Question for forum owners: vBulletin 4.x vs. Invision Power Board 3.x vs. xenForo 1.x

007 · Jul 24, 2011

I'm interested in what other forum owners here have to say about some of the most talked about platforms out there. I'm a vBulletin 3.8 users at the moment and am running it on one of my forums which is nearing a million posts. I'm considering a big upgrade including hiring a coder to custom code several new features, rolling out a new design, etc. From what I've heard, vBulletin users are not happy with vB4. The two big ones that people are going to are Invision and xenForo (A promising new forum software being developed by former lead vbulletin developers).

My question is mostly to those who currently use vBulletin 4, but anybody can answer, especially if you have experience as a user on any of these other platforms.

Is vBulletin 4 really that bad? I know DNForum runs it and I've personally not had any problems here, but I've never used it as an admin or really an overly active member either.

Should I stick with vb 3.8 or upgrade to 4.0? Or furthermore, what's been everyone's experience here with the other two that I mentioned?

LeeD · Jul 29, 2011

Our plan is to stick with vBulletin 3.8 and consider vBulletin 5 when it finally arrives. Xenforo is interesting but it is too early for us to commit to using that platform. IPB is a worthy candidate but just doesn't seem to have the plugin / modifications support that vBulletin does.

007 · Jul 30, 2011

That's what I ended up deciding in the end. Going to stick with 3.8 for now. If vBulletin 5 is another flop then it will be time to consider an alternative, but it doesn't make sense to decide that now with no forum software really as the clear front runner (based on current releases).

Poohnix · Jul 30, 2011

I'm an admin of a quite busy forum running vB4. Can't say we've had any real issues with it, it runs quite well.
Activity is about 50,000 posts per month, so it's not exactly idle.
I don't know it it was worse when it first came out... we didn't upgrade to vB4 until 2 months ago, and are currently running v4.1.3.