vBulletin is a powerful and sophisticated forum platform that has traced back to 2001. Since that time, this advanced bulletin board has earned the love and loyalty of large communities all over the world serving about 40.000 online communities at the web. bbPress, contrastingly, is plain and simple forum software designed by WordPress developers, that is easy to use, easy to administrate, fast and clean. But don’t let its simplicity deceive you – underneath the gleam, it’s got some powerful features and is highly customizable.
vBulletin vs bbPress: Overview
vBulletin is commercial forum software that runs separately from your site. The platform is also suitable for running a forum and blog at the same time. The price of vBulletin starts from $249 (free forum support and one month ticket for support).
bbPress, on the other hand, is a free forum plugin made by WordPress way. It means that you should install this tool directly on your WordPress core and run it in tandem with your website.
Virtually, it’s not necessary to choose your future forum platform in accordance with its price. Being a free bulletin software, bbPress undoubtedly has some limits in contrast to the commercial vBulletin, while the latter may have more advanced and powerful features that will fit your forum best.
Forum Platforms Working Fields
vBulletin is usually used for business matters while bbPress is used as the addition, third-party tool to a website or other web project.
Forums Under-the-Hood
Moving on to the core functionality of vBulletin and bbPress forums, let’s discover some management aspects in details. Generally, both bulletin boards possess built-in functions as well as third party plugins or extensions that aim to improve forum functionality. So, check up the list of their basic existing features below:
vBulletin |
bbPress |
|
Field for Posting |
There’s a built-in field for posting that is supported with BBCode (lightweight markup language) |
In order to post, you have to install a specific plugin. And there’s no BBCode implementation. |
Emoticons |
A built-in tool with various icons. |
It’s required a plugin installation. |
WYSIWYG(visual editor) |
+Req | Requires the additional plugin. |
SyntaxHighlighting |
+ | Plugin |
Security System |
+ | Plugin |
Groups |
Multiple groups creation possible |
One only |
Upgrade Method |
Within a dashboard + manual interaction |
Within a dashboard |
Generally, the major benefits that explain bbPress popularity are the possibilities to integrate a forum with a website and manage these two web projects within one dashboard. This nice feature saves a good deal of time and effort, plus your users won’t have to log in twice, separately to your website and forum.
In contrary, vBulletin possesses more advanced and sophisticated options. To reflect it – assistance support is always available, plus you may create the truly professional forum website together with the weblog.
If you have made your final verdict on your future bulletin board, but don’t want to start running it from the scratch – you may easily migrate vBulletin to bbPress. Following the tutorial presented below, you’ll definitely be able to transfer vBulletin to bbPress without ringing the bell of a developer: