Companies Using phpBB

Our live crawl finds phpBB on 6,550 domains, resolving to 784 identifiable organisations. Named users include Veeam Software, Blackmagic Design, Intelbras, Ooma, Image-Line and SCS Software. Software Development is the largest industry at 11.18%, mostly vendors running their own support forums.

We detect phpBB on 6,550 active domains as of our August 2026 rollup, of which 784 resolve to a company record. The enrichment rate is low because a large share of phpBB boards belong to hobbyist communities and volunteer groups with no company record to match.

phpBB holds 11.61% of the Community and Comments category and ranks 3rd, behind Disqus at 13,033 domains and XenForo at 7,881. Among self-hosted forum software it is second, and about three times the size of vBulletin.

Discourse is the modern self-hosted alternative and the one our churn data actually supports: it is the only destination over-represented among domains that dropped phpBB. XenForo is the largest commercial alternative at 7,881 domains, and Disqus replaces a forum with a hosted comment thread rather than matching it feature for feature.

The United States leads with 145 matched companies at 20.14%, but Germany (114) and France (94) together account for 28.89%, making phpBB the most European platform in the category. The United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Brazil, Spain and Poland follow.

65.35% of matched companies employ 1 to 10 people, the highest small-company concentration in the category, and 19.60% employ 11 to 50. Larger named users are almost always software vendors whose forum is a small part of the business.

phpBB is the only platform we publish whose customers peak before 2010. 38.81% of matched companies were founded in the 2000s, against 26.68% in the 2010s and 16.44% in the 1990s. Only 5.39% were founded in the 2020s.

An organisation of 1 to 10 people, founded in the 2000s, in the United States, Germany or France, running a community rather than selling software. The second recurring profile is a software vendor of any size hosting a free public support board.

Yes. We detect it on 6,550 domains, making it the third-largest platform in Community and Comments. 260 domains have dropped it since we began tracking in April 2026, about 4% of the base over that window, the lowest churn rate of the three technologies in this batch.

The signal is real but the volume is small. Discourse appears on 0.02% of live phpBB domains and 1.54% of domains that dropped phpBB, so it is around 100 times over-represented among leavers. In absolute terms that is 4 domains over our tracking window, so treat it as a direction rather than a trend.

A public support forum is expensive to buy and cheap to self-host. phpBB is free, runs on ordinary PHP hosting and has two decades of moderation tooling. Software Development is 11.18% of matched phpBB companies, more than double any other industry, and the detected host is almost always a forum subdomain rather than the main site.

We match phpBB on its session cookie, its JavaScript globals, the phpBB Group copyright meta tag and the copyright markup its templates render. These are emitted by the running application, so a match means a live board rather than a link to one. Because the signals are template-level, a heavily customised theme that strips the copyright block can be missed.