But when people try to claim that XF is “just a forum” and therefore it’s the same as the “just a forum” package at Invision it really is quite disingenuous.
It would be less disingenuous if the $200 for a forum at Invision allowed any kind of pages to be created, but to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t. And less so if it allowed any sort of e-commerce monetisation, but as far as I know it doesn’t. Can you make an article forum in Invision with news/article/blog layouts for threads or does that require Pages or some other significant customisation? I don’t think there is (I could be wrong I don’t know).
Agreed.... and Forum -> Forum XF currently has some features that IPS does not have. AFAIK there is no way (short of having Pages) to make an equivalent of the Xenforo Articles/Pages with the base IPS forum. But WITH IPS Pages you have a lot more ability to control what you pull, how you present it and allow interactions with it. Pages is basically just allowing you to code to access the data in the database directly... generally without having to know PHP and how to use all the callbacks, etc to write a custom add-on.
The point of contention was trying to compare a base XenForo Forum configuration to the full suite of IPS at a cost level. That in itself was disingenuous. As one of my posts stated... you have to look at what you need and what would fit the bill. That's why one of my sites runs on XenForo (it works great on it, better than IPS would due to Bob's Showcase add-on and the higher quality of the XenForo Gallery). On my pipe site there are features on there that XenForo would not support (the classifieds add-on that allows me to actually sell ad spaces if I choose to and also collect funds for items sold via it and multiple custom databases (via Pages) for reviews of pipes, tobacco, shops, etc without having to develop separate custom add-ons) so it's why it runs IPS.
Bang for the buck, Xenforo on the forum/gallery/RM(files) level still is a better economical choice over IPS.... mainly due to IPS neglecting features in their Files and Gallery, giving priority to the forum application. And there are functions that XenForo can do that requires an additional app for IPS to be able to. But one still needs to look at what the requirements they have now (and in the future) for their site to make a decision. There is no one-shot-deal that fits all situations.