Drupal forum has less features than vbulletin. If you want to develop a big forum site, vbulletin is the best choice.
It doesn't cost that much money to kick start a Drupal? But if you are planning to go on a long run with your forum, vBulletin is the best. Owned license can get you pretty far. I've got three and am loving all three of them.
here is a new forum that I want t build it by drupal : http://we.vatgar.com/ I went integer drupal and Vbulletin but this have several problem ( integration is not good idea ! ) if you want use drupal for other feature of this cms you should use drupal forum modules too . There are several modules in drupal that by used these you can get nice forum output .
You said it right the first time. If you want to save yourself a lot of "pain" and misery, go with VBulletin. Out of the 2, you are going to get your best support and security out of VBulletin. Drupal is supported by a fine community. But there is nothing like being able to submit a real trouble ticket to a real help desk. And, if you run into serious problems - phone support is an option for VBulletin. Even though you do have to pay for phone support, its still an option.
The difference is that if you want to make your site anything but just a forum you're better off with Drupal. In other words, if you are just building a forum, sure use VB, but if you plan on also having blogs, a store, video media etc, you'll be way better off using Drupal altogether as integrating vb with Drupal is not easy or tight.
I have already vbulletin forum for alst 3 years and its amazing product. Unfortunately we dont get a CMS like that and vbulletin ssems to be focussed on just vbulletin and all products with a look and feel of forum. Now my exosting site is 5 times larger than forums and i wish to move it to CMS and hence I am thinking of having a dedicated cms with just single option.
I will suggest to use drupal for main site.. and integrate Vbulletin with Drupal. Drupal has a Module to integrate Vbulletin. Vbulletin forum is far better than default Drupal forum.
Thanks a lot for comments. I am thinking that a paid version of EE might be much better than drupal though it lacks components like blogs for users etc as a paid product is much better than so called open source project where maintaining it might be more time consuming and costly. Only exception seems to be Wordpress though
What is EE? Just because you know what an acronym means does not mean that everyone else does. Proper grammar requires that the acronym be defined before using it. Also, if you are looking for a CMS for VBulletin, there are a lot of professional grade options out there. Take a look at subdreamer, phpcow, typo3 and vbadvanced.
Integrating Drupal and vBulletin is not a good solution from what my engineers have told me in the past. You can do everything with Drupal and some that you can do with vB, but it may take a lot of work.
yes drupal and vbulletin is messy and though drupal is open source the TOC ( total ownership cost) for a non techie is much higher than other softwares like expression engine and in fact Acquia is more or less a paid open source.
I have been using drupal for more than 3 years and the community contributed modules can pretty much replicate most of the functionality that other bulletin boards have. However - The learning curve is very very steep with drupal and if something goes wrong , cost to get it fixed if you cant do it yourself is just astounding. Also Drupal is quite a resource intensive content management system and it tends to struggle on normal shared hosting environment if you have more than a few modules installed.