available for the needs of your platform.
- Small ($49/month): 100 members online at once; 15 GB file storage.
- Medium ($75/month): 250 members online at once; 30 GB file storage.
- Large ($120/month): 600 members online at once; 35 GB file storage.
- Extra Large ($200/month): 1,250 members online at once; 70 GB file storage.
- Double XL ($375/month): 2,500 members online at once; 125 GB file storage.
- Giant ($650/month): 5,000 members online at once; 250 GB file storage.
Also, the total number of members and staff allowed is unlimited. You can access a 14-day free trial and a full demo before the purchase.
3. Zendesk Guide
Zendesk Guide assimilates a wide knowledge base for your users to actively draw on. A large part of the Zendesk Suite seamlessly integrates with Zendesk Support.
Moreover, with the combined ticket management and cooperative consumer engagement, your digital presence is going to grow faster than ever. With Zendesk guide, you can easily set up a customizable help center, an accessible customer service portal and an expansive online community. This effectively means that your customers get better self-service and agents see a faster resolution of their problems.
Features
- You can totally customize your help center with access to a whole host of themes. You can even use your own brand logos. Not to mention, it’s compatible with external scripts (such as HTML, CSS, and Javascript).
- It lets you create personalized articles with media like photos and videos.
- You can also control who has what access to your online knowledge base. Open it up to the public, require registration or permit access to agents online the choice is yours.
- Zendesk Guide allows users access to a customer portal so they can track and manage their own support requests.
- An answer bot responds to emails and queries with relevant help center articles to resolve customer requests while they’re waiting for an agent.
Pricing
- Lite Version: Lite variant for the Zendesk Guide comes alongside the Zendesk Support, plans for which start at $5/month, billed annually. This pack includes fundamentals such as the knowledge database, support request form, Google Analytics reporting, and the capture app.
- Professional Version: It cost $15/agent/month and this pack further incorporates custom themes, multilingual content, performance dashboards, community forums and flagging.
- Enterprise Version: It cost $29/agent/month and with this, you get one adds the option for multiple help centers, multiple theme templates, article lifecycle management, content cues, subsections and team publishing to the list.
Answer bot services can be added to either of the last three plans for $50/month. Furthermore, you can request a demo and access a free 14-day trial for the software before needing to buy it.
