Here is an article written (in Japanese) by the author of NeoBundle Shougo, about why he wrote NeoBundle and how NeoBundle differs from Vundle.
Actually, NeoBundle is a fork of Vundle. Shougo added some features to a fork of Vundle but lately found he couldn’t follow the upstream Vundle‘s development, so he made the fork to a new plugin now called NeoBundle.
The differences summarized as below:
- Rename the commands from
Vundle, replaceBundletoNeoBundle. (Example:BundelInstalltoNeoBundleInstall). - Add support for vital.vim, a vim utility library written by thinca.
Neobundleworks even you have set theshellslashoption other than the default.- Add support for vimproc, a launcher plugin written by Shougo.
- Add an interface for unite.vim written by Shougo, he also notes it as the major motive for writing
NeoBundle. - Add support for plugins that hosted as a Subversion/Mercurial repository, but it is still an experimental feature now.
- (UPDATED) Now
NeoBundleadds a lazy loading feature whereVundledoesn’t have. It allows you to load plugins at some user-defined time point, not only during the vim initialization where.vimrcis loaded.
I use vundle because it suffices my needs (I used pathogen before). But you can take a try at NeoBundle.
(UPDATE) NeoBundle has stopped active development now and will be replaced by dein.vim, which is Shougo’s another brand new plugin manager. As a side note, you can also take a look at vim-plug which I’m currently using.