There is a quiet exodus happening across the forum world. Long-running communities on vBulletin and IP.Board (Invision Community) are packing up and leaving. Not because forum software is dying. Because their platform is. And the place most of them are heading? XenForo.
This post is not a polished marketing comparison. It is a real look at what forum admins have been saying for years, what the numbers show, and why XenForo has quietly become the default choice for anyone who runs a serious community and actually cares about it.
The Fall of the Giants
Once upon a time, vBulletin and IP.Board were the gold standard of forum software. If you ran a serious community in the 2000s, you ran one of these two. They were robust, they were trusted, they were everywhere.
Then something went wrong. With both of them. At roughly the same time.
What happened to vBulletin
In 2007, Internet Brands acquired vBulletin. The original developers stayed for a few years, then quietly resigned to start their own company. That company became XenForo. What they left behind spiraled into one of the most talked-about failures in community software history.
vBulletin got kinda killed by the Internet Brands buyout and vB4 and the vB5 upgrades. It still exists and you can still use it, but very few new sites do anymore.
Hacker News discussion, 2023
vBulletin 5, released in 2012, was supposed to be a complete modern rebuild. Instead, it shipped with thousands of open bug reports, a complete break in backward compatibility, and an interface that confused even veteran admins. The community never recovered from it. vBulletin.org, the unofficial hub for mods and styles that had run since 2000, was shut down in August 2024. That was the end of an era, and not in a good way.
By 2017, vBulletin 3 and 4 were declared End of Life. By 2023, vBulletin 6 was announced, but by then most of the forum admin world had already moved on.
The vBulletin pricing math in 2025: A vBulletin 6 license runs $179 with one year of updates, then $79 per year to stay current. XenForo costs $160 upfront with the first year included, then an optional $55 per year. The kicker: XenForo actually works.
What happened to IP.Board
Invision Community (formerly IP.Board) took a different path. Instead of breaking their software technically, they found a more direct way to lose their customers: pricing.
In 2025, long-term customers received an email announcing the cheapest hosted plan had jumped from $30 per month to $100 per month. That is more than triple. The self-hosted renewal fees had already jumped by 57% in 2022. The community response was immediate and angry.
I’ve been an Invision customer since 2005. The cheapest hosted plan is more than TRIPLE what I am currently paying. How are smaller communities supposed to deal with cost increases this insane?
Long-term IPB customer, Invision Community feedback forum, August 2025
The self-hosted option sits at $499 upfront plus $199 per year. And Invision no longer lets you buy just the forum module. You now pay for the entire suite whether you want the e-commerce module, the blog, the gallery, or not.
And beyond the pricing, there were deeper problems. One documented case from Capterra involved two IT managers running an executive community on IPB who spent 18 months filing bug reports, were accused of modifying the software (they hadn’t), were left without support for months, and ultimately abandoned the platform after losing over 2,000 hours of work.
We cancelled our IPB plan and let about 2,000 hours of work go down the drain. We have now moved on to a different vendor where we have experienced about 5% of the issue frequency as compared to IPB.
Verified review on Capterra, 2022
Why XenForo Is Different
Here is the thing most comparison articles skip over: XenForo was not built by a startup. It was built by the two lead developers of vBulletin who resigned after Internet Brands took over. Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan knew exactly what they were building against, because they had built what came before.
XenForo launched in beta in 2010. Its first stable release shipped in 2011. As of 2025, it is on version 2.3.7 with 2.4 in active development. The codebase has never been abandoned, never been sold to a corporate acquirer, and never had a major version break things catastrophically.
XenForo 2.3 ships with a redesigned default theme, improved JavaScript performance, and unbundled CSS caching for faster page loads. As of July 2025 the latest release is 2.3.7 with 2.4 in active development.
Speed: not even close
vBulletin 5 became notorious for its server resource usage. IP.Board is heavier still. A widely-cited comparison from forum hosting communities found that IPB uses more server resources than even vBulletin 4. XenForo was specifically designed for efficiency from the ground up.
XenForo hands down, without question or reserve. Friendlier, faster, more secure. Uses fewer resources than IPB, which uses more than even vBulletin 4.
