Favorite Forum Software

[The Hulk]

What's your favorite forum software? Mine is Xenforo. 

[ZandraJoi]

For free, I will go with Proboards. It'd give a 5 star rating if they let us migrate over to another platform 😛

For paid, Xenforo for me as well. I've been on several of them & while they are the pricier platforms, you do get what you pay for & I've seen a lot of quality.

[Uncrowned Guard]

Purely for forums, I do prefer Xenforo.

[Aerodynamic]

It's a tie between Invision Community and XenForo. It if it wasn't for the 3rd party developers, I'd pick InvisionCommunity.

 

Curious you said Xenforo, while you're running Invision on all of your forums,  @Uncrowned Guard Care to elaborate on that? 😄

[Uncrowned Guard]

7 hours ago, Aerodynamic said:

It's a tie between Invision Community and XenForo. It if it wasn't for the 3rd party developers, I'd pick InvisionCommunity.

 

Curious you said Xenforo, while you're running Invision on all of your forums,  @Uncrowned Guard Care to elaborate on that? 😄

So I do believe XF beats IPS head to head when it comes to the forums.  The battle has seen XF mostly sit idle as IPS has caught back up, but XF's dedication to just building a forum shows. Granted, the differences are pretty minor at this point and none of them would really be a benefit for me.

The problem is after the forums.  Once you leave the forum battle, IPS offers a full suite of community tools and applications that XF (including Bob's awesome add-ons) just can't complete with and normally don't even have an alternative to offer.  

The largest issue was actually the article and CMS systems. Here we merely use a template to make our pages look a bit better and everything else is handled by IPS without any need for third parties.  XF offers nothing at this level and all the third party tools I have seen really struggle with a "database" looking design vs a user friendly look.

Now the only issue with this post is Invision Community 5 coming next year and it looks amazing and so far XF does not appear to have anything to answer with.