Freelance Forums

I've looked around quite a bit and am trying to decide what to use for my next forum. IPB and VB seem to be the best feature wise from what I've seen. I've read about phpbb and smf amongst others. Anyone got any experience of how these compare to the paid ones?

PHPBB all the way. Not only is it free but its VERY powerful. The community support for the software is huge. You can find mods, templates, and support almost anywhere.

Johnny

This is often a huge debate about which forum software to use. I would have to say that VB is the best out there today.

VB is the best but its not free so use PHPBB its the second best forum software and its free and u have a good support

Best Free Board: PHPBB

Best Paid Board: VB

Out of those two i'd go with VB.

Being realistic phpBB comes 3rd place after IPB. It's close between IPB and vb for the number 1 slot imo.

Ok then, here is my take:

vB is very feature rich, as is ipb. The downside: paying full stop (.)

However, with some tactical modifications, you can optomize phpbb to have mostly all of these features, without the payment. So you decide, a couple of hundred dollars or 100 hours modifying??? I would go modifying and do it gradually.

Boy ya had to open this can of worms, lol Ok it's like this IPB rox, hehe Vbull is great, both of those are paid, for free phpbb3 is looking pretty good, and SMF is excellent as well, SMF is the old YaBB by the way but much more admin friendly in my book.

SMF isn't the old YaBB. YaBB (CGI/Perl) is still in development. The port of YaBB to PHP and mySQL was YaBB SE. YaBB SE has since ceased, and the developers of it have written SMF, a seperate system written from the ground up.

I'd say SMF beats phpBB by far. It has all of the useful phpBB MODs as default features, has tons of other useful MODs, an expanding theme archive, and is extremely stable. It's also an extremely powerful software, and quite versitle.

In my opinion, if you're going paid, go for vBulletin. If you want something free, definately go with SMF.

The guys who wrote SMF left YaBB to write it, so to me its the old YaBB

I saw something that someone said, and I think it needs to be said.

phpbb is free, vB is $160 dollars. But is vB 160 times better than phpbb?

Can you say that everything about it is 160% better? Do You honestly use every feature on the software? No? Thats what swayed me to the free side of the force.

Is the superb support behind vBulletin worth the $160? Is the wonderful selection of hacks worth the $160? Are all the rich features worth $160? It all depends on what you want to do.

I believe the best one is Invision Power Board. It's simple while having many features for the user and it's really powerful for the admin.

Points taken, but if you know your webdeveloping then the features and hacks and skins are easy to implement. But ya I do see where you are coming from.

Invision seems to not care about the average joe who buys their software, they seem more concerned with getting big corporations to use their stuff. They bragged about all the big companies using their stuff on the website last I saw.