🆚 phpBB vs. vBulletin
- 📈 phpBB is twice as popular as vBulletin.
- 🌎 phpBB is more popular in the United States, Germany, and Russia.
- 🌍 vBulletin is more popular in Australia, Turkey, and Vietnam.
Type
About
phpBB is an open-source forum software written in 
PHP.
It provides a flat topic and post structure with hierarchical sub-forums, user groups and permissions management, multiple attachments per post, full-text search, multilingual support across 50+ languages, and access to over 450 extensions and 280 themes in its official customization database.
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
- 🥇 Most popular in the United Kingdom in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥇 Most popular in Russia in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥇 Most popular in France in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥇 Most popular in Poland in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥇 Most popular in the Czech Republic 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.
Simple Machines Forum🗃️ 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 3,359,906 websites.
- Statistics were last calculated on .
- For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.