In the world of web technologies, people are divided into those who take hazards and those who strengthen their strategic stability. In other words, there are those who are always in search of alternatives for their online projects and those who are insistently improving and polishing their site’s features. Today, a large number of website owners prefer to start the website from scratch rather than beat their old sites completely. The same situation is with the discussion board owners. To be specific, the trend to leave vBulletin in favor of bbPress is currently growing because of the desire to run both forums, blogs, and websites right in one place.

There are various ways of building a forum on the new platform – for instance, you may duplicate your forum content on the current platform and paste it to the new one. However, you should realize that it is an absolutely thankless job. Alternatively, you may choose between a built-in bbPress importer or an automated solution – CMS2CMS forum migration service. Focusing on the more improved ways of data, let’s see all their pros and cons below.

Options Built-in bbPress Plugin Automated CMS2CMS vBulletin to bbPress Migration
Forum Status Usually, the forum owners assign the statuses to their forums, for example, there can be sticky ones, that are shown at the top of the forum page and they are stable. During the bulletin board content migration, the built-in imported does not preserve the forum status at the new discussion platform. When transferring your forum from vBulletin to bbPress, the automated converter keeps the forum status during the website migration. It means, that if you have a sticky forum at your vBulletin website, they will stay the same at your bbPress forum at WordPress CMS.
Forum Categories The built-in importer allows migrating your forum categories to the bbPress forum field. It means that every new category will be displayed as a separate forum. In case you plan to make preserve the category system at your new bbPress forum, you should manually configure the forum types for the category. While using automated CMS2CMS forum migration service, all the forum categories are converted respectfully to the bbPress categories.
Forum Posts/Replies and Topics Unfortunately, bbPress importer doesn’t preserve the migration of posts, replies that are marked ‘favorite’, subscribed topics. The automated converter allows migrating the favorite and subscribed topics to the bbPress forum platform preserving their statuses. 
Custom vBulletin   Codes       If you have some embed items like
youtube video, infographic, etc, you won’t be able to convert them to bbPress using a built-in importer.     
Otherwise, using CMS2CMS, your vBulletin BBCode will be migrated similarly to bbPress at once.

Migration Entities

vBulletin to bbPress Migration Alternatives

So, if you are still wondering whether to migrate your forum data from vBulletin to bbPress, you may try a free Demo Migration right away and make your final decision.