The first time I noticed something was off was around 2022.
I’d been migrating XenForo forums on and off for over a decade. The work was always familiar, XenForo‘s database schema is clean, the importers are well-built, and the platform earned its reputation back in 2011 by being everything vBulletin 4 wasn’t.
But around 2022 the calls started shifting. People weren’t moving to XenForo anymore. They were moving away from it. Quietly at first. Then more openly.
In the spring of 2025, TechEnclave, a 20-year-old community with 2.5 million posts and 79,000 members, posted publicly that they were migrating off XenForo to Discourse. Their explanation was one sentence I’ve seen repeated almost word-for-word in admin forums since:
Progress on XenForo as a platform has stalled for years now.
– TechEnclave migration announcement, 2025
That’s the polite version. The less polite version is what XenForo admins say to each other in private threads on TheAdminZone: that 3.0 has been “coming soon” for so long it’s become a running joke, that the design hasn’t been refreshed since 2011, and that the price keeps going up while the feature gap with newer platforms keeps widening.
Some of it is unfair. The XenForo team has had real problems, co-founder Mike Sullivan stepped back from active development a couple of years ago, and a two-person company doesn’t just bounce back from losing one of two people. But unfair or not, the perception is real, and forum admins make decisions based on what they see.
So here’s what I actually see when I look at XenForo in 2026.
The price has crept up
XenForo raised its license price from $160 to $195 in January 2024. That’s the first price hike in years, and reasonable on its own.
The problem is the rest of the bill.
A practical XenForo install isn’t just the $195 license. You’ll probably want the Media Gallery add-on ($70), the Resource Manager ($70), and Enhanced Search ($60). Those are XenForo‘s own official add-ons, sold separately. If you don’t want the “Forum software by XenForo” tag in your footer, that’s another $250 for branding removal.
Then come the third-party add-ons. The XenForo community has built a healthy add-on ecosystem, but the pricing has crept upward over the years. Add-ons that used to cost $5 with lifetime updates now run $50-80 with annual renewals. Run four or five of them on your forum and you’re looking at $200-400 a year in renewals alone, on top of the $60 base license renewal.
I’ve seen first-year setup costs hit $1,400 on what people thought was going to be “a $195 forum.” Five-year total cost of ownership routinely lands between $2,500 and $4,500 for a serious setup. None of this is gouging, XenForo isn’t predatory. But the gap between the advertised price and what you actually pay has gotten wide enough that admins are noticing.
There is no AI. None at all.
This is the part that surprises forum admins most when I bring it up.
XenForo as of 2.4 has zero AI features. The XenForo 3.0 roadmap doesn’t add any either, the team has been clear that 3.0 is fundamentally a design refresh. “Effectively 2.3 with a new style,” in their words.
Compare this to what’s happening elsewhere. Discourse added AI summarization in 2024. wpForo 3.0, released earlier this year, ships with 360° AI-powered features baked into the core: semantic search, content moderation, translation across 100+ languages, an AI chat assistant trained on your forum content, automatic spam detection, topic summarization. The list goes on.
XenForo‘s response to all of this has been to release version 2.4 with a new editor and quality-of-life improvements. Useful. Not transformative.
This matters more than it sounds. A community member typing “my posts keep disappearing” into your XenForo search box gets zero results, because no thread contains that exact phrase. On wpForo, the AI semantic search finds threads about moderation policies, post approval, account verification, whatever the member was actually looking for. That difference compounds. Better search means members find answers. Members who find answers stay. Members who don’t, leave.
The design is from another decade
I’ll be diplomatic: XenForo‘s default theme has aged.
The basic forum view, horizontal rows, thread titles in a list, last-post excerpts on the right, is structurally unchanged since 2011. It’s the same design language as a 2010 vBulletin forum. Refined, polished, but recognizably from that era.
XenForo admins know this. In the official XenForo community last year, someone evaluating the platform wrote that “the forum and themes, in general, look like they’re from the early 2000s. I understand that some may find this nostalgic, but it looks incredibly outdated.” Nobody disagreed.
3.0 is supposed to fix it. It’s been “supposed to fix it” since 2022. As of right now, there’s no firm release date, and admins on TheAdminZone have stopped speculating.
A community member in XenForo‘s own forums put it diplomatically in early 2026: “By default, XenForo uses outdated structured data that is losing ground in the AI-search era.” Which is a polite, technical way of saying: the platform isn’t keeping up.
A small team is a fragile team
This isn’t a criticism. XenForo has always been built by a small team, and for most of its history that was a strength. Tight focus. No corporate bloat. Real engineers running the show.
But the downside of a small team shows up exactly when something goes wrong. When Mike Sullivan (the M in KAM, alongside Kier Darby and Ashley Busby) stepped back from active development in 2023, XenForo‘s velocity dropped visibly. The 3.0 release that had been promised “shortly after 2.3” got pushed indefinitely. As I write this, 3.0 still has no release date.
Compare that to WordPress, which is backed by Automattic (a multi-billion-dollar company), has 20,000+ active contributors globally, and ships major core updates every quarter regardless of which individuals are or aren’t available that week. The risk profiles are completely different.
If you’re a forum admin running a community that matters to you, that you’ve poured years of moderation effort into, that risk profile should factor into your platform decision. It rarely does, in my experience. But it should.
So where are people going?
Three places, mostly.
Some go to Discourse. It’s modern, well-funded, and increasingly common for technical communities. The migration from XenForo is doable but the resulting experience is genuinely different, Discourse is email-first, has a less traditional forum structure, and feels more like a mailing list with a web UI. Some communities love it. Others don’t.
Some go to phpBB or MyBB. These are free and stable, but aging faster than XenForo in some ways. Mostly chosen for budget reasons.
The interesting category is the third: WordPress with the wpForo plugin. This is the path more communities are quietly taking, and the one most XenForo admins haven’t seriously considered, because the mental model of “forum software” doesn’t include “WordPress plugin.”
That mental model is the wrong frame. wpForo isn’t bbPress. It’s a full-featured forum platform that happens to live inside WordPress, which means your forum gets the entire WordPress ecosystem for free, 65,000+ plugins, mature SEO tooling, the WooCommerce stack if you ever want to monetize, and a global community of agencies and freelancers who can help you when you need it.
And wpForo 3.0’s AI features are genuinely competitive with anything else on the market. The platform that XenForo admins have written off as “WordPress with a forum bolted on” turns out to be the most aggressively-developed forum platform of 2025-2026. That’s not the punchline anyone expected.
What I tell people who ask
When admins email me asking whether they should move off XenForo, I tell them honestly: it depends.
If your community is small to medium, you’re paying $200-400 a year in licenses and renewals, your moderators are burning out on spam, and your members are quietly complaining about search, yes, you should move. The five-year savings alone will fund the migration, and your members will thank you.
If you’re running a million-post community with a heavily-customized XenForo setup, a dedicated developer on staff, and add-ons you’ve invested years configuring, staying probably makes sense. The switching cost is real.
Most admins are in the first category. Most don’t know it yet.
If you want to know what moving looks like, we’ll quote your XenForo migration in 6-12 hours. You don’t pay until it’s done and you’ve signed off on the result. That’s how we’ve operated since 2010, and that’s how 4,200+ communities have made the move.