Best Question & Answer Plugin for WordPress

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If you want to implement a Question and Answer site, similar to the uber popular Stackexchange or Yahoo Answers, you have a variety of WordPress-based solutions you can try out. Let's see what these options are.
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If you want to implement a Question and Answer site, similar to the uber popular Stackexchange or Yahoo Answers, there are a variety of WordPress-based solutions you can try out.

Let’s take a look at the available plugins and themes below.

Plugins

CM Answers

q&a-plugins-CManswers

CM Answers is a responsive plugin for WordPress that enables forum members to post questions and answers, comment on existing topics and vote for best forum contributions. Users enjoy a wide spectrum of options such as multiple file uploads, social media login, user profiles, private messages and user votes.

Administrators have vast control over actions performed on the forum, allowing full admin moderation of questions & answers, varied access restriction capabilities, multiple forum categories and easy-to-use shortcodes. Our detailed log & statistics module enables easy tracking of actions performed on the forum so that you’re always informed of what goes on in your discussion forum.

The CM Answers plugin can also be integrated with several other WordPress plugins including the CM MicroPayments Platform which adds a virtual currency layer to allow users to pay for asking questions or answering. It can also be integrated with any cart system so you can sell downloads directly. There is also a free version if you wish to try out the basic features before committing to it.

Get CM Answers

wpmudev Q&A

wpmudev-q-and-a
WPMU Dev Q&A is a premium WordPress plugin that brings full questions and answers functionality to any WordPress site. It has full front-end capability together with a WYSIWYG editor for both the questions and answers.

It offers theme integration through the use of widgets and is fully customizable using the included template files. There is also a voting system for both questions and answers as well as an integrated reputation points system and dedicated user profile pages.

Get wpmudev Q&A

AnsPress

anspress

AnsPress allows you to easily add a question and answer section, just like in stackoverflow.com or quora.com, in your WordPress site. AnsPress is made with developers in mind and is highly customizable.

It even includes voting and commenting on questions and answers, a private message system, email notifications and user profiles, among other features.

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Sabai Discuss for WordPress

q&a-plugins-SabaiDiscuss

SabaiDiscuss is a premium questions and answers plugin for WordPress. The plugin features the ability for users to ask and answer questions similar to Stack Overflow or Yahoo Answers. It’s an ideal tool not only for building a community driven question-and-answer website but also for building a discussion forum, a knowledge base, or even a helpdesk portal for WordPress.

Among its many features you will find the ability to search questions and answers by keywords and categories, the ability to post questions and answers from the front-end of your site, hierarchical categories, featured questions, user profile pages, and a lot more.

You can even check out the live preview of Sabai Discuss in action right here.

Get Sabai Discuss for WordPress

DW Question & Answer

dw-question-and-answer

DW Question and Answer is a WordPress plugin which builds a complete Question & Answer system for your WordPress site, like Quora or Stackoverflow. The plugin supports multi-languages, shortcodes, reCAPTCHA, email notification system and so on.

Among its key features you will also find the ability to submit, filter, order, edit, delete, answer or comment on questions and answers, it offers users the chance to vote on and pick the best answer, an instant search by keywords, stick questions and a lot more.

There is also an Embed Question add-on which allows users to share any great question on Social media channels such as Faceboook, Google Plus, Twitter, Linkedin and Tumblr. You can also embed any interesting question from DW Question & Answer site into your blog post, page content and even the Text widget.

Get DW Question & Answer

WP Answers

wp-answersWP Answers is a great plugin to easily add a questions and answer community to your existing site, or to create a new stand-alone community. It integrates with any WordPress theme while also offering a clean, responsive, and easy to customise theme of its own if you need one.

It also allows you to auto-generate content from Stack Exchange in order to kick start your community by pulling content from its API and making your site look busy from the start. WP Answers even integrates with Facebook and Twitter to facilitate viral growth, and offers users the chance to obtain points which list them on a leader board to encourage participation amongst themselves.

Get WP Answers

Themes

WP Answers

wp-answers-theme

As mentioned above, WP Answers offers a question and answer system for WordPress that allows you to add a Q&A community to your existing site, or create a new stand-alone community.

You can easily integrate the WP Answers plugin into any WordPress theme or use the included responsive theme that has many features and is easy to customize. It also integrates with Facebook and Twitter to spread your content virally by automatically posting to their profiles.

Get WP Answers

Answers – Templatic

Templatic have a premium question and answer theme that allows you to create a fully functional Q&A portal that is user driven and content oriented. This focus on content is visible in the design itself with the homepage being dominated by the big questions section.

Questions are separated through large tabs marked as recent, most responses, unanswered, and recently answered. The header offers two menus with drop down capabilities, login and registration links, and a search bar. Users have the ability to vote answers up or down and the individual that asked the question can assign the best answer. The admin may allow users to post questions for free or charge them a fee to do so via PayPal.

Every user has profile page that keeps track of the user’s answered and asked questions as well as how many votes he/she has received. Each question can be assigned a category and the total number of views are registered.

Get Templatic Answers

QAEngine

qaengine-theme

QAEngine is a new generation of WordPress Question and Answer theme with a content-focused UX and a refreshing full-width layout design. Users can easily ask questions, inserting links or pictures as needed. They can also browse topics to find the information needed with an Ajax live search, as well as view single question listings for more detailed answers.

It is both powerful and highly customisable. It offers a style customiser, a ready intro page, front-end controls for publishing and editing content, a simple and modern design, user badges and points system, and a live notification system, all while being mobile friendly with an adaptive design.

Get QAEngine

AskIt

askit-theme

AskIt from Elegant Themes effectively transforms your blog into a fully functional question and answer site. It allows your visitors to post their questions and have them answered by fellow members. Any visitor can post answers to these questions which are then voted on by the community until a “correct” answer is chosen by the question author.

Among its features you’ll find an ePanel for all the theme options you can need, shortcodes for designing and organising your posts, as well as page templates to make your life easier by giving you access to pre-made styles and functions.

Get AskIt

Q-and-A

q&a-plugins-dailywpQ&A

Q-and-A is a simple and powerful question-and-answers-like WordPress theme. It doesn’t really matter whether you are about to run a specific niche Q-and-A site (like math, coding, marketing, etc.) or a simple questions and answers site relating to the product you sell, this theme will be very useful. Moreover, what you can end up with is a small or even large scale community site that binds people who share the same interest.

Both Questions and Answers are posted via the theme’s front-end which means site users will never reach the dashboard. By answering the question well users collect reputation points, otherwise their reputation could go down. Answers that get accepted by the question author should bring the greatest score. Everyone willing to participate in your Q-and-A site must be registered.

Get Q-and-A

Conclusion

In general, the theme solutions seem to be easier to implement than the plugins, however this will then depend on the look and feel that you’re going for.

Have you used any of these plugins and themes? What’s your opinion, do they help to generate new traffic/more income?

UPDATE: This post was updated in June 2015 with new plugins and themes.

Jean Galea

Jean Galea is an investor, entrepreneur, and blogger. He is the founder of WP Mayor, the plugins WP RSS Aggregator and Spotlight, as well as the Mastermind.fm podcast. His personal blog can be found at jeangalea.com.

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32 Responses

  1. Hello,

    Awesome collection of Question & Answer plugins for WordPress. This blog is awesome for those people, which are new for WordPress and searching these type of plugins.

    keep updating.

    Thank you!!!

  2. Hi….. guys
    I am Using DW Q&A in my Website you can check out here

    its Better then other available plugins

  3. Hi, it’s a nice plugin. A good WP Plugin found that has amount of features.
    does the user get mail notification for that? by using this plugin…
    please reply

  4. “I recommend not buying anything from them.”.

    Too late =) I bought Q & A of WPMU DEV and it’s fucking limited without any updates and support.

  5. Be careful with WPMU Dev. Their Q&A product pricing is misleading. It’s not Just $19 but in fact $19 PER MONTH if you want to keep it updated with all the latest updates that WordPress comes out with. If you use Paypal, they will automatically sign you up for automatic payments. So I’d be careful endorsing that one. I personally will not ever buy anything from them again.

    1. I confirm that WPMU Dev methods are disgusting and revolting. These people are way to greedy and marketing oriented, their only goal is to make money as much and as fast as possible, and there’s not any support. These guys are dishonest, they even trick customers advices. I recommend not buying anything from them.

  6. Do you know of any Q&A plugins that do NOT require the user to login or register to post or answer a question?

    Thanks for the great article!

    1. Jon, trust me, you don’t want to do that. The amount of spam comments you will get will offset any convenience of not requiring a login. In fact, I quit using the WPMU Q&A plugin because I was still getting spam comments even after requiring registration.

      1. Thanks for the advice! I may have to rethink my approach then. Are there any plugins that allow a question to be asked anonymously that first require the admin’s approval before publishing? This again might lead to a lot of spam filtering, but at least the spam would not be published on the site immediately. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks!

        1. Degree3 had a moderation feature when I was looking at it a year ago. You would have to look at their current revision to see if that feature is still there.

  7. You forget is add subai plugin that is also powerful plugin to add questions answers option in wordpress.

  8. I request wp answers plugin for new bloggers .
    since wp answer is a plugin to convert the site automatically into Q&A site …….
    thanks a lot for your explanation

  9. Hi, i need plugin like If a user, lets say “ABC” asks a question, only the admin and “ABC” can comment and reply to that question. Another user “XYZ” cannot comment on that question. can i have that plugin or theme.

  10. Hi, it’s a nice plugin….I would like to know whether their is an option for the user who is answering the question to upload a file……

  11. Fantastic post. Any opinions on which is most mobile/tablet friendly? I am looking for a fast, functional QnA script at my site ne1up.com and need to implement something smooth enough to display nicely/effectively on various devices.

    Also need 100% of the source code which some scripts don’t give… Hadn’t thought about using WordPress, interesting option worth a little more thought…

    Thanks!

    Thomas @NE1UP

  12. Hi @mantic59, thanks for your question and interest in Pubble ) . I am not terribly familiar with those guys. We never come across them – we bump into UserVoice / Get Satisfaction but they are not really focused on Q&A. Just had a quick look at the Degree3 implementation on your blog. Obvious differences that I see:

    * Pubble supports page level Q&A threads. It looks like the same Q&A thread loads into every page on your blog? This may be a setting.

    * With Pubble, you get page level moderation (i.e. you can assign moderators at community / app / page level).

    * Pubble includes advanced reporting features (pages getting the most questions, moderators replying the fastest, etc.).

    * Pubble offers plugins for WordPress ) / Tumblr / Drupal (available in Pubble admin). They may also – not sure.

    * Pubble supports question submission via voice (Chrome only)

    * Pubble includes apps for Facebook that extend your Q&A community to your Facebook pages. See:

    Study USA:
    INTO Higher:

    * Pubble supports authentication via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pubble and question submission via email. We also support private question submission. Some live web site examples on:

    Study USA:
    INTO Higher:

    Hope this helps. Best, John

  13. Hi Jean, I’m John Co-Founder and CEO in Pubble. I noticed a couple of visitors coming through from wpmayor in our getclicky dashboard so I thought that I would check out your post. Great review of some really nice Q&A options. If you are planning on doing a follow up post, I would love to contribute. The Q&A apps that you have covered above take a different approach to what we focus on in Pubble. For us, its all about Q&A in context (i.e. the Q&A threads live on the pages that they relate to). The aggregated “FAQ” page (i.e. the style of page that you’ve included above) is actually built from the widgets deployed across the site.

  14. I’ve tried the WPMU Q&A (both free and paid) but I’m not particularly happy with it–it’s not quite mature enough for my taste (the paid version does support email notification though I have found it buggy). I’m seriously looking at Degree3’s Q&A WordPress plugin. It’s on my test box right now and it seems to be more flexible and reliable.

    1. Hi Mantic59, how did you like Degree3′s Q&A, I am also going to try some of these, so would like to ask you if you have something new and could review it. Thanks

      1. Julio, I put Degree3’s Q&A on my site, but it doesn’t get used a lot. Perhaps because of the floating tab for questions, I don’t know. In any case it’s used nearly as much as my previous Q&A solution, so I’m still looking for something that will work for me.

        1. The modal layout (pop-out) and Facebook social login is limiting your question volume. Try using an on-page layout on a select number of pages to compare.

  15. Does all of them support mail notifications….like when a new user answers….or someone posts a reply….does the user get mail notification for that….please reply..

    1. Not sure about that, you’ll have to try them out or ask on their help forums, let us know what you find out, thanks.

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