🆚 Simple Machines Forum vs. vBulletin
- 📈 vBulletin is twice as popular as Simple Machines Forum.
- 🌎 vBulletin is more popular in the United States, Germany, and Russia.
- 🌍 Simple Machines Forum is more popular in Thailand, Finland, and the Czech Republic.
Simple Machines ForumType
About
Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is open-source 
PHP forum software used to host and manage online community discussion boards with a SQL database backend.
It provides an advanced permission and user management system, support for themes and extensions, email notifications, attachment handling, topic and post tracking, moderation tools, over 45 interface languages, and compatibility with MySQL, 
PostgreSQL, and 
SQLite databases.
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
- 🥈 Second most popular in Thailand in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 6th most popular in Russia in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 6th most popular in the Netherlands in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 6th most popular in France in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 7th 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.
🗃️ 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.