🆚 Discourse vs. vBulletin
- 📈 vBulletin is twice as popular as Discourse.
- 🌎 vBulletin is more popular in the United States, Germany, and Russia.
- 🌍 Discourse is more popular in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland.
Type
About
Discourse is an open-source community platform built on 
Ruby on Rails.
It supports 
Markdown, BBCode, and 
HTML formatting in posts, infinite scrolling discussions, real-time chat, AI automation for detecting toxic and NSFW content, single sign-on and social login, and the topic summarization features.
vBulletin is a commercial forum software platform written in 
PHP that uses a MySQL or MariaDB database.
It includes built-in support for forums, groups, polls, and blogs, offers a customizable template-based interface, an AJAX-powered chat, an admin control panel with a granular user-group permissions system, and SEO optimization tools.
Headquarters
Pricing
Categories
Popularity
Determined by the number of sites using each technology.
Market share
Popularity by country
Determined by the number of sites detected from each country.
Awards
- 🥉 Third most popular in Canada in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 5th most popular in the United Kingdom in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 6th most popular in the United States in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥈 Second most popular in Turkey in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥈 Second most popular in Australia in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 4th most popular in the United States in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 4th most popular in Russia in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 4th most popular in the Netherlands in the Internet Forum Software category.
Popularity by domain category
Determined by the number of sites in each category.
Top sites
Top-ranked sites that use these technologies.
Compare alternatives
Technologies with similar characteristics.
Khoros Communities🗃️ About This Data
- We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
- Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
- This report is based on the analysis of 3,361,290 websites.
- Statistics were last calculated on .
- For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.