Companies Using Simple Machines Forum

Mostly hobby and community boards, plus small companies running support forums. 64% of matched companies have 1 to 10 employees, and Software Development (18.18%) leads the industries. Company users include Patch My PC, Trenz Electronic, Camera Bits and Daffodil International University, all of which served SMF when we checked on 6 November 2026, usually on a forum. subdomain.

Our November 2026 crawl counts 1,837 domains running SMF after removing 20 duplicates, for-sale pages and SEO-network boards, and 226 match a company. They are domains, not customers: SMF is free software. Since tracking began on 16 March 2026, 93 domains dropped it from every hostname. In a random 40 we checked on 6 November, 33 served it.

SMF holds 0.61% of Community & Comments at TechnologyChecker.io, 11th of 63 rows, on 1,837 cleaned domains. Livefyre (80.15%) and Disqus (4.47%) lead but are comment widgets. Among forum software, XenForo (8,092 domains), phpBB (7,040) and Discourse (4,160) are larger, and SMF is ahead of Tapatalk (1,299) and bbPress (1,092).

The closest alternatives are other self-hosted forum packages. In our November 2026 crawl, phpBB has 7,040 domains, XenForo 8,092, Discourse 4,160, Invision Power Board 3,155 and vBulletin 2,238. Tapatalk is also in the category with 1,299, and 6 domains moved from Tapatalk to SMF since 16 March 2026.

The United States, with 63 of the 226 companies we matched, then Germany (22), France (13), and Bangladesh, the United Kingdom and Spain with 9 each. Bangladesh's count includes three organisations carrying the Daffodil name, a university, a school and a computer company, each with its own SMF forum. Russia has 6.

Small ones. 64% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 22.5% have 11 to 50. Only 5 have more than 1,000 staff. Most company installs are a support or user forum on a forum. subdomain, as at Patch My PC and Trenz Electronic.

Older than the hobby boards suggest. Among matched companies with a founding year, the 2000s and the 2010s tie at 34.48% each, 15.52% were founded in the 1990s and only 7.76% in the 2020s. 23.28% predate 2000, among them software and equipment makers that run a support forum, such as Camera Bits and Trenz Electronic.

On our data: a software, internet or IT firm with 1 to 10 staff, in the US, Germany or France, founded in the 2000s or 2010s, running a support or user forum on a forum. subdomain, on PHP with jQuery from Google's CDN. A second, larger group is volunteer clubs and hobby communities on their own domain.

Yes. Simple Machines describes SMF as open-source free forum software made by volunteers, and its GitHub README says it is licensed under the BSD 3-clause licence. Per simplemachines.org, it is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database. Our crawl counts 1,837 domains running it in November 2026, mostly community boards on their own domain.

The 2.1 branch is. Simple Machines released 2.1.8 on 11 October 2026 as a security patch for the 2.1 line. SMF 2.0 reached end of life on 4 October 2026, with 2.0.19 as its last release. In our 6 November sample, 13 of the 29 forums that printed a version still ran 2.0 and 3 ran 1.1.

View the page source. SMF defines JavaScript settings such as smf_theme_url and smf_default_theme_url, and most boards print an "SMF 2.1.x" link to simplemachines.org in the footer. Those are the signals our rule reads. Some boards hide the footer link: 4 of the 33 SMF boards in our random sample showed no version.

Because they're private boards that ask visitors to sign in before reading. In our November 2026 crawl, 38 of the 1,837 SMF domains have "Login" or "Log in" as their homepage title. They still run SMF and stay in the count, but there's no public content to read, so we can't tell what the community is about.

In our November 2026 crawl, the forum packages in Community & Comments with the most domains are XenForo (8,092), phpBB (7,040), Discourse (4,160) and Invision Power Board (3,155). Simple Machines Forum has 1,837. Livefyre and Disqus have more domains than any of them, but they are comment widgets rather than forums.