Elgg, BuddyPress, JomSocial: Which is better?

I was asked days ago which was the best social networking platform. This is a tough question, since there are so many frameworks that have their advantages and disadvantages. However, only three made it to my list of the best social networking platforms.

Why? Well, those three are the best well supported frameworks. I am not going to discuss about Oxwall or Moblim since their support base is small and there's not clear documentation available yet.

BuddyPress

The main problem is decreasing support. Once was very popular now has become stale. Now much has changed in over a year. It is not that easy to create patch, now picture creating a brand new plugin for it.

For me, BuddyPress is really hard to customize. I have a good experience making web designs and I can tell you that if you want to create your own custom template in buddypress, you are going to face big challenges. Changes in style sheets are easy, but try to modify a template you downloaded or create a new one, you are gonna loose it. It is not that easy to customize in terms of design, even the smallest change, you will have to hire a buddypress developer.

Worst of all, there is a lack of themes. Try to find a buddypress theme in Woothemes or Theme Basket, it is not that easy folks. Many of developers dropped buddypress since it was hard to create a theme and it didn't have much popularity.

Even if you get your buddypress network up and running, that doesn't mean you will face the need of adding more features to your network and last time I checked, I couldn't see any useful plugin for buddypress.

And it is not only me who says this, go ahead and search reviews about BuddyPress and all will be the same.

JomSocial

I'm gonna put it this way: Stay Away from JomSocial. Do you want to complicate your life? Go ahead, choose JomSocial. This is by far the hardest platform to develop anything. The process for installing new features to a JomSocial network is pretty complicated. Learning how to create a theme or a new feature will take some time. In fact you will have to invest many hours to be skilled with this platform.

Elgg

This is by far the best social networking platform. It use is increasing every month and it is the perfect solution to create a network for your school, college. Not only that, it is so flexible that you can even create a private e-learning platform for your school.

This platform is well supported. It has over 2,000 open source themes and plugins, an active community of developers, and a new release every few months. It had a major change 9 months ago, which completely changed the look and feel of elgg and added more security features. Not only that, it added better Twitter and notifications support.

Themes on this platform are very easy to modify and use. You can customize any theme or create your own one. People who knew nothing about elgg are now releasing open source themes and plugins.

Out of the box, elgg comes with everything you need in a social network: Friends, profiles, groups, private messaging, etc. And if there's a new feature you need, you can get it at the plugin section of the elgg community. Several plugins are being released every week, each one adding a feature or enhancing an existing functionality.

Overall, if you need a network of any kind, Elgg is the way to go for its flexibility and because it is well supported. Not only that, you will a set of features out of the box that will help you create your network within minutes (unlike other platforms)