XenForo community member with experience running all three platforms for clients
In practice this means: the same server that struggled with an IPB or vBulletin 5 installation will run XenForo comfortably. For large forums, the gap gets even wider. XenForo forums with 22 million posts report running without the catastrophic table-lock issues that plagued vBulletin installations at similar scale. The software is built to handle growth without making you rebuild your infrastructure every two years.
The developer story
This matters more than people realize. XenForo is developed by a small, focused, long-tenured team. They are not a venture-backed startup trying to reach an exit. They are not a division of a media conglomerate cross-subsidizing forum software with ad revenue. They make forum software. That is it.
The result is a product where the developers clearly use what they build. The XenForo community forum runs on XenForo. Every major version ships because the team actually wanted those features, not because a product roadmap committee approved them after three quarters of planning.
Who built XenForo: Kier Darby, lead developer of vBulletin 3 (the version most people still consider the best vBulletin ever shipped). When he resigned from Internet Brands in 2010, he took years of deep forum architecture knowledge with him. XenForo is built on that foundation.
Pricing that does not punish loyalty
The XenForo model is unusually honest for commercial software. You pay $160 once. That includes the first year of updates and ticket support. After that, you can renew for $55 per year, or you can keep using whatever version you have indefinitely at no extra cost.
There is no subscription lock-in. No hosted-only tier. No mandatory suite purchase. No annual price hikes. No email announcing your renewal just tripled. The software is yours.
The add-on ecosystem
One of the early criticisms of XenForo was that its add-on marketplace was smaller than vBulletin’s or IPB’s. That was true in 2011. It has not been true for a long time. The XenForo Resources section now hosts thousands of add-ons, themes, and language packs. The developer community is active, the quality bar is high (because the core API is clean), and the pricing for third-party add-ons is generally reasonable compared to the IPB equivalent.
IPB and XenForo, it’s a real battle. IPB has a very big assistance and modules, but the modules are really expensive. XenForo has more modules and they are cheaper.
Forum community comparison thread, ForumWeb Hosting
Who Should Still Consider vBulletin or IPB
This is a fair question. The honest answer is a short list.
vBulletin still makes sense if you are already running vBulletin 4 or 5 and your community has deep customizations that cannot be easily ported. Migrating is work, and if the platform is stable enough for your needs, staying put has its own logic. Just do not expect vBulletin 6 to feel like a step forward.
Invision Community still has advantages if you genuinely need the full suite: forums, blogs, commerce, events, gallery, and downloads all under one roof with a shared user system. For enterprise organizations that need that breadth and have the budget to match, IPB’s suite approach is genuinely compelling. Just budget for the renewal increases.
For everyone else, running a community forum without unusual suite requirements and without an enterprise budget, the calculation is simple.
The Real Community Verdict
Forum admins are not shy about this comparison. The XenForo community forums are filled with threads from people who ran vBulletin for a decade and finally made the switch. The tone is almost universally the same: why did I wait so long?
I’ve used both vBulletin and XenForo and prefer XenForo by far. It is so much easier to administer.
Forum administrator, ForumWeb Hosting comparison thread
Worth every penny. Immaculate support. IPB is bloat. VB sucks. We settled on XenForo for our own project and have not looked back.
Forum agency owner with client projects on all three platforms, XenForo community
The numbers back it up too. According to Google Trends data cited in a KeyCDN analysis, XenForo interest has remained steady and growing while vBulletin and IPB have declined. That trend reflects what is happening on the ground: forums are moving, and XenForo is where they are landing.
Moving Your Forum to XenForo
XenForo has built-in importers for vBulletin 3, 4, and 5, as well as for IP.Board. But built-in importers handle the basics: posts, users, threads, categories. They do not handle private messages reliably on large archives, custom user fields, 301 redirects from old URLs, attachment migrations, or your theme. And any missed redirect is a permanent SEO loss.
That is where a professional migration service makes the difference. We have migrated hundreds of communities from vBulletin and IP.Board to XenForo. Every post, every user, every attachment, every private message, and every old URL covered with a 301 redirect so your search rankings come with you.
The migration takes 24 to 48 hours. Your live forum stays online the entire time. You pay only after you have inspected and approved the result.
If you have been running on vBulletin or IP.Board and this article sounded uncomfortably familiar, the move you have been postponing is easier than you think.