Online communities are digital spaces where like-minded individuals come together to engage in discussions, share ideas, collaborate, and connect on various topics or interests. These communities can take many forms, such as forums, social networks, or membership websites. Online communities can revolve around hobbies, professions, industries, specific interests, or any other shared passion. Some well-known examples of online communities include Reddit, Facebook Groups, and specialized forums like Stack Overflow or WordPress support forums. In this article we are going to list the Top 10 best community plugins:
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1. BuddyPress – WordPress Community Plugin
BuddyPress is indeed a popular open-source WordPress community plugin that enables users to add social networking features to their WordPress websites. It offers a variety of features to help you create and manage your online community.
Some of the key features of BuddyPress include:
- Member Profiles: BuddyPress allows users to create and manage their member profiles. Users can add information about themselves, such as a profile picture, cover photo, and additional details.
Connecting with Community Members: Users can connect with other members, follow their activities, and build social connections within the community. - Private Messaging: It provides a private messaging system that allows members to send private messages to each other, fostering direct communication.
- Activity Streams: Activity streams display the latest activities of community members, such as new posts, comments, and more, helping to keep the community engaged.
- User Groups: BuddyPress allows the creation of user groups, which can be based on shared interests, topics, or any other criteria. These groups can have their discussions, forums, and activities.
Why BuddyPress?
BuddyPress is a free plugin, which makes it an attractive choice for individuals and organizations looking to create their social network or online community within a WordPress website.
PRICE: Free
2. PeepSo – WordPress Community Plugin
PeepSo is a free community plugin that gives you the tools to build a social network on your WordPress site.
This easy-to-use plugin comes with the following helpful features:
- Messaging and live chat.
- Media uploads, including videos and photos.
- Custom widgets for community engagement.
- Links from a multitude of supported members, including YouTube.
- This theme’s lightness and slim design make it compatible with a variety of WordPress themes, so you can customize your website to your heart’s content.
Why use PeepSo?
Best WordPress community plugin for Social engagement.
Price: Free. Starting at $19/month for pro.
3.wpForo Forum – WordPress Community Plugin
wpForo Forum is a WordPress plugin that provides features for creating and managing online forums within your WordPress website. It offers several benefits for building a community forum, as mentioned in your description:
Multilingual Forum Functionality: wpForo Forum supports multiple languages, making it easier for users from different regions to engage in discussions and interact on your forum.
- Badge and Rankings System: The plugin includes a badge and ranking system, which can gamify user participation and encourage engagement. Users can earn badges and improve their ranks based on their activity and contributions to the forum.
- SEO-Friendly Layout: Having an SEO-friendly layout is crucial for better visibility on search engines. wpForo Forum is designed to help your forum content rank well in search results, potentially attracting more visitors.
- Anti-Spam Blockers: Spam can be a significant issue on online forums. wpForo Forum includes anti-spam features to help you manage and reduce unwanted spam content and interactions.
- Integration with WordPress Community Plugins: wpForo Forum integrates with various other WordPress community plugins, including BuddyPress. This integration allows you to combine the features of a forum with those of a social media network, offering a comprehensive community-building experience.
- Add-Ons: The ability to purchase add-ons allows you to extend the functionality of the wpForo Forum plugin. This can be useful for tailoring your forum to specific needs or enhancing its capabilities.
Why wpForo Forum?
wpForo Forum appears to be a versatile WordPress plugin for creating and managing online forums. It provides features that can help you build a thriving online community, making it a good choice for those looking to add forum functionality to their WordPress websites.
PRICE: Free. Add-ons available.
4 . Profile Builder – WordPress Community Plugin
Profile Builder is a user management tool and plugin for WordPress that provides features for creating and managing user registration forms and customizing front-end login widgets on your website.
It offers a range of functionality, and some of its key features include:
- Member Directories and User Listing Pages: Profile Builder allows you to create directories and listing pages for your website’s members, making it easier for visitors to find and connect with other users.
- Custom Logins from Anywhere on Your Site: This feature enables you to add custom login forms to various locations on your website, improving user accessibility and convenience.
- Multiple Registration Form Creation: You can create and customize multiple registration forms to gather different sets of user information or tailor the registration process for various user groups.
- Edit Profile Form Creations: Profile Builder allows you to create multiple edit profile forms, which can be useful for collecting and updating user information.
- User Role Editor: With the user role editor, you can define and manage user roles and capabilities, providing you with fine-grained control over your members’ access and permissions.
- Best WordPress Community Plugin for Managing Users: Profile Builder is designed to be an effective solution for managing users within a WordPress community or membership site, making it easier to handle user registration and profile customization.
Why use Profile Builder?
