BuddyPress was conceived in 2008 while working to add social networking features to a WordPress MU powered site. The first official stable release was in May 2009. The platform has grown and morphed considerably since then, into the dynamic, easily extensible package you see today with a truckload of free and premium BuddyPress themes available. There is also a large number of useful plugins available for WordPress and BuddyPress making it possible to power up your features and possibilities.
Just like its parent project WordPress, BuddyPress is an entirely open source endeavor. Everything from the core code, to the documentation, themes, and plugin extensions are all built by the BuddyPress community. This means anyone can help the project by contributing their time and expertise. BuddyPress provides a range of features that work right out of the box. However, you might decide that you only need to make use of a couple of features to begin with. This is relatively easy using BuddyPress as you can turn off the features you don’t want with a click of a button. When you disable features, your site’s theme will auto adjust, showing only the menu items, pages and buttons, for the features you have enabled.
In this post, I will do a round-up of some of the best free and premium BuddyPress themes.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links and I will earn a commission if you purchase through those links (at no extra cost to you). I recommend that you do your own independent research before purchasing any product or service. This article is not a guideline, a recommendation or endorsement of specific products.
KLEO – Pro Community Focused, Multi-Purpose BuddyPress Theme
KLEO is a responsive community and social network WordPress that is responsive and retina ready. It integrates with BuddPress to provide a complete package. The theme package includes great demos to help you get started quickly. The theme has several new features. These include the SIDEKICK interactive tutorials integration, GeoDirectory plugin fully compatible, brand new demo and Sensei eLearning plugin compatibility. Also include in the package are Visual Composer frontend drag and drop page builder, Go responsive pricing and compare tables for WordPress, Slider Revolution, WooCommerce, Paid Memberships Pro, BuddyPress, bbPress and Google Maps. KLEO is compatible with Gravity Forms and Contact Form 7 plugins.
This theme is made to be beginner friendly. It comes with one click demo content for installing posts, menus and widgets. A child theme has been included to make it easy to upgrade the theme while keeping your theme files intact. All demos are included with the theme as well as offline documentation.
PowerMag Magazine Theme – DEMO
This is one of the most powerful magazine/reviews themes with BuddyPress integration. It comes paced with features and it is Retina-ready and Fully Responsive – build with Bootstrap. Follow the link and see the amazing list of powerful features and customization options.
Cinematix BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Cinematix theme is integrated with BuddyPress & bbPress which lets users register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. A social network in a box, build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.
Sweet Date – DEMO
SweetDate WP is a unique, clean and modern WordPress theme based on Zurb Foundation Framework. It is perfect for a dating or community website but can be used as well for any other domain. We put all the things that you need to create a perfect community system. Although at first we designed it to be used as a dating theme for WordPress, Sweetdate can be customized to match any domain.
Buddy: Multi-purpose WordPress & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Buddy is a clean, modern and fully responsive web design. It is a popular BuddyPress and WordPress theme that can be used for any type of website, whether it be business, corporate, community, magazine, portfolio, etc. It has a lot of cool features and with the auto install feature you will have the theme set up real quick. If you want to get to know Buddy a little better, the theme comes with detailed documentation and top-notch free support.
Social Buddy – WordPress & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Social Buddy is a responsive community WordPress theme that integrates with BuddyPress & BBPress and is perfect for niche communities and social networks.
Studio – DEMO
Studio is a balance of beautiful, pixel-perfect design with flexible, easy-to-navigate customization.
OneCommunity – BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
OneCommunity lets users register on your site and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. A social network in a box, build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.
Blogs MU – DEMO
Blogs MU is a stunning teams, groups and networking oriented theme. Control the site appearance and allow members to customize their profile pages too – works great with BuddyPress, WordPress and Multisite!
Razor: Cutting Edge WordPress Theme – DEMO
Razor is a clean, professional design for WordPress. Built on a responsive layout structure and supporting Retina (HiDPI) enabled devices, Razor’s beauty is more than skin deep. The theme is packed with powerful modern features and the advanced controls you wish other themes included. There are endless possibilities for building websites, communities, social networks and so much more.
Flix BuddyPress Ready Team Blogging – DEMO
Flix is a community and power blogging theme for WordPress. With BuddyPress support included into the the theme you can start your own community in no time.
Engage – WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress Theme – DEMO
Engage is a community based theme built on WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress that lets you signup visitors on your site. Members can then build their profiles, send messages, friend other people, interact in groups, post in the forum, share interests, and much more.
DynamiX – Premium WordPress Theme – DEMO
Dynamix is a professionally designed WordPress theme that you can customize in many different ways. it features Piecemaker 2 image rotator, BuddyPress plugin integration, WP e-Commerce plugin integration, Grid Gallery 3, 4, 5, 6 Column Options, etc.
