NodeBB Reviews

NodeBB is a modern, fast forum building tool that brings a lot of current social features and integrations to the old-school bulletin board. IT provides lightening fast response times and is full open source so a breeze to clone from Github and set up. It provides multiple database integration options and quick integration with 3rd party services as well. Further integrations can be carried out through its comprehensive suite of RESTful web services.

While the provisioned services for NodeBB are quite useful and provide effective customer support, using a provisioned instance of NodeBB can be quite costly.

We've been using NodeBB to run our forum for more than a year. Overall, it's a great *value for money* tool. The interface is relatively easy to use: after a bit of work of understanding where different settings are controlled, two people, one of whom was a trainee, could work it out alright. We like the look and feel it provides, which gives an impression of a website, rather than your average forum...

Read more

Since it's a new platform and a small team, there isn't a lot of learning materials about the software. Because plugins are open to the community to create, they would sometimes interfere with one another and break things. There is no curation to the list of recommended or updated plugins. And there is no quick way to understand if a task could be solved with a plugin or not (could be solved through documentation?). One needs to spend time with the community to work this out.

• Infinitely extendable with plugins and widgets • Open source, making it possible to find the source of any issue • The data sent to every page is easily accessible in JSON via API • Great support for forums hosted by NodeBB

• Plugins and widgets break on every upgrade. It's impossible to keep the system up to date without a lot of effort and developer resources • While the system is extendable, many things that should be built in are either second class add-ons or non existent. We had to build our own search widget, for example. • We have discovered numerous security issues and bugs that NodeBB should have been aware of themselves

The forum software is easy on the eyes, some forum software looks too busy, with too many options and not intuitive but, NodeBB is clean and easy to use. The software is flexible and adaptable for your needs. The software has many options, I have adapted it to what I need, switching off features I do not need for my business.

The software team at NodeBB are keen to help with every issue you may encounter, so I have not really found any cons as such which would deter me from using the software. The software team are constantly updating the software, with additions and new features. I have had suggestions for what I have considered improvements and the NodeBB have listened, the features could take some time to be released, but the team have to consider feedback from many users and the best for improvements is released. I have used the NodeBB's customisation route many times, to get the features I need.

Plugins are the best feature. There is a plugin for almost every need & its easy to install & use it quickly

Design can be better, need to do more research on how communities evolve & design patterns to make the product inherently sticky. Email freqency settings are quite poor. Its either spammy or no email at all.

There are several pros with NodeBB, it as a sleek design, not like old forums from the 90's. It's fast, I mean really fast. Functionalities as onsite chat makes the difference. The way it's built... to scale, that's a big plus.

The installation process is not that friendly, but, that's on the installer. Another con would be the lack of features as more mature alternatives do have, but, it's understandable, NodeBB is rather young with a 1.10 version.

That it is both open sourced and that it can be hosted by the developer. The forum is both supportable and portable because of that. It's got a very nice user interface and I think it's just easy to get around, and it's responsive. Every part of the UI is clean and modern, and they've built it to accept many third-party integrations.

I wish there were more themes for the forums. There are alot of switches to see which fonts / colors work. I do like how it's very open, but it's not immediately obvious that in some cases those third party integrations cost additional fees.

Easy to install, good extensions. Writing extensions is easy.

The API has no documentation. Wanted to make some integrations, but couldn't figure out how to authenticate from a third party.

NodeBB is easy to setup, easy to personalize, and easy to administrate. There are several useful plugins that can be installed from the rich community.

Not all plugins have the same quality, meaning that compatibility of some of them can break when upgrading the forum.

It's modern. It has modern features. Competitor platforms don't come close to being able to offer as slick of a solution. I like how easy the plugins are to use.

I don't have many complaints. It's pretty awesome.

It's open source, very customizable. Their hosting plans are very competitive compared to similar competitors. The user interface is very modern. Their customer service is very quick to respond.

The UI isn't consistent in some areas, it's a bit of a tinkerer's software. I wouldn't put it as enterprise ready.

Modern and easy to use interface for customers. Leaves the old "forum" look behind and brings new age tech to discussion boards.

Backend could be easier to use. Make it look more the the frontend

Clean and easy to use front facing software that has modern aesthetics

Backend could use visual work. Would like it to resemble more of the front end.

The backend was simple and super user friendly.

The peer to peer engagement could be stronger