Discourse, Xenforo and almost all leading forum software take the burden out of you through their pre-hosted solutions. The only problem is that some of them are insanely priced.
Discourse for example offers the basic managed package at $100 per month. Too steep if you are not a corporate client.
They are indeed costly if you are not into commercial ventures. Using managed hosting is much more economical if you are comfortable with the backend.
As a bonus, most hosted solutions offer many premium plugins included in the base price.
Premium plugins do sound nice. Higher Logic / Vanilla does something like that.
I would opt for a leading forum software like Xenforo for the simple fact that because it is leading, there are many people who use it. More people who use it, the more you can get help for problems that may occur.
I do wish they were cheaper.
I have never used free-hosted forums and I have also never used any premium forum softwwares. I have always used open-source forum scripts to build forums. If you do not have funds to pay for premium software like xenforo, it is better to use PhpBB instead of hosted forums.
I looked into other paid hosted forums such as Invision and even Forums.net and man they're expensive especially Invision Power Services! If you're wanting to use paid software, you're better off hosting it yourself since it's much cheaper. (With the exception of vBulletin.) For the beginner package when it comes to Invision, it's $54 per month or $588 for annual and that's just for the forum software, no other addons!
I looked into Xenforo and their cloud option and was shocked at the price. It is great if you are someone that is using the software for say a business reason and you will be monetizing your site and such and may make money back from it but for someone like me who even though I do monetize my forums as soon as I can, it would not be beneficial for me to pay that price for cloud hosted with Xenforo. I am much better getting my own hosting and installing the software myself and paying for license renewal when I need to.
100% true.
It is actually meant for people who have no time and a strong IT budget. Possibly enterprise customers. They normally walk away if there is no dedicated, paid support. Time is a very important factor for them and do not waste on petty matters.
They would rather pay and get it done than meddle around with silly tech jargons.
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