I have used SMF, PHPBB, IPB and Vbulletin and I must say that Vbulletin has really surprised me. I love Vbulletin the most. I never liked phpbb because I find it's looks disgusting. No offence to any of the phpbb users, but that is just my personal opinion. I was pretty happy with the looks of SMF and its features are also great, provided its free but the problem was a lot. I've always got messed up with mods installation on its automated mod installation feature. And everytime there used to be an error, I got suggested by SMF officials that I have to re upload all files and overwrite existing ones and that means "All mods lost". So i decided to shift to IPB (my friend's license which was getting wasted). Now the problem here was that I installed it and after a month or two, many new updates were done and my friend was away, so I did not had the password to the client area, and my forum repeatedly got hacked by some haters. I had to shift back to SMF and finally took Vbulletin. And since then no one have dared to hack my forum even though I am using inferior version. I had a problem only once and that too got the support from their support team within 15minutes. Vbulletin is very easy to control, the installation of modifications is tons easier and have never messed anything, moreover after a shift to vbulletin, I've seen my website rankings better in google. Hats off to vbulletin.

I agree with you almost 100% Their are a lot of nice boards out their, but I do agree that vbulletin is the best one that I have used so far. I remember when I used PHPBB. I thought that was the best software (mainly because it was free lol) and I swore that I wouldn't upgrade to vbulletin. However, someone on my forums talked me into it and now I would never go back.

I think vBulletin is flawless but smf is also not too bad. I think it is the best forum software which is available in free and many large sites are running on this. Obviously the main part of highly traffic sites is managed by vBulletin due to its support.