Companies Using XenForo

The forum platform that is really an advertising business

We measure five forum applications with enough scale to compare. On four ordinary advertising signals, XenForo is not slightly ahead of the others. It is in a different band.

Prebid, the header-bidding library, appears on 24.71% of XenForo domains. On vBulletin it is 7.99%, on phpBB 5.13%, on Invision Power Board 4.64% and on Discourse 1.75%. Google Publisher Tag runs 26.25% on XenForo against 4.81% on phpBB. Taboola is 16.65% against 3.71%. Even plain AdSense, the one every hobby site has, is 35.11% against 17.21%.

Prebid is the number worth stopping on, because nobody installs header bidding casually. It exists to run an auction between several demand sources before the page renders, and setting it up implies an ad operations function, a direct relationship with more than one exchange, and enough traffic that the difference between bidders is worth the latency. A quarter of XenForo's install base has all three. One in fifty-seven Discourse domains does.

That reframes the licence question. XenForo costs money and phpBB does not, and the usual reading is that XenForo is what you buy when you can afford better software. The data says something narrower: XenForo is what you buy when the forum earns. A board with an ad-ops team has an obvious reason to pay for support and a predictable upgrade path, and a board without one does not.

Two thirds of these companies have ten people or fewer

66.54% of matched XenForo companies employ 1 to 10 people. That is the highest small-company share in this category, higher than free phpBB at 65.35%, which looks backwards for paid software.

It is not backwards, it is the same fact from a different angle. A large forum and a large company are unrelated. Tom's Hardware, Comic Book Resources, All About Circuits and Hypixel all appear in this list, and all of them serve audiences far out of proportion to their headcount. Forum publishing is a business where two people and a database can support a community of hundreds of thousands, and the advertising numbers above are how those two people get paid.

If you are sizing this market from the company records alone you will get it badly wrong. The right unit for XenForo is not employees, it is monthly readers, and we cannot see that. Treat the 1 to 10 band as a statement about staffing, not about reach.

Forums do not migrate. They close.

351 domains stopped returning a XenForo signal over our tracking window. We checked all of them against every other forum platform in our corpus, and 9 now run one. Two went to Flarum, two to phpBB, two to Discourse, and one each to Simple Machines Forum, MyBB and Tapatalk.

Nine out of 351 is not a migration pattern, it is the absence of one. Every other category we publish has a readable exit corridor, because software gets replaced by other software. Forums do not behave that way. The cost of a migration is not the import script, it is the twenty years of threads, the permalinks and the search traffic attached to them, so a community that has stopped being worth running is closed rather than moved.

The inbound side is the mirror image and it is equally sparse: 14 domains arrived from vBulletin and 5 from phpBB, with nothing going back the other way to vBulletin at all. That is the migration the forum world has been describing since 2010, when XenForo was founded by vBulletin's former lead developers, and fifteen years later we can still see the last of it moving. Both numbers are small enough that you should read them as direction and not as volume.

One caveat on the ranking

The market share on this page, 13.97%, is calculated on a denominator that excludes a technology our category page still counts. Livefyre, a comment product Adobe discontinued in 2017, was matching another library's JavaScript global and reading as 227,094 domains when its real footprint is 74. That inflated the category total roughly fivefold and compressed every genuine share into a rounding error. We have fixed the rule; the category page will catch up when the affected domains are next crawled. Until then, this page and that one will disagree, and this page is the one to trust.