Invision Power Board or vBulletin ?

[Rye]

vBulletin is pretty cool.

[Loony BoB]

Invision Board is 1000000000% better than vB2 (with respect to code quality and performance). (nearly everything is better than vB2) However, with the coming of vB3, Jelsoft pulled the gap and now both of them are nearly neck and neck. Both have unique features the other doesn't. I personally would be happy using either.

Of course, last I checked, when vB3 came out, most IPB people were admitting that it was a lot better than IPB. Even under 'Features unique to IPB' section on their site, it details "Features like multi-quote, topic multi-moderation and inline moderation aren't to be found anywhere else! In addition to the front-end features, IPB has been developed in a modular style with built-in event handler so that interfacing with 3rd-party software is easy." ...but vB has all of these 'unique features'. In fact, I went through every feature detailed on the IPB site and as far as I know, vB has every one of them... maybe the exception of email logs.

vB3.5 > IPB

[Samuraid]

Well, vB3 was missing a number of new features just added in vB 3.5.0 that have been in IPB for a while now. Unfortunately, I don't have access to an IPB 2.1 so I can't compare the new stuff they have been adding.

Note: I'm primarily comparing vB3 to IPB2 since I have no access to IPB 2.1 to see any of the new features and I'm still somewhat new to vB 3.5.0

Things IPB has that are better than vB3 or missing from vB3:

• Moderation queue
• Warning system (still not in vB 3.5, UPB has had this for a while)
• <s>Converge</s> (doesn't really apply)
• Search engine spider controls and stats
• Multi-quote
• Topic & post subscriptions (IPB userCP is more comprehensive in this respect)
• Supported RDBMS' (this is big, since both phpBB and IPB support many RDBMS but vB still only supports mySQL)
• Topic multi-moderation (not in vB3.0)
• Inline moderation (not in vB3.0)
• Moderation queue (not in vB3.0)
• Full-text searching (not in vB3.0)
• XML archiving (not in 3.0 or 3.5)
• Export topics to Word/HTML (not in 3.0 or 3.5)
• RSS topic feed (is this in vB 3.5 yet?)
• A full IPB license costs around the same as vB but includes unlimited software updates.

Anyway, I could be wrong on many of those, but there are a few, such as RDBMS support and the warning system that are pretty significant.
I'm not arguing that vB3.5 is bad. I think it's excellent. I'm just arguing that it isn't much better than IPB 2.1 and the converse is also true.