Alternatives to Discourse logo

Alternatives to Discourse

Disqus, Flarum, Discord, Slack, and XenForo are the most popular alternatives and competitors to Discourse.
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What is Discourse and what are its top alternatives?

Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Replies are attached to the bottom and top of each post, so you can optionally expand the context of the conversation – without breaking your flow.
Discourse is a tool in the Forums category of a tech stack.
Discourse is an open source tool with 40.1K GitHub stars and 8.1K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Discourse's open source repository on GitHub

Top Alternatives to Discourse

  • Disqus
    Disqus

    Disqus looks to make it very easy and rewarding for people to interact on websites using its system. Commenters can build reputation and carry their contributions from one website to the next. ...

  • Flarum
    Flarum

    Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free. ...

  • Discord
    Discord

    Discord is a modern free voice & text chat app for groups of gamers. Our resilient Erlang backend running on the cloud has built in DDoS protection with automatic server failover. ...

  • Slack
    Slack

    Imagine all your team communication in one place, instantly searchable, available wherever you go. That’s Slack. All your messages. All your files. And everything from Twitter, Dropbox, Google Docs, Asana, Trello, GitHub and dozens of other services. All together. ...

  • XenForo
    XenForo

    It is a commercial Internet forum software package written in the PHP programming language. ...

  • Answer
    Answer

    It is an open-source knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more. ...

  • Threads Forum
    Threads Forum

    It is designed to help teams inform, discuss, and make decisions at scale. For leaders at every level of a company, it is a platform for work that best delivers on decision making by tapping into the collective wisdom of an entire team, providing everyone with a voice to assure better business outcomes. ...

  • PeerBoard
    PeerBoard

    It is a modern community platform designed to live as an organic part of your existing website or product. Now you can easily create an engaged discussion space wherever your users already are - no more siloed external platforms or legacy forums! ...

Discourse alternatives & related posts

Disqus logo

Disqus

2.5K
478
466
Elevating the discussion, anywhere on the web.
2.5K
478
+ 1
466
PROS OF DISQUS
  • 141
    Ease of use
  • 116
    Free
  • 62
    Great ui
  • 45
    Sign-up not required
  • 40
    Wordpress integration
  • 26
    Replies
  • 18
    Up votes
  • 8
    Threaded discussion
  • 6
    Easy ghost integration
  • 4
    Tumblr Integration
CONS OF DISQUS
  • 4
    Ads
  • 1
    Poor support
  • 1
    Bugs with migration tool

related Disqus posts

Niall Geoghegan
at experiential psychotherapy institute · | 8 upvotes · 84.1K views

I created a Squarespace website with multiple blog pages. I discovered that the native Squarespace commenting tool is not currently capable of letting people subscribe to my blog pages if they are using Google Chrome or Safari! I then discovered that Disqus email verification doesn't work with Yahoo Mail. I also hate that there's no way to turn off that email verification (which I don't need since I moderate all comments anyway). So I want to use a different commenting system. I've read some good things about Commento. Three questions: (1) will it work on a Squarespace site? (I'll pay a developer to integrate it for me) (2) Does it have its own issues/elements that don't work smoothly, similar to the other two? (3) Is there another plugin I should be considering for my Squarespace site?

See more
Flarum logo

Flarum

55
109
47
Delightfully simple open-source forum software
55
109
+ 1
47
PROS OF FLARUM
  • 13
    Elegant
  • 11
    Open source
  • 8
    Fast
  • 7
    UX
  • 7
    Simple
  • 1
    Extendable
CONS OF FLARUM
    Be the first to leave a con

    related Flarum posts

    Discord logo

    Discord

    1.7K
    1.4K
    805
    All-in-one voice and text chat for gamers that’s free, secure, and works on both your desktop and phone
    1.7K
    1.4K
    + 1
    805
    PROS OF DISCORD
    • 65
      Unlimited Users
    • 59
      Unlimited Channels
    • 55
      Easy to use
    • 51
      Voice Chat
    • 49
      Fast and easy set-ups and connections
    • 46
      Clean UI
    • 43
      Mobile Friendly
    • 43
      Free
    • 33
      Android App
    • 29
      Mention system
    • 27
      Customizable notifications on per channel basis
    • 26
      Customizable ranks/permissions
    • 22
      IOS app
    • 21
      Good code embedding
    • 19
      Vast Webhook Support
    • 16
      Dark mode
    • 14
      Easy context switching between work and home
    • 14
      Roles
    • 13
      Great Communities
    • 12
      Very Resource Friendly
    • 12
      Robust
    • 12
      Easy to develop for
    • 12
      Great Customer Support
    • 12
      Bot control
    • 11
      Video Call Conference
    • 11
      Video call meeting
    • 10
      Able to hold 99 people in one call
    • 10
      Sharing screen layer
    • 9
      Great browser experience
    • 9
      Shares screen with other member
    • 9
      Easy Server Setup and joining system
    • 8
      Easy
    • 7
      Lower bandwidth requirements than competitors
    • 7
      Easy to code bots for
    • 6
      Noice
    • 3
      Easily set up custom emoji
    CONS OF DISCORD
    • 9
      For gamers
    • 9
      Not as many integrations as Slack
    • 4
      Limited file size
    • 4
      For everyone
    • 3
      Sends data to US Gov
    • 1
      Unsupportive Support
    • 1
      Suspected Pedophiles in few servers
    • 1
      Undescriptive in global ban reasons

    related Discord posts

    Josh Dzielak
    Co-Founder & CTO at Orbit · | 19 upvotes · 428.1K views

    Shortly after I joined Algolia as a developer advocate, I knew I wanted to establish a place for the community to congregate and share their projects, questions and advice. There are a ton of platforms out there that can be used to host communities, and they tend to fall into two categories - real-time sync (like chat) and async (like forums). Because the community was already large, I felt that a chat platform like Discord or Gitter might be overwhelming and opted for a forum-like solution instead (which would also create content that's searchable from Google).

    I looked at paid, closed-source options like AnswerHub and ForumBee and old-school solutions like phpBB and vBulletin, but none seemed to offer the power, flexibility and developer-friendliness of Discourse. Discourse is open source, written in Rails with Ember.js on the front-end. That made me confident I could modify it to meet our exact needs. Discourse's own forum is very active which made me confident I could get help if I needed it.

    It took about a month to get Discourse up-and-running and make authentication tied to algolia.com via the SSO plugin. Adding additional plugins for moderation or look-and-feel customization was fairly straightforward, and I even created a plugin to make the forum content searchable with Algolia. To stay on top of answering questions and moderation, we used the Discourse API to publish new messages into our Slack. All-in-all I would say we were happy with Discourse - the only caveat would be that it's very helpful to have technical knowledge as well as Rails knowledge in order to get the most out of it.

    See more

    From a StackShare Community member: “We’re about to start a chat group for our open source project (over 5K stars on GitHub) so we can let our community collaborate more closely. The obvious choice would be Slack (k8s and a ton of major projects use it), but we’ve seen Gitter (webpack uses it) for a lot of open source projects, Discord (Vue.js moved to them), and as of late I’m seeing Spectrum more and more often. Does anyone have experience with these or other alternatives? Is it even worth assessing all these options, or should we just go with Slack? Some things that are important to us: free, all the regular integrations (GitHub, Heroku, etc), mobile & desktop apps, and open source is of course a plus."

    See more
    Slack logo

    Slack

    117.4K
    94K
    6K
    Bring all your communication together in one place
    117.4K
    94K
    + 1
    6K
    PROS OF SLACK
    • 1.2K
      Easy to integrate with
    • 876
      Excellent interface on multiple platforms
    • 849
      Free
    • 694
      Mobile friendly
    • 690
      People really enjoy using it
    • 331
      Great integrations
    • 315
      Flexible notification preferences
    • 198
      Unlimited users
    • 184
      Strong search and data archiving
    • 155
      Multi domain switching support
    • 82
      Easy to use
    • 40
      Beautiful
    • 27
      Hubot support
    • 22
      Unread/read control
    • 21
      Slackbot
    • 19
      Permalink for each messages
    • 17
      Text snippet with highlighting
    • 15
      Quote message easily
    • 14
      Per-room notification
    • 