Companies Using Invision Power Board

I've been tracking the Invision Power Board (IPB) footprint since our detection pipeline first picked it up in July 2005. As of our April 2026 crawl, we see 1,211 active domains running the v4 codebase, of which 288 match to LinkedIn-enriched company profiles. That's a 21.2% match rate, lower than our platform average because many IPB sites are independent fan communities on their own domains rather than corporate properties. The product has been around longer than most of its rivals: Wikipedia and Invision Power Services' own decade-in-review both trace the company to 2002, when Charles Warner and Matt Mecham left Jarvis Entertainment Group and started selling the software that had just been called IBForums.

Growth trajectory

IPB's curve splits cleanly into three eras. The 2005-2010 incubation saw slow growth from 18 to 46 active domains, the paid-forum market in that window was dominated by free alternatives like phpBB and SMF. The 2011-2017 commercial expansion doubled adoption roughly every two years as IPS released the 3.x line and then the ground-up 4.0 rewrite, reaching 214 active domains by July 2017. Then came the 2018-2024 boom: active domains jumped from 214 to a peak of 1,227 in September 2024, a 5.7x increase in six years driven by pandemic-era community formation and the launch of Invision Community 4.5 with Zoom integration.

The story turns in late 2024. Between the September 2024 peak and July 2025 (our latest full month), active domains fell 34.6% to 802, a drop that lines up with IPS's v4 end-of-life announcement for hosted clients and the push to Invision Community 5. Some of the detections we count as "lost" are almost certainly the same customers upgraded onto IC5, which we track under a separate technology ID. The rest represent real departures. Compared with vBulletin, which we see declining at roughly 8% per year, IPB's recent drop is steeper but concentrated in a transition window.

"The late-2024 cliff in our IPB detection data is not organic decline. It lines up to the week with the v4 end-of-life push, which means we're watching a forced migration, not a market exit." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The 6,193 domains in our previouslyUsed index for IPB are fresh prospects for migration-service vendors, XenForo resellers, and Discourse Hosted. If you sell community-replatforming services, filter our database for previously-IPB domains with no current forum technology to find communities that abandoned the platform in the last 12 months and haven't landed on a replacement yet.

Customer profile

The IPB customer base skews small and old. 63.6% of enriched customers have 1-10 employees, which is typical for community software, but the age data is the real signal: 43% of customers were founded in the 2000s and another 16% in the 1990s. Add the 3.9% pre-1960 cohort (institutions like EDHEC Business School, founded 1906, and Arkivverket, the Norwegian National Archives, founded 1817) and 63% of IPB's customer base predates 2010. By contrast, Discourse customers are dominated by post-2010 digital natives.

What makes this page worth reading isn't the detection set alone, it's where our data overlaps with Invision's own customer list. In the decade-in-review post, IPS names LEGO, HTC, Sage, Mattel, Gibson Guitars, and Squarespace among the communities it launched in 2019. Three of those names appear in our active detection set with matching subdomain patterns: forum.gibson.com, forum.htc.com, and community.creations.mattel.com. Mattel also has a dedicated vendor showcase page. A case worth calling out separately is The Trevor Project's TrevorSpace, the largest moderated safe space online for LGBTQ youth, which chose IPB after outgrowing a custom-built platform. John Callery, director of technology at The Trevor Project, credited IPB's plugin extensibility and the team's willingness to build protections for vulnerable users as decisive. The most recent vendor-published win is AI Skills Hub, launched in 2025 by Innovate UK in partnership with PwC, and confirmed by IPS as running on Invision Community 5.

Beyond the vendor-verified names, our detection data surfaces an enterprise tail worth noting: Zeiss (qualityforum.zeiss.com), Kaspersky Lab, Austrian Airlines, ESET, AVG, Malwarebytes (forums.malwarebytes.com), Line 6, and Thermaltake. These are customer-support forums attached to subdomains, not marketing deployments. The decision-maker is almost always a customer-experience or community manager, not a CMO.

