I switched from Pathogen to Vundle, at the prodding of people on HN, and I can't say I am all that thrilled about the difference. It basically does what Pathogen does, plus it does a bit more. The issue is that the "bit more" that it does just doesn't seem... polished.. to me, and covers things that I never found troublesome to do manually anyway. I'm not going to switch back (since it does what Pathogen does there isn't a reason), but I don't think it is better, just different.
1. I switch to another tool if and when I have problems with my current tool. Because Pathogen has served me well for the last two years there's no reason to switch to Vundle or some other plugin manager.
2. Vundle is too heavily Git/Github-centered for my taste.
While I also wish Vundle weren't as wedded to GitHub, I still find it to be the better of the two tools. Plus, Vundle can also use the Vim Scripts repo as a source, so it's not strictly tied to Git/GitHub.
Vundle is strictly better unless you automate your software updates and want to be able to update your vim plugins without having to launch vim to do so. Pretty tenuous but maybe some sysadmin-inclined people really prefer this.
I previously used pathogen + git submodules .. It was very challenging to manage and much harder to keep up to date.
Vundle has proved a significantly better system for keeping things managed and uses the exact same approach and code as pathogen. It's hard to criticize vundle and support pathogen since they are so similar.
Yeah. I'm just citing the only reason I've heard, which is that invoking vim just to update a plugin is gross. Which is kinda true - what happens if your vim config is in some bad state and doesn't start properly, your update process breaks unnecessarily (odd coupling to have). Definitely edge case-y, but a tradeoff anyway.