Overall, Profile Builder can be a valuable tool for WordPress website owners who need to create and manage user registration forms, enhance user profiles, and effectively manage user roles and permissions within their online communities or membership sites. The choice between the free and pro versions will depend on your specific requirements and the extent of features you need.
Price: The basic version of Profile Builder is available for free, offering essential features for user management.
The pro version of the plugin starts at $75 and includes additional advanced features and support.
5. Youzify – WordPress Community Plugin
Youzify is indeed an enhanced version of the BuddyPress plugin, designed to provide additional features and functionalities to your online community. Youzify takes it a step further by extending its capabilities and adding a range of features to enhance the user experience.
Here are some of the key features of Youzify:
- User Activity Stream: Youzify adds an activity stream to your BuddyPress community, allowing users to share updates, and posts, and engage with each other in a social media-like feed.
- Friend Requests: Users can send and receive friend requests, helping them connect and build relationships within the community.
- Follow Options: Youzify enables users to follow each other, which can be useful for staying updated with specific users’ activities and posts.
- Points and Badges: You can award points and badges to users as a form of recognition for their contributions or achievements within the community. This can help gamify the user experience and encourage active participation.
- Replies, Likes, and Comments: Users can interact with each other’s posts by leaving comments, liking content, and engaging in discussions.
- Color Schemes and Themes: Youzify allows you to customize the look and feel of your community by adding color schemes and creating fun themes. This helps you brand your community and make it visually appealing.
Why use Youzify?
Best WordPress community plugin for Building membership sites. Youzify enhances the social and interactive aspects of your BuddyPress community, making it more engaging and user-friendly for your members. It can be a valuable addition if you want to create a vibrant and interactive online social community.
Price: Free. Starting at $49 for the pro version.
6.bbPress – WordPress Community Plugin
bbPress is indeed a free and open-source WordPress forum plugin designed for creating discussion boards and integrating them seamlessly with your existing WordPress website.
Here are some of the key features and benefits of bbPress:
- WordPress Integration: bbPress is designed to work smoothly with WordPress, making it easy to add a discussion forum to your existing WordPress website. Users can log in with their WordPress accounts, and the plugin adopts the look and feel of your WordPress theme.
- Beginner-Friendly: It’s built with beginners in mind, so even users who are not experienced with forum software can set up and manage discussion boards on their WordPress sites.
- Plugin Compatibility: bbPress is compatible with many other WordPress plugins, allowing you to extend its functionality and integrate additional features into your forums. This means you can customize your discussion board to fit your specific needs.
- Scalability: bbPress is designed to be scalable, which means it can handle forums of various sizes, from small community boards to larger, more active ones.
- Simple and Flexible Design: The plugin offers a simple and flexible design, which allows you to customize the look and layout of your discussion boards to match your website’s design and branding. You can create forums, topics, and replies with ease.
- Moderation and Spam Control: bbPress includes basic moderation tools and spam control features to help maintain a clean and safe discussion environment.
- User Profiles: It provides user profile pages, where users can view their activity, topics, and replies, making it easier for members to engage with the community.
- Notifications: Users can subscribe to topics or forums to receive notifications of new activity, helping them stay engaged in discussions.
Why choose bbPress?
bbPress remains a popular choice for adding discussion forums to WordPress sites due to its integration with the platform and its user-friendly approach. However, it’s always a good idea to research the latest developments and user reviews to make an informed decision for your specific needs.
Price: Free
7. Asgaros Forum – WordPress Community Plugin
Users can engage in discussions, share content, and customize the forum to their needs, all within the WordPress environment. If you’re looking to add a forum to your WordPress site, this plugin could be a valuable option to consider.
Here’s a breakdown of its features:
- Simple Content Management: It likely provides an easy way to manage and organize forum content.
- Profiles & Members List: Users can have profiles, and there’s a list of members on the forum.
- Notifications & Feeds: Users can receive notifications and follow feeds to stay updated on forum activity.
- Powerful Editor: This feature might offer an advanced text editor for forum posts.
- SEO-friendly: The forum content is optimized for search engines.
- Reactions: Users can express their reactions to forum posts, similar to liking or upvoting.
- Uploads: Likely supports file uploads, allowing users to share images or documents.
- Search: Provides a search feature to help users find specific content within the forum.
- Polls: It supports the creation of polls for engaging discussions.
- Widgets: Possibly offers widgets to display forum content in different parts of your website.
- Statistics: Provides statistics and insights on forum activity and usage.
- Guest Postings: It may allow guest users to post without needing to register.
- Approval, Banning & Reporting: Likely has moderation tools for administrators to manage user behavior.
