XenForo – the new king of forum software

Today Xenforo 1.0 was released, a new forum software. Boring? No, exciting. Despite being a new software and having 1.0 as it’s version number, it immediately got the attention of many forum admins because it was written from scratch by Kier Darby and Mike Sullivan, two talented coders who where in large parts responsible for the success of the old market leader, vBulletin.

It’s obvious to compare the new kid in town Xenforo to the old market leader vBulletin, so here are the current advantages of vBulletin:

• Integrated social groups, blog, CMS  (at least if you buy the more expensive suite)
• Many other features

So the old standard software naturally has more features than the newcomer. But why did I call vBulletin old? Here are the advantages of XenForo:

• Way more easy to use (and I speak about the average forumuser)
• Rock solid software as many, many sites prove that migrated to Xenforo during the Beta period and large sites that are planning the migration to XenForo
• Written from scratch, that means: modern technology and stability and industry standards
• Experienced, dedicated developers with the vision to build the most advanced forum software
• Easy styling
• Alerts, activity stream, likes and many more modern features
• A company that has the trust of many forum admins

And believe me, the advantages of Xenforo are the disadvantages of vBulletin, a software ruined by a greedy company (Internet Brands who bought the old Jelsoft company). Does the software lack some features? Yes. But will many forums benefit from a switch to Xenforo? Yes.

In the few month XenForo was available as Beta software, the community of addon developers, users and forum admins grew from zero members to more than 6000 members, from 0 posts to 170,000 posts. I never saw a forum growing so fast in so few days. Within a few months dozens of addons where developed or ported to the new software and all report the same: coding addons shows how many thoughts Kier and Mike invested in the basic structures of the software.

Try it yourself, visit the future of forum software.

This review was written by an enthusiastic forum admin with 10+ years experience with several forum software.