Its open source product, Vanilla OSS, is a lightweight Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language using the Garden framework.

Vanilla is designed to bring forums back to their roots, providing core functionality with additional features such as emoticons available as plugins.

[4][5][6] Hosted plans offer many features from the open source version with additional premium add-ons supported by the core team.

[17] Between 2002 and 2005, this alpha version of the forum went through many revisions, and the core theming and plugin engines were built, culminating in the release of Vanilla OSS.

[21] Vanilla OSS has a very lightweight core with a number of optional plugins, including chat, private messages, "Who's Online", and attachments.

Applications can be extended by plugins and themes, these mainly use a combination of convention based file structure, configuration, and event hooks.

The features held back are Reactions[38] & Badges, Polls, User Ranks, and enterprise integrations such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and GitHub (among others).