- Moderators, Permissions & Usergroups: Provides options for setting up and managing moderators, user permissions, and user groups.
- Customizable Responsive Theme: You can customize the forum’s appearance to fit your website’s design and ensure it’s responsive on various devices.
- Multilingualism: Supports multiple languages for international user communities.
- Multiple Instances: You can run multiple forum instances on your website for different topics or purposes.
- Multisite Compatibility: Compatible with WordPress Multisite, allowing forums on a network of sites.
- myCRED Integration: Integration with myCRED, a points management system for WordPress, which can be used to reward and incentivize user participation on the forum.
INSTALLATION
- A new forum page is automatically created during the installation
- Add this page to your menu so your users can access your forum.
Why choose Asgaros Forum?
Asgaros Forum is the perfect WordPress plugin if you want to extend your website with a lightweight and feature-rich discussion board. It is easy to set up, super fast, and perfectly integrated into WordPress.
Price: Free
8. WP Discussion Board – WordPress Community Plugin
A forum can be a valuable addition to your website, fostering engagement, interaction, and community building among your users.
Let’s Describe the key features :
- Registration and Login: Having a front-end registration and login system is crucial for user engagement. It allows users to easily create accounts and log in to participate in the forum discussions. It’s also essential for user management, as you can track user activity and ensure a safe and secure environment.
- User-Generated Forum Topics: Allowing users to create new forum topics through a simple form is a fundamental feature of any forum. This feature empowers users to initiate discussions on various subjects, making the forum more dynamic and user-driven.
- Dedicated Pages for Forum Topics: Creating dedicated pages for each forum topic is an excellent practice. This allows for better organization, makes it easy for users to find and engage in specific discussions, and provides a clear structure to your forum.
- Replies: Enabling users to reply to forum topics is the essence of a forum. It encourages conversation, sharing of opinions, and collaboration among your site’s visitors. Having threaded or nested replies can further enhance the discussion experience.
Why choose the WPDiscussion Board?
WPDiscussion Board is a promising choice for adding a forum to your WordPress site, especially if it offers the features you’ve mentioned. Make sure to thoroughly test it and consider how it fits your specific needs and preferences before fully implementing it on your site.
Price: Free; Paid plans start at $49 per year.
9. Simple: Press Forum – WordPress Community Plugin
Simple: Press is a feature-rich forum plugin designed to work seamlessly with your WordPress website. It offers a range of features and can be extended with add-ons to enhance your forum’s functionality.
Here’s a breakdown of its key features and offerings:
- SEO Optimization: The plugin is optimized for search engines, improving your forum’s visibility.
- Customization: It’s highly customizable and extendable to create a tailored forum experience.
- Data Import: You can import data from other forum platforms like bbPress and Asgaros.
- Forum Structure: It supports multi-level forum structures with subforum capabilities.
- Privacy Options: You can create both private and public forums.
- Theme and Template Customization: Simple: Press is fully theme and template-driven, making it easy to customize the look and feel of your forum.
- Administration: The plugin offers extensive administration options and settings for easy forum management.
Why choose Simple: Press?
Simple: Press offers greater flexibility in terms of customization, integrations, and overall functionality. This means you can tailor your forum to fit your specific needs, rather than being limited to the features and options provided by a hosted solution.
Price: Absolutely. Simple: The press itself is free to download and use.
10.ProfileGrid – WordPress Community Plugin
ProfileGrid is a versatile WordPress plugin that offers a wide range of features for creating user profiles, groups, communities, paid memberships, directories, WooCommerce profiles, bbPress profiles, content restriction, sign-up pages, blog submissions, notifications, social activity, and private messaging.
Here’s an overview of its key features:
User Profiles
- Create and manage user profiles with custom fields.
- Display user data from various plugins that use custom posts or shortcodes.
User Groups
- Create multiple user profile types.
- Customize fields for each group.
- Assign group managers or moderators.
- Configure group-specific privacy settings.
- Define registration workflows for different groups.
- Set membership limits for groups.
- Map groups to specific WordPress roles.
- Filter user profiles based on groups in directories.
- Choose between open (public) or closed (private) groups.
- Closed groups require membership approval.
Community Features
- Create public and private groups.
- Add group-specific modules like discussions, photos, events, etc.
- Appoint group managers for community moderation.
- Set privacy levels for content within communities.
- Allow users to join multiple groups.
- Users can create their groups from the front end.
Why choose ProfileGrid?
ProfileGrid aims to provide a flexible and modular user profile and community-building solution for WordPress websites. You can enable or disable specific features with a single click, and the plugin offers a clean and organized admin interface. With the addition of new shortcodes, you have greater control over how user group and profile data is displayed on your website, and you can also create personalized content for your users.