Sales Signal: These customer-support forums are high-intent targets for conversational analytics, AI search, helpdesk consolidation, and knowledge-base tooling. When an IPB community has 10+ years of posts, there is usually a replatforming conversation underway, especially since IC5 forces a migration anyway. Pitch "migrate once, migrate to something modern" rather than incremental improvements.

Industry and geographic concentration

IPB's industry mix is more horizontal than most forum tools. The top two verticals, Software Development and Computer Games, tie at 8.73% each, and gaming-adjacent categories (Computer Games, Gambling Facilities, Spectator Sports) account for 13.9% combined. A second cluster is cybersecurity vendors: Kaspersky Lab, ESET, AVG, and Malwarebytes all run peer-support forums on IPB. That's not coincidence. IPB's moderation controls, private forum permissions, and anti-spam tooling matter when your forum regularly attracts malware samples and phishing attempts. Our vBulletin analysis and XenForo profile show a different vertical mix. A third mini-cluster: consumer-hardware brands (HTC, Gibson Guitars, Line 6, Thermaltake) using IPB as a product community.

Geographically, the US leads at 33%, but Europe collectively dominates: UK (9.7%), France (6.6%), Germany (5.2%), Poland, Russia, Norway, Belgium, and Austria together contribute more than 30%. This European skew is unusual for forum software and partly reflects IPB's long-standing reseller network in Germany and France.

Sales Signal: The German and French IPB communities are worth prioritizing. Most competitors underweight EU outreach, and IPB customers there are statistically more established businesses (manufacturing, telecom, higher education) with larger community budgets. Localized migration services or EU-hosted Discourse alternatives have structural advantages in these markets.

Migration patterns

IPB's migration ledger is telling. On the inbound side, IPB gained 29 companies from vBulletin, the single strongest corridor, plus 8 from SMF, 6 from bbPress, and 5 from phpBB. That's 48 inbound migrations from legacy platforms. On the outbound side, IPB lost 11 companies to bbPress (WordPress-native communities), 8 to XenForo 2.x, 6 to Discourse, 4 to BuddyBoss, 3 to Flarum, and smaller numbers to MyBB and NodeBB.

The net picture: IPB is a net gainer against older PHP forum platforms (vBulletin, SMF, phpBB, Vanilla), but a net loser against modern alternatives (bbPress-on-WordPress, XenForo 2.x, Discourse, Flarum). That's the classic position of a mature platform late in its market cycle, it can still absorb refugees from dying competitors, but it can't hold customers who want something newer. A concrete example: Sports Interactive, maker of Football Manager, appears in our data as a former IPB detection on community.sports-interactive.com, last seen in December 2024 (right as IC5 launched). IPS also features Sports Interactive on its own showcase, so the migration is likely a v4-to-IC5 upgrade rather than a departure.

"IPB's migration ledger looks like a bridge: inbound traffic from vBulletin and SMF, outbound traffic to Discourse and bbPress. In two to three years, the bridge empties." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: There are two-sided opportunities here. For migration-service vendors, the outbound list (especially the 6 going to Discourse) defines your ideal customer. For IPS itself, the inbound 29 from vBulletin says there's still meaningful pull if the messaging targets admins who have outgrown free PHP tools. Competitors pursuing IPB's customer base should focus on the customer-support-forum segment, since the cybersecurity cluster alone (Kaspersky, ESET, AVG, Malwarebytes) would move together if one migrates first.

Technology ecosystem

The typical IPB tech stack tells you this is a jQuery-era PHP application. 94.77% of IPB customers use jQuery, and React appears on just 22.3% (mostly on login widgets and enterprise SSO wrappers, not the core community). Infrastructure leans on Cloudflare (57.14%) and Cloudflare Hosting (56.45%), which makes sense: forum sites face continuous scraping, spam submissions, and DDoS risk, and Cloudflare's free tier handles most of it without custom work. Apache (39.72%) and Nginx (40.77%) split nearly evenly, a pattern typical of long-running PHP-MySQL apps where shared hosting defaults to Apache and newer deployments move to Nginx.

The payment mix is revealing. PayPal shows up on 25.78% of IPB customer sites while Stripe appears on just 11.50%, a 2.2x lead for PayPal that runs opposite to modern SaaS trends. IPS historically built strong PayPal integration into its Commerce module (paid memberships, subscription clubs, pay-per-post), which kept customers on PayPal rails as the rest of the internet moved to Stripe. Google Analytics (79.79%) and GTM (78.4%) dominate analytics adoption, with GA4 at 48.43% indicating that roughly half of IPB customers completed the forced migration away from Universal Analytics.

Sales Signal: The low Stripe adoption (11.5%) is a gap, not a preference. Forum monetization tools with modern payment rails (Stripe subscriptions, crypto, Apple/Google Pay checkout) are underrepresented here. If you sell Stripe-based membership tools or checkout optimization, IPB customers are a narrow but convertible segment.

G2 review signals

Invision Community has only 2 reviews on G2, too few for a reliable AI Summary. Broader third-party sentiment on Trustpilot (58 reviews) and Capterra aligns with our migration data: pricing and ease-of-upgrade are the two most cited concerns. The shift to a SaaS-only tier structure ($89 to $549 per month) and the v4-to-v5 migration have compounded both complaints. Our outbound migration data confirms it: the 6 customers who switched to Discourse and the 11 who moved to bbPress almost certainly did so to escape either the pricing or the forced upgrade path.

Sales Signal: The review-sentiment and migration-data alignment means "price anxiety" is a verified objection, not a talking point. Competitors pitching fixed self-hosted licensing or predictable annual pricing have a concrete angle. For retention-focused sales, IPS itself would benefit from a clearer price-lock guarantee for IC5 migrants, since customer churn peaks during tier transitions.

Key takeaways

1. Market position: #11 of 43 in Forum & Community, 0.51% share, well behind vBulletin and Discourse but ahead of XenForo 2.x and the newer open-source cohort.
2. Growth phase: Post-peak. Active domains fell 34.6% between September 2024 and July 2025, coinciding with the IPB v4 end-of-life rollout.
3. Core customer: A small team (1-10 employees) at an established business (founded 2000s or earlier) running a customer-support or fan community on a forum subdomain.
4. Competitive moat: Deep moderation features, mature PayPal integration, and 20-year brand trust in cybersecurity communities and consumer-hardware fan bases.
5. Key vulnerability: SaaS pricing that starts at $89/month combined with the v4-to-v5 forced migration is pushing price-sensitive customers to bbPress, Discourse, and Flarum.
6. Dataset note: 6,193 domains in our previouslyUsed index represent churned IPB customers, roughly 5x the active base. This is a large, underserved audience for migration services.

Sales applications

Outreach template for community-tooling vendors: "I noticed your team still runs {subdomain.domain} on Invision Community v4. With IPS pushing the v4 end-of-life and IC5 pricing starting at $89/month, many operators are using the forced-migration window to reassess. Happy to share how [X similar-sized IPB shop] saved 60% moving to {alternative platform}."

Targeting strategy: On TechnologyChecker.io, filter for technology = Invision Power Board, company size 51-200, and last detection before 2025-06-01. This surfaces mid-sized organizations with churn signals (last detection dropped off in the migration window).

Competitive angle: For Discourse and XenForo 2.x sales teams, the six confirmed Discourse migrations and eight XenForo 2.x migrations give you named references. Pair these with the 34.6% decline to demonstrate "your peers are moving, here's why."

Explore the full live dataset, including all 288 enriched IPB customers, their company sizes, industries, migration history, and the 6,193 previously-used domains, on TechnologyChecker.io.