WoltLab

WoltLab GmbH is registered in Düsseldorf, Germany, at Wilhelm-Raabe-Straße 18 (Amtsgericht Düsseldorf, HRB 112223, VAT ID DE231311649, managing director Marcel Werk).

The company has run continuously since 2001, and its own marketing leans on that history directly — "Premium Forum-Software aus Deutschland" — with hosting, support and billing all kept in Germany. Named enterprise customers listed on its site include Siemens, Deutsche Bahn, games publisher Gameforge, Hetzner, Brother and Tipico, a track record most community-platform vendors in this category cannot match.

Pricing is published at every cloud tier rather than hidden behind a sales call.

Cloud Starter is €35.95 a month billed annually (30,000 MB storage, 600,000 requests a month, unlimited users and staff), Cloud Professional is €71.95 a month (100,000 MB, 2,500,000 requests a month, WebAuthn security and an extra support seat), and Cloud Business is €224.95 a month (250,000 MB, 5,000,000 requests a month, white-label error pages, priority ticketing and a 99.5% SLA).

Cloud Enterprise, with SSO across SAML, OAuth 2, OpenID Connect and Azure AD plus custom modifications, is quoted on request. WoltLab is also the only tool in this category selling a genuine one-time self-hosted licence, starting at €129.99, for buyers who would rather run the software on their own infrastructure than commit to a recurring subscription. A 14-day free demo is available, though there is no permanent free tier.

The trade-off is scope: WoltLab is pure forum and community software — forum, blog, calendar, database, filebase, gallery — with no built-in membership-billing layer for associations that need to collect dues or manage chapters. The self-hosted option is also not open source; it is a purchasable commercial licence rather than a codebase you can freely audit or modify, and its interface reads closer to a classic forum than a modern social feed, similar to Discourse.

What WoltLab does well

• German GmbH with a full commercial-register entry (HRB 112223), operating continuously since 2001
• Cloud hosting stated inside Germany directly on the pricing page, not just implied
• Genuine one-time self-hosted licence from €129.99, unique in this category alongside a recurring cloud option
• Published pricing at every tier, with named enterprise customers (Siemens, Deutsche Bahn) as reference

Where WoltLab falls short

• Not open source: the self-hosted option is a purchasable licence, not an auditable or freely modifiable codebase
• No membership-billing layer — a pure forum tool, so associations needing dues or chapter management still need a separate product
• Entry-tier storage and request caps are modest, and the step to Business at €224.95/month is a large jump for white-labeling and priority support

Standout feature. A genuine one-time self-hosted licence alongside its EU-hosted cloud plans, backed by a 25-year operating history and named enterprise customers few community-platform vendors can match.