Xenforo Review - What are your thoughts?

MasterA Level 1

June 15, 2016, 7:08 pm

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Xenforo Review - What are your thoughts?

Xenforo is a popular forum software with over 94,000 members in their community forum and has only been released for 5 years. I have been using Xenforo for a while now and would like to write a short review about them.

Xenforo has lots of very nice features and there are many very useful 3rd party addons in their marketplace. There Xenforo community is also very helpful when you have issues and there are many developers in the community who are willing to produce custom features for you. However, one disadvantage is that a lot of the addons in the Xenforo marketplace are paid and it can be quite costly to add lots of features to your forum. Furthermore, they don’t have a complete suite like IPB.

Xenforo also lacks some very basic features as well such as a built in referral system. There is a referral addon out there but it doesn’t seem very good. However, Xenforo does seem to be quite user friendly and the customer service seems quite good. I think Xenforo definitely has some great potential. They are still in their version 1 release and I think they will might become one of the best forum softwares in the future.

What are your thoughts about Xenforo?

Comments

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Beverly

Beverly

I've used Xenforo for awhile and really like it, but like you said, there are downsides to the software too as there is with any software. I think there was a lot of initial buzz about this software and people hyped it up as the next best thing, but really there are many features on free and other paid software that are just as worth having.

8 years ago

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robertman11

robertman11

I like XF but haven't actually used it (as a webmaster/owner) in a long time. Back when I switched to it I was accustomed to vBulletin and XF had a lot of features that VB wasn't up to date on yet. Also, VB was bloated and ate up server resources while XF was fast and efficient. I do not know if that has changed between the two yet, I know that VB released a lot of new versions with a lot of features. I also know/heard that the XF guys use to work at VB and were sued by VB.

8 years ago

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MasterA

MasterA

Xenforo is still quite fast and efficient and I guess that is one of their unique selling points. That is also another reason why I like them. However, there are always downsides to anything. As Beverly has said, there was a lot of hype with Xenforo when it was released but it slightly overrated; it isn’t as good as you might think but they have been released for shorter periods than their competitors such as Mybb and IPB.

Yes, there was a lawsuit between Xenforo and vBulletin but it was settled in 2013. The lawsuit didn’t seem to affect Xenforo’s demand and lots of people were still using them even before the lawsuit was settled.

8 years ago

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robertman11

robertman11

The speed was one of the main reasons I switched. vBulletin was incredible slow and bloated compared to XF at the time. This was back in 2012. I do like the idea of vBulletin's cloud solution though. No more hassleing with servers if you want to start a form, although you do lose control/options with cloud solutions (and the speed probably is worse on a shared host).

8 years ago

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MasterA

MasterA

Yes, I agree that having a cloud solution is very useful. You don’t have to worry about constantly upgrading your forum and they deal with everything including backups. I looked at the vBulletin website and they don’t seem to have anything higher than 200GB of bandwidth for their cloud solution. Do they have custom plans for larger websites? With smaller forums the cloud solution is quite good but when your forum grows, I think it will be better to host your forum on your own VPS or dedicated server.

Xenforo don’t have a cloud solution but since both IPB and vBulletin has them, I guess Xenforo may consider it in the future. However, Chris has stated they have no plans for it at the moment as they are focusing with Xenforo 2.0.

8 years ago

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EliteWriter

EliteWriter

I agree with most of the things you pointed out in your Xenforo review. All in all it is a popular platform and many have tried to use it to build a community. It has various modern features and options as well as a good number of customization possibilties. The administration options are great and when it comes to usability I feel that they did a good job as you have all the options you might need to manage a forum well, including the database and security updates. It is also considerably fast relatively speaking and even though thyey have still a number of ameliorations to do, I feel that they started on the right foot with Xenforo.

8 years ago

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