Discourse icon
Discourse icon

Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. A modern forum, everything's been redesigned to be easy.

Discourse screenshot 1

Cost / License

Application type

Platforms

  • Online  Cloud server required
  • Self-Hosted  Cloud server required
  • Ruby
  • JavaScript
  • Cloudron
  • Docker
3.5
Good12 reviews
157likes
13comments
0news articles

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1. ActivityPub icon  Support for ActivityPub
  2.  Email list
  3.  Trust Level system
  4.  Interactive tutorials
  5.  Infinite scroll
  6. Patreon icon  Patreon Integration
  7. Slack icon  Slack integration
  8.  Mobile friendly
  9.  REST API
  10.  Live Push Notifications
  11.  Integrated Spam Protection

 Tags

Discourse News & Activities

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Recent activities

Comments and Reviews

   
Comment summary: Opinions on Discourse are varied. Positive reviews commend its functionality, features, open-source nature, and clean user interface. Users find it intuitive and highly customizable. However, criticisms include difficulty in production readiness, fragile dependencies, significant costs, and security issues. Negative feedback also highlights concerns about support and design decisions such as its retention-based focus. Some neutral comments mention limitations for new users and tedious processes to disable certain features.
Top Positive Comment
Thelle Christensen
2

Discourse is pretty awesome forum software - best I've tried!

If it could to voting and edit suggestion like Quora icon Quora it would be completely killer!

Top Negative Comment
rightsfight
2

Not ready for production. This product is high on promise, but needs another 3 to 5 years to mature (if it survives that long). A great range of promised features, but not ready for prime time. Consider other products. Discourse is not production worthy. It is extremely fragile, with a long list of inter-dependencies on other products, with any updates to any in the long chain easily breaking Discourse. Despite being recommended to install inside of Docker, Discourse's very fragile dependencies also mean it does not do well outside of a very narrow set of platform configuration options (alternative Linux distros problematic). Riddled with a vast array security issues, that do not appear to be taken into consideration. Support is very poor, with a long list of backlogged issues still unresolved. The community is very active, and attempts to help but is very scattered in the support provided. Oversight of support and development is by a single developer that has a reputation for being very immature, very insecure, and often deletes any criticisms and many of the bug reports. If the product matures, check in again in 3 to 5 years to see if improved, otherwise do not consider using this product in any production environment.

[Edited by rightsfight, November 20]

davar
-1

Generally it's a good idea to create a new forum software from scratch because the existing ones are terrible, outdated and slow, yet discourse manages to make some simple things even worse, e.g.:

  • Bad overall user experience
  • Slow page loading (esp in long threads)
  • Search is horrible, impossible to find what one is looking for
  • Scrolling on mobile/tables inside threads still sucks (jumps too far ahead, jumps too far back)
  • Admins/Mods can restrict user settings way too much, some forums even restrict privacy settings. This shouldn't be possible.
  • "Trust-based" system restricts non-mods even more
  • Badges are a useless gamification thing and too gimmicky

All in all, the poor UX could be due to the fact that this software was developed from the perspective of a moderator and not a forum user. Some features only serve to further limit user participation, thereby ironically limiting the discourse in a forum.

Douze
0

Discourse is modern and powerful... but its design is retention-based, and their recent developments into a chat tool underline this direction. The main reason i want to use forums is because the discussion may be less noisy, and attention-grabbing... why are they pushing their porduct in this direction then ?

ab1
0

Most users want to disable emails with activity summary created by other users with websites when they don't want to read said websites that often: "when I don’t visit here, send me an email summary of popular topics and replies".

Users have to repeat steps below for most websites with Discourse:

  1. click your username
  2. click human icon (actually Preferences)
  3. click Preferences
  4. click Email in Preferences tab
  5. uncheck option in question
  6. save changes
ab1
0

Body is limited to 32000 characters...

ab1
0

.log files are restricted for new users... .zip files are restricted for new users...

7 of 13 comments

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What is Discourse?

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. A modern forum, everything's been redesigned to be easy.

Self-hosted Discourse software is free, hosting service is paid.

Official Links

Discourse information

  • Developed by

    US flagCivilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.
  • Licensing

    Open Source (GPL-2.0) and Free Personal product.
  • Pricing

    Subscription ranging between $100 and $300 per month.
  • Written in

  • Rating

    Average rating of 3.5 (12 ratings)
  • Alternatives

    68 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Categories

Social & CommunicationsDevelopment

GitHub repository

  •  46,078 Stars
  •  8,786 Forks
  •  110 Open Issues
  •   Updated  
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Our users have written 13 comments and reviews about Discourse, and it has gotten 157 likes

Discourse was added to AlternativeTo by RemovedUser on and this page was last updated .