What Forum software do you prefer?

I really like IPB, especially with the changes they have been making / have made in 2012. I think they are leading the way.

vBulletin just seems a little lost to me. Trying hard to make back what it is they lost.
 
BrandonM said:
I like IPB and xenforo a lot. Not a huge fan of vbulliten.
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XenForo does look good.

I am holding off from buying because of the lawsuit though, at the moment they are unable to release any more versions and it sounds like it will stay that way for a while.
 
I love phpBB, use it for all of my classes (I teach web design and coding classes). I have heard vBulletin is great as well, but if I can get what I see as all the necessary tools from a free forum, why pay?
 
I have used both phpBB and vBulletin over the years for various sites. I used them for forum fan sites for games and for forums for various business's.

For the game sites we use to run, I preferred phpBB because you set it up for free and let the players who ran it customize it with very little experience. It is a good platform to learn on and easy to use.

For a more professional site or business, IMHO, vBulletin is the only way to go., it's fairly easy to integrate with your site and I never had any security issues like phpBB could have at times. For me though the look, feel and integration was always the big seller for us to purchase vBulletin.
 
IPB & XenForo all the way for commercial systems.

MyBB for free software.

All the ones mentioned above are in a class of their own I think.

+1 to the XenForo lawsuit now being over and active development commencing again on XenForo!!!
 
I have seen myBB but never Vanilla. What are the plusses of these, or is it really just personal preference and what you have experience with?
 
vBulletin is the more enterprise level forum system, and I have years of experience using it on a large scale (150,000 members).

MyBB is actually quite nice as well, as a free alternative.
 
webling said:
Why would someone want to pay the price for vBulletin when you can get SMF for free?
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Because they may feel vBulletin works better for them?

Prefer the look, feel, feel its more flexible / have a plugin they specifically want among many more potential reasons.

I personally would never purchase a vBulletin license (at least not any time soon) as v4 + v5 seems to be some very big steps backwards.

I think commercially XenForo & IPB will be the dominating softwares, unless something else pops up / vBulletin does some serious changing before they loose their market share.
 
I have used ipb, smf, vbulletin and phpbb. I don't care for phpbb. Smf uses the least cpu cycles from what I have seen. Vbulletin and ipb each have their good and bad points. I have been using ipb for years but recently I have been thinking about switching to vbuletin. Vbulletin has better mods but the cms is not as good as the one for ipb. I would love the features from ipb's cms to be in vbulletin's cms as it would be perfect for me.

Also I can not disagree that vbulletin looks like it is going back words. So I am not sure if it is a good idea for me to switch or not. IPB has a lot of nice features and is very up to date. however it lacks stable mods that vbulletin has.
 
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For paid forum software I like Vbulletin. And for free software mybb is the one I prefer.

I currently use mybb on a forum I run. Have been considering upgrading to vbulletin sometime. But not sure on it yet since the new Vbulletin seems to have some bugs that need working out.

Chad
 
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