Price: $79.00 per year
11. UltimateMember – WordPress Community Plugin
UltimateMember appears to be a versatile plugin for managing user profiles and building a community on a WordPress website.
Some of the features are:
- Frontend Forms: Users can register and log in from the front end of your website. You can customize the registration form by adding custom fields to collect specific data.
- Stripe Integration: This allows you to integrate Stripe for payment processing, making it useful for membership or subscription-based websites.
- Custom Email Notifications: You can customize the emails sent to users for various actions like registration and password reset.
- Elegant User Profiles: Each user has a public profile page to display their data.
- Shortcodes Editor: Easily add the plugin’s shortcodes to pages or posts with a shortcode generator and editor.
- Roles Editor: You can edit, create, and duplicate user roles, giving you control over user capabilities.
- Beautiful User Directories: Display user directories that can be placed anywhere on your site.
- SEO-Friendly URLs: All URLs generated by the plugin are designed to be search engine optimization (SEO) friendly.
- Content Restriction: Restrict content access based on user roles, logged-in status, or other criteria.
- Password Management: Allow users to update their passwords from their account page.
- Custom Fields Editor: Create custom user fields to collect additional user data during registration.
- Widgets: Display user data and forms in sidebars using widgets.
- Redirects: Control where users are redirected after login, registration, and other actions.
- Powerful Tools: Tools to help you manage your site and user registrations.
- Developer-Friendly: Offers a range of hooks and filters for customization and integration with other plugins.
- Extensive Documentation: Comprehensive documentation and expert support for users.
- Translation Ready: The plugin and its add-ons are fully localized for translation into other languages.
- Show Author Posts & Comments on User Profiles: Users can see their authored posts and comments directly on their profiles, enhancing engagement and personalization.
- Developer-Friendly: Ultimate Member is developer-friendly, offering a range of actions and filters for customization and extending its functionality.
Why choose the Ultimate Member?
Ultimate Member is a versatile choice for WordPress websites looking to provide a seamless user registration and profile management experience, build online communities, and create membership-based sites.
Price: Free
12. WP-Recall – WordPress Community Plugin
Here’s a brief explanation of each of the features mentioned:
- Profile Recall: This feature allows users to create customizable profiles with fields that can be reordered through a drag-and-drop interface. It’s a useful tool for managing user profiles on your WordPress site.
- Rcl Chat: This feature enables personal messaging and global chats. It allows users to engage in easy and unlimited chats using shortcodes. It can be a valuable addition to building a community or enhancing user interaction on your site.
- Rating System: This feature provides various options for rating content on your website. Users can use stars, like/dislike buttons, or a simple option to rate comments, posts, and other types of content.
- Public Recall: This feature allows users to create and edit posts directly from the front of your website. It also includes a multi-photo uploader, making it convenient for users to publish content without accessing the WordPress admin panel.
- User Balance: This feature introduces a personal user balance system, which can be useful for websites that involve financial transactions or virtual currency systems.
- Commerce: This appears to be a free eCommerce add-on, which means it could extend your website’s capabilities to support online selling and buying. It may provide features related to product listings, shopping carts, and payment processing.
- Groups Recall: This feature offers a solution for managing group-oriented memberships and controlling access to content within closed groups. It can be handy for websites that require membership structures.
- PrimeForum: PrimeForum is a lightweight WordPress forum add-on. It allows you to create and manage discussion forums on your website. The reference to “SEO URLs” suggests that it may include search engine optimization features for forum URLs.
Why choose WPRecall?
Features of WPRecall significantly enhance the functionality of your WordPress website, making it more interactive, community-oriented, and versatile. Depending on your website’s goals and audience, you can choose to activate and configure these features as needed.
Price: Free
13. UserPro – WordPress Community Plugin
Here’s a breakdown of the features of UserPro mentioned:
- Customizable Login and Registration Forms: UserPro provides the ability to customize and create user-friendly login and registration forms to fit the needs of your community site.
- Social Connect and Integration: It allows users to connect and integrate their social media accounts, making it easier for them to sign up and interact using their existing social profiles.
- User Badges: You can assign badges to users based on their activity or achievements, which can add a gamification element to your community and encourage user engagement.
- Multiple Member List Displays: UserPro likely offers various ways to display and list community members, providing flexibility in how you showcase your user base.
- Viral Marketing: This feature could involve tools or mechanisms to encourage users to invite their friends and promote your community, thus spreading the word virally.
- Content Restriction: UserPro might allow you to control access to certain content or features based on user roles, ensuring that premium content is available only to authorized users.
- Public/Private Feed: A public feed allows users to share their activities and interact with others, while a private feed could provide a more personal and controlled environment for specific user interactions.
- Verified Accounts: Verified accounts typically signify that a user’s identity has been confirmed or that they have a special status within the community, which can enhance trust and credibility.
Why use UserPro?
UserPro appears to be an all-in-one solution for building a feature-rich community website within the WordPress ecosystem. It can be a valuable asset for site owners looking to create engaging and interactive user experiences.
Price: $39 with free future updates.
14. ProfileGrid – WordPress Community Plugin
ProfileGrid is a versatile WordPress plugin designed for creating user profiles, managing communities, and providing various membership features on your website. It offers a wide range of capabilities and is known for being a flexible and modular solution.
Here’s a breakdown of its key features and functionalities:
- User Profiles: ProfileGrid allows you to create and manage user profiles on your WordPress website. These profiles can include various fields and details, making them highly customizable.
- Groups: The plugin offers the ability to create user groups, which can serve as different profile types. Each group can have its own set of fields, managers, and privacy levels.
- Group Managers: Group managers can be assigned to oversee and moderate specific user groups. They can control privacy settings and membership approvals for their assigned group.
- Registration Workflows: Each group can have its registration workflow, allowing you to tailor the user registration process for different groups.
- Membership Limits: You can set membership limits for groups, controlling how many users can join a particular group.
- WordPress Roles Integration: Groups can be mapped to specific WordPress roles, providing additional control over user access and permissions.
- Content Restriction: ProfileGrid enables content restriction and access control. You can restrict content based on user groups or membership status.
- Private and Public Groups: You can create both open (public) and closed (private) groups. Closed groups require membership approval from a group manager or site admin.
- Multiple Group Memberships: Users can join multiple groups, allowing them to engage with various communities or profile types.
- Shortcodes: The plugin provides a variety of shortcodes for displaying different types of user groups and profiles within your WordPress theme and widgets. Dynamic content shortcodes allow you to create personalized content for your users.
- Community Features: ProfileGrid is not just about user profiles; it also offers community-building features. Users can create and join public and private groups, engage in discussions, share photos, and participate in events within these groups.
- Frontend Group Creation: Users can create their groups from the front end, expanding the community-building aspect of your website.
- Privacy Settings: You can set privacy levels for content within groups, allowing you to control who can access and view specific content.
- Support: ProfileGrid provides support for any issues, bugs, feature requests, and general help through their support team.
- Compatibility: The plugin is compatible with various other WordPress plugins and integrations, including WooCommerce and bbPress.
Why choose ProfileGrid?
ProfileGrid is a comprehensive WordPress user profile, community, and directory plugin that offers extensive features for managing user profiles, creating communities, and controlling membership access on your WordPress website. It is highly customizable and provides a range of tools to cater to your specific website needs.
Price:$79.00 per year.
15. MemberPress – WordPress Community Plugin
Features of MemberPress include:
- Content Access Rules: Allows you to control access to your content, enabling you to implement paywalls or restrictions with ease.
- Online Courses: Provides a Learning Management System (LMS) platform for creating and selling online courses.
- Coupons: This lets you create and manage customizable coupons to increase sales and customer retention.
- Community Building: Helps foster a sense of community on your website, potentially leading to increased user engagement and loyalty.
- ReadyLaunch™ Page Maker: Offers a user-friendly solution for building attractive and mobile-responsive pages, even if you lack technical or design skills.
- Drip Content: Allows you to schedule timed releases of content and control content access, ensuring a steady stream of valuable material for your audience.
- WordPress Affiliate Plugin: Enables referral marketing, allowing others to promote your products or services and earn commissions for successful sales.
- Payment Gateways: Supports various payment methods, including Apple Pay, Google Wallet, credit cards, international currencies, direct debit, and Cash App, to prevent missed sales due to limited payment options.
- WordPress Subscription Plugin: Facilitates automated billing for subscription-based content or services, making it easy for members to join or upgrade directly from your website.
Why choose MemberPress?
These features are valuable for individuals and businesses looking to monetize their WordPress websites, offer online courses, and manage content access, among other functions. It appears to be a comprehensive solution for those seeking to generate revenue and create engaging user experiences on their WordPress sites.
Price: Basic$179.50/ year, Plus$299.50/ year and Pro$399.50/ year accordingly.
Final Thoughts on WordPress Community Plugins
WordPress plugin ecosystem is continuously evolving, and new plugins may have emerged since my last update. The effectiveness of a plugin can depend on your specific community needs and the compatibility with your WordPress theme and other plugins. Always check the latest reviews, ratings, and compatibility information before choosing and installing any plugin.
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