First, I apologize for the length of the reply. I find frequently my years of report writing as an LEO impacts my responses as I want to try to be more detailed. So, here we go.
If you want a simple forum and you have the technical skills, the self hosted is a decent paid offering. Notice, I don't say the best, because there are still many QOL functions that are missing from it when compared to other offerings now. As for price, they have recently increased their price after years of keeping it constant, and I have no issues with that. But what I have read several complaints about (and personally agree with) was the fact that the increase did not bring many QOL features to the end users, which is what keeps our sites going.
IMHO one of the main reasons XF took off was because so many at the time were running vB and when Kier and Company left and started their own script, it was similar enough to vB (and coded by ex vB developers) that existing vB admins flocked to it since vB was having issues. And at the time, the forum itself was technically superior to vB and many other competitors. But those days are far behind us now. Other script developers are constantly striving to see where they can push the envelope in their core offering, meanwhile Xenforo rests on their haunches and basically keeps with their staid early 2000's era formula.
Their 1st party add-ons also continue to languish from any attention. The prime concentration has been on admin and developer related improvements with a smattering of QOL improvements for the actual site users spread in here and there for the last several years.
Now, I'm only going to lightly touch (in this one sentence) on how dependent XF is on 3rd party developers (many who over the decade have shown to be transient in nature so their add-ons disappear) to get what other scripts offer core and how that negatively impacts many admins that become dependent upon those add-ons for their site offering.
As to their SaaS offering... compared to what you get for what you pay, they are slightly behind other offerings when compared to storage and 1st party add-on offering. Personally, I have no desire to use an SaaS solution since I can get a server/VPS that give me greater performance than what their SaaS offering does, albeit at the requirement of me doing the server maintenance, which I do not mind as it is fun for me still. Not everyone has that ability, and often even those that do decide they would rather spend that time doing something else. As an example, right now I get 300Mbps bandwidth (unlimited), 480GB SSD storage, 32GB RAM and 8 CPU cores to play with for $15 a month. That exceeds the $250 a month offering from XF. Now yes, you do have to factor the software renewal prices and initial purchase price (which decreases based upon the years owned, so for me now it would equate to about $25 a year for purchase cost). So even doing that I pay maybe $60 a month cost IF I renew all my add-ons and the XF stuff each year. Then you add to that I can host additional XF (or other script) sites on my server, which if I did with SaaS would result in an additional cost. So for 2 XF sites to get what my server could offer, I'd be paying $500 a month ($6000 a year) for what I would be paying less than $1500 for for self hosted and keeping all renewals active.
Then you have the additional issue (and this is not distinct for XenForo) that some add-ons require the ability to install other software onto the system. Typically with an SaaS solution, you will not be able to use these.
For those that don't want the the hassle of maintaining a server, there are several quality shared hosting providers out there. MattW is a classic case of one.
I personally do not see the draw of a SaaS offering and seriously doubt I will ever use one. If anything, I would fall back to a high performance shared hosting provider since I do tend to run multiple sites.
But for some, a SaaS solution will fit what their needs are. For some, that will simply be bragging rights that they "run on the cloud". Others, it will be business requirements.
Overall, if you want a base forum and do not want to be dependent upon third party add-ons to provide QOL improvements (or even features like groups, quality articles, calendar) on your site, you may want to look elsewhere. If you are OK with the current design/development paradigm of XF that seems to still be rooted in the early/mid 2000's then XF will probably work fine for you.
