Here is a Forum Demo where you can compare 8 forum scripts. Invision Power Board MyBB phpBB PunBB SMF vBulletin WowBB XMB Check it out, it's a pretty handy page.
IMO, I choose Vbulletin because it is highly customizable to fit your creativity and isn't so bad on price to be honest for an owned license. I like Phpbb and SMF as well, those are free ones if you want to go the free route.
vbulletin is the best, really. Even if it costs money. For free i would recommend phpbb or smf, which you said, but they can not go with vb. Before i got my forum, is used phpbb. It works very well but it hasn't so many possibilities like vb. A friend of mine got smf, this seemed to be like vb. The style was nearly the same, also the settings. Also: Vbulletin is more Google SEO friendly, and you can have more visitors from google search results if you use Vbulletin. And the biggest and best forums are using vb. So it is highly recommend.
Totally agrees with Zero esp on the SEO part. SMF is nice and it has hacks just not as many as VB and if i remember right i dont think you can see the code, i dont remember though.
smf does have a free seo mod, at least the last time I setup a smf forum there was.. That would fix the url's and help with some of the duplicate content. with vbulletin, I would highly suggest adding vbseo
Its been so long since using or interacting with SMF, I hardly remember anything about it. Although VBSeo is a paid mod but it is very useful and of course highly recommended.
Great page. That site is great. It lists just about every thing you need to know about a forum. Its just a shame IPB is no longer free. Ive noticed that whenever I do a google search a vbulletin forum will come up. In terms of SEO VB would be the only way to go. Although its great that SMF has an SEO package. Thanks for letting me know about the SMF SEO package. Ill look out for that
By asking if Vbulletin is worth it, I am guessing you have never been hacked? Nor have you ever really needed support? Because if you had, you would not be asking. I have used all of these on my sites: phpbb2 SMF MDforum Dragonfly Vbulletin Vbulletin is the most secure out of all of them. I have seen some post in this thread saying that VB is just like the rest - that is bull. Some forums, during the install you have to CMOD every folder to 777. With Vbulletin you do not have to do that. One popular PHPBB site I used to visit stayed hacked. The owner would fix the problem, the site would go back up, then a few days latter it was hacked again. This game went on for about 2 months. The owner finally switched to SMF. A close friend of mine had a phpbb forum, after getting hacked several times he finally closed his site. You should really try a free forum software for a year or so. Be sure to install some mods and customize the templates. Get hacked a few times, beg for support in that free forums support section. And when you are finished playing, buy vbulletin and run with the big boys.
I've been wondering this same thing and given the responses here and my personal experience it seems VB is the way to go. I have both PHPbb and SMF and they just don't make the grade when you're trying to have a top notch website. Given the advice here, I think I'm going to go with VB.
I just went to check up on the prices and the "nominal" annual fee just went up. I believe the $40/$60 was $25 a month ago. "The owned vBulletin Forum license allows you to run the software on your site indefinitely. Along with this license, you will receive one year of free updates. Beyond the first year, a nominal fee of $60 (or $40 if purchased within 60 days of the license expiring) is payable to obtain updates for an additional year. "
Well out of the free forums and the paid forums, i personally feel that Vbulletin is the best way to go since they send out updates about new versions, also you can go to vbulletin.org and get free mods or find a programmer who can work with vbulletin and make you mods as you go. and also vbulletin is a very good open source software/script however you define it... so in the long run when you get done paying that $180(instead of the $160 before price raising up) that when you have loads of members that you will be glad that you invested in it to begin with. as for the mods there are many more for vbulletin than anything else that i have come across. i have a friend that can help on installing any mods for vbulletin at a nice price and is really great.
Asking for help in the SMF forums is more like begging for support. I used SMF bridged with joomla - it was one of the worst experiences I have ever had as a site owner. At one time smf offered a bridge to joomla and even had a forum for bridged websites. Questions in the smf forum went unanswered for weeks. If an answer was posted, it usually went like this - "that is a joomla problem". Sometimes, sections out of a support thread were deleted. In one thread, someone was having the same exact problem as I was. We were posting replies for about a week. A few days into this a coder posted a few suggestions. Then all of a sudden, every post by that other guy was gone. Half the thread was deleted. How is a forum supposed to work when people delete 1/2 the thread? After about 6 months of trying to get smf and joomla to bridge and play nice with each other, I finally gave up.
I feel that "worth it" would imply that you are looking to host a prestigious or large community. In my own experiences I have found that most VB installations were not worth it, however, it is really how you want to percieve your site that should decide what kind of forum to offer. I usually find that IPB works best for my forum solutions, but VB is a pleasent second. Overall I find that VB is not really worth it though in most cases.
There are some people who will tell you to use free software until your forum starts to take off, but I love vBulletin and would not start a forum without it! -Raymond
Definately worth every penny. I used phpbb at first, made all kinds of mods to it and still wasn't happy. Vbulletin has all of the options I wanted in a default installation.
I was using phpBB, SMF, VBulletin and IP, and i find VBulletin like the best, because of the speed, the support, the look and the modifications.