A bulletin board system that is common among the internet communities, vBulletin offers you the chance to create an interactive community on virtually any scale that you want.

Some of the more common sites to use it are Winamp, as well as Sitepoint, both relatively large companies.

The vBulletin has some extensive features and is a good selection for the larger site or the professional company owner. It is probably not the best selection for the day to day site owner.

The installation requires multiple steps to accomplish and is somewhat extensive in the install process. Administration of the board is relatively easy and the features are seemingly endless. So endless in fact that it is difficult to find some of those you want to install.

The default template is clean and well laid out. Overall the features of vBulletin are outstanding. Each of your users has control over their own control panel and is able to change their options to lay out the settings to their satisfaction.

You have absolute control of your category and forum selection and the system takes steps to keep your selections in the memory so that you aren’t required to set them for every additional forum that you create unless you choose to change them.

You may set up a moderator and change permissions for each one or set them as group permissions as you see fit. Permission values are easily editable to change on a person to person basis. You can keep a very close watch and excellent control over the options that each moderator or administrator has to prevent a “hostile takeover” type of scenario.

The comparison with PHPBB finds that many of the same features are available in both. vBulletin does offer a few things that you’re not going to find in PHPBB, but it also offers a fairly hefty price tag to go along with the endless features.

The cost of vBulletin is fairly cost-prohibitive to those in the beginning stages of their site use, at a fairly high 180-280 USD, plus 60 dollars per update.  This seems a bit on the pricey side to us, being higher than other forum and content management software in most cases by about 100 dollars.  It is in fact higher in price than most anti-virus and other software as well.

vBulletin tends to be less well laid out for SEO than some other software on the bulletin board list. This is surprising in that the cost is so high that those things should have been taken into consideration to make it more attractive to the site owner who wants good seo options for their bulletin board site.

While vBulletin offers you extensive use and administration selections, it is somewhat disorganized in the layout of the administration. The price makes it a less attractive option than some other bulletin board systems. There are those that offer you a free or low cost option to vBulletin, but for the corporation or company who needs these extensive functions, it is an attractive and viable option.