phpBB vs. vBulletin: A popularity contest between two internet forum platforms

You may find it rather interesting that with so many different types of unimaginably popular websites available today, forums continue to be one of the most used types of website even today. This popularity was the reason that why we have many different content management systems that are solely dedicated for creating forums and forum based bulletin. Out of them two deserve a special mention, phpBB and vBulletin.

Both are made using PHP and MySQL and both are very popular in web-development industry and are employed by hundreds of different types of forums and similar website. But that’s where the similarities between the two end. In actuality both these softwares are intense rivals and are actively fighting to gain an edge in popularity.

This contest is even visible in the twitter statistics of the two CMS. phpBB’s twitter profile and vBulletin’s twitter profile have been active on the internet for close to 4 years now with a difference of 100 days or so but still there is significant difference in the number of followers of the two, as apparent from the infographic below. vBulletin is followed by significantly more twitter accounts than phpBB even though phphBB is open source and developed by a community effort whereas vBulletin is a commercial product and developed by single corporation named Internet Brands Inc.

But even after the significant difference in the popularity, phpBB remains a close competitor of vBulletin and still a popular choice of new and old web-developers and designers. For more interesting factsabout the twitter statistics of the two internet form platforms, refer to the infographic below.