Salutation – WordPress + BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Salutation is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme. Salutation has a clean design focused on high-level content organization. It’s easy to navigate and promotes a feeling of user satisfaction. The well organized menus and page structures encourage a positive user experience allowing your visitors to find what they’re looking for quickly. The theme includes administration features giving you complete control of your website’s layout and design. The unique and easy to manage design ensures your site will stand out and be remembered.
SuperMassive – Business WordPress/BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
SuperMassive is a powerful professional WordPress and BuddyPress theme. The aim from the beginning was to create a great looking theme that would allow you to make your own unique and abstract layouts in minutes. SuperMassive achieves this by incorporating a ton of easy to use shortcodes. It also comes with excellent support for audio/video files. If that isn’t enough it comes in five amazing skins, Obsidian, Obsidian Grunge, Chocolate, Arctic Fox and Tiger (Dark) to suit your particular taste. SuperMassive really does live up to its name!
Made – Responsive Review/Magazine Theme – DEMO
Made is a powerful review / magazine BuddyPress theme. It is designed to increase the amount of time users spend on your site. It has a lot of customization features, responsive design and built in user ratings.
Mingle – Multi-purpose WordPress Theme – DEMO
Mingle is an amazing WordPress theme and it’s BuddyPress ready! Mingle has been designed as an adaptable and highly intuitive WordPress theme. It includes administration features giving you complete control of your website’s layout and design. The unique and easy to manage design ensures your site will stand out and be remembered.
ReviewIt – Review WordPress & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
ReviewIt is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme that provides you with powerful review and community features.
WildCommunity – BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
WildCommunity is a BuddyPress theme. It lets users register on your website and start creating profiles, posting messages, making connections, creating and interacting in groups and much more. BuddyPress lets you build a social network for your company, school, sports team or niche community.
Bounce: Responsive Business WP & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Bounce is a powerful, professional and fully responsive WordPress & BuddyPress theme. It is very feature rich, check it out!
Tersus – Responsive WordPress Theme – DEMO
Tersus is a comprehensive responsive WordPress theme with BuddyPress plugin integration. It is a very popular theme with a powerful admin, tons of features and flexible options. Tersus is designed to suit almost all projects.
Politic: Campaign, Political WP & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Politic: Campaign & Political WordPress Theme is meant to make you look good, professional and make you stand out as a trusted candidate for the people. The theme is BuddyPress ready (1.6)! This feature will allow you to easily create your own social circle. This is important as a candidate today. The theme features a unique styling for your events and WP Email Capture plugins, which you’re notified promptly to install automatically, upon theme activation, enabling you to easily collect emails for your campaign and plan events with advanced functionality.
Score: Review WordPress & BuddyPress Theme – DEMO
Score is a WordPress and BuddyPress theme that is ideal for reviewing any kind of content
Huddle – WordPress & BuddyPress Community Theme – DEMO
Huddle is a clean, robust and easy to use community theme designed and developed for WordPress and make compatible to run seamlessly with both BuddyPress and bbPress plugins installed. Finally, a community theme that is both elegant, clean, modern, and easy to use, with top notch features and functionality out of the box.
BuddyPress Magazine – DEMO
The Magazine Theme meets allows you to run a media rich, gorgeous looking, BuddyPress or WordPress site that doubles as powerful community hangout – Publishing meets Community!
Business Portfolio – DEMO
Business Portfolio is all about showcasing things – it lives to make your content the center of attention in a fresh, elegant manner.
BuddyPress Scholar – DEMO
Scholar is a theme designed to work for heavy content sites, educational institutions and more ‘formal’ communities.
Business Feature – DEMO
Business Feature is all about making your content count. Get your content noticed with this great flexible and high impact theme. Based on the design of the incredibly popular wpplugins.com – Business Feature brings all the power to feature content that site has to your doorstep. Not only that it has an added ability to link to BuddyPress as well.
Gallery Theme – DEMO
Gallery is designed to showcase images. They could be photographs, paintings, products, services, even portfolio items – as the name suggests a gallery but a gallery can be of anything.
BuddyPress Social – DEMO
Social is a truly beautiful theme that takes inspiration from Facebook and delivers you more than you ever thought was possible from a theme – BuddyPress, WordPress or Multisite ready to go!
Business Services – DEMO
Business Services does exactly what the name suggests – it is a great way to show the services you offer. This theme though goes beyond that and can adapt easily to suit a range of sites and requirements.
EduClean – DEMO
The Edublogs.org homepage theme, is ready for you to disassemble and use in as many personal, business or other projects as you like!
The Daily Theme – DEMO
The Daily Theme is the Daily theme is the ultimate news / CMS based theme with multiple designs and layout options to launch your site into the headlines.
Network – DEMO
Network is a powerful front page theme perfect for displaying network-wide content on WordPress or BuddyPress.
Solitude – DEMO
The solitude theme features a two column fixed layout with a jQuery powered slider for the frontpage. This theme is easily configured through the themes option panel, and the theme is fully widgetized.
Product – DEMO
Product is a perfect theme to feature what you want to sell! Whether its your great BuddyPress community, handmade goods, ecommerce or your own services – this is the perfect marketing theme for you.
BuddyPress Community – DEMO
BuddyPress Community Theme is a theme which brings your people together, your friends to the table and your BuddyPress goodness out of the closet.
Dustin Betonio is a Translation Management graduate at University of Mindanao. His earlier career was devoted on customer service outside the information highway. Currently studying Law in the same University.
Nice selection of WordPress themes. The Razor theme is very customizable.
BuddyPress themes are the best and easiest solution for community websites.
Well steve this certainly depends on your needs. I agree that it is a flexible and low cost solution that will work for most new community websites.
Today I was search wordpress theme for our own website and i have catch from here, it is a fantastic link for wordpress theme. Thanks for Trip Wire Magazine
i found this new free buddypress and eCommerce theme, same theme author that developed the blogsmu and social i think. it is responsive and support woocommerce too.
btw thanks for sharing this buddypress theme list.
Nice selection of WordPress themes. The Razor theme is very customizable.
Which one do you recommend that would allow me to easily sign up new members of both Consumers, and Businesses, and then have the ability to show reviews/ratings for the businesses, or reviews/ratings for the events that the businesses schedule?? I’m trying to create an exclusive happy hour website where consumers would have the ability to rsvp for happy hours, rate/review them or the businesses that have the happy hours (the business profiles).
OH, AND RESPONSIVE so they can do this from their phones while at the happy hour, and so they can look at all the profiles who rsvp’d for the happy hour, while they are there, on their mobile phone, etc.
The date on this post is April 2013. Why is the oldest comment November 2011? I am just sayin.
Thanks Leon, we updated the article to include more recent material and get rid of broken links. Should have added a not about this as well!
What kind of forums they use at the hoodle and onecommunity, it sure doesn’t look like bbpress ??
I use the OneCommunity theme. Have some issues with it but working it out and it looks pretty good. The only problem is it states it has an instruction guide when you download the file but it doesn’t. And the support site poor and never accessible.
Thanks for such a nice colourful collection of community wordpress themes
Nice collection of themes. I like the BuddyPress Social theme, will download it for one of my new projects.
Thanks for sharing awesome themes 🙂
themeforest and wpmu……cool
Wow, awesome themes. Like it. Thanks for sharing
Ive been looking for an article like this for a while now, giving examples of the best and most versatile buddypress themes available so many sincere thanks for writing it.
Hi Simon, glad you found the article useful.
Best regards,
Sofie
Bounce is indeed a great looking theme. However, and it’s a big however, its implementation is badly conceived. Some things are installed/edited as widgets; some are in sample pages; some like the header top right navigation is a law unto itself. It’s not a theme for the newbie – it takes some working out! And everything is laborious compared to, for example, the StudioPress themes. You also need to be aware that getting help is a long-winded process. You need to have access to your purchase code (not in the sales receipt from theme Forest). You then need to fill… Read more »
how can i download a buddypress magazine theme?????
ne1 plz suggest
Can anyone recommend a Buddypress theme specifically for a dating/matchmaking site. Thanks
Try Mingle: http://para.llel.us/themes/mingle-wp/
Idk about Mingle. I bought a Mingle license from them about 6 months ago and their theme is well put together but if you try to make custom post types with custom post templates, they don’t exactly “help you” when you have questions about their theme hierarchy. But that’s just my opinion.
Then again…with bp 1.7 I don’t think it matters what theme you use if you have a good imagination.
Huddle i think is the best buddypress theme
As long as you don’t require support, where the average wait time for a reply is 2-3 weeks
I guess you haven’t seen yet Gratitude – http://themeforest.net/item/gratitude-buddypress-responsive-wordpress/1538282 . It’s an amazing theme and what makes it even better – being responsive!
Chris,
What happened to gratitude? I see your links for it, but it’s not on ThemeForest anywhere. Can you provide another link to another demo so I can check it out please. Thanks.
Very useful this article
Cool themes!
Can’t put it any simpler than that. The theme looks GREAT, I got my issue with the widgets worked out.
Cosmic Buddy could be nice (I’m not saying will be) if he’d get rid of the 37289 bugs 😉