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Looking to start a SM army, and fairly new to 40k, other than a few botched plays with my imperial guard.

So I have to ask, what are the fighting styles of: "Ultramarines, Vanilla, Dark Angels, Black Templar and Grey Knights"

Not interested at all in black templar, sorry for fans of those codexes.

Not looking for a depth thing, just like a one to two liner on each.

Vanilla/Ultramarines - Long Ranged firepower, currently weaker at it than Space Wolves. Speeders, Predators, Rifle Dreads, Sternguard, MM Attack Bikes, and Tactical Marines are typically what you'll see in a Vanilla army. Librarians are the current HQ of choice, but YMMV depending on what you want to do. Typically, Vanilla marines are weak in close combat, with even their dedicated assault units being bad at that job, with the exception of one unit.

Dark Angels - You can run an all Terminator Army! But so can Grey Knights.

Black Templar - Melee Marines. Have special rules unique to them with the vows, emperors champions, etc. But I find that if you want melee marines, you'll get further with GK or SW.

Grey Knights - the Current reigning champion of codexes this edition. They aren't weak on any front, and can field a lot of bang for their buck. Psyfilmen Dreads, Draigowing, Purifier Spam... Lots of options for strong lists.

Blood Angels: Can take dreads in Elites, Troops, and Heavy, Assault Marines are troops, and some of their special characters are bat-gak insane (Mephiston, for example)

They're a more assault oriented army than standard marines, and have some good CC units, although GK do beat them in this regard. A decent list is a bunch of assault marines with a couple of Priests (BA apothecaries), who can provide FNP/FC, a librarian with a 4x melta honour guard, and missile launcher devastators. No tanks means that enemy heavy weapons and anti-tank are suddenly much less useful.

The other common list for them is 5 man assault squads in razorbacks, using the discount on transport costs that the Assault marines get when they drop their jump packs for a free Lascannon/plasmagun turret, then rounding it off with Auto/Las Preds. They also have an assault cannon predator that they can take in Fast attack, and all of their Rhino based tanks have the "fast" rule. That gives you 10+ fast tanks with a bunch of Lascannons, Autocannons, Assault cannons, and plasmafire in a 1500 point list.

Also, dedicated transport land raiders that you can take for everything. Anything that can take a transport can take a raider.

Just my two cents, YMMV.

I don't know much about other chapters, so I'll leave that to the rest of dakka.

Ok the above BT is not all accurate. They can be melee based but don't have to be, and to avoid another argument I don't think they are "worse" than GK at melee.

BT can be one of the nastier shooty lists with 5 man termis squads w/ 2 CML and Tank Hunters each, and they can also be taken in the HQ section as well. 5 man Las/Plas squads are the troops for these lists and BT have dirt cheap typhoons, all backed up by preds or vindis that can take Power of the Machine Spirit!.

Melee BT also focus heavily on termis since they can have both preferred enemy and furious charge, making them swing at I 5 S 5 with rerolls to hit and wound and not allowing armor. They can also take psudeo-eternal warrior.

The other two ways to run BT (not as compettative but still fun) is a "black tide" list that runs 10 marines (pistols/ CCW, MG, and PF) along with 10 neophytes (scouts) in one big squad, 6 times, with bikers with meltas/MM. The other is a LR spam list where 7 of the suckers can be on the board at 2500 with 4 of them having blessed hull which ignores lance so DE and Eldar can just fly around in front of you but do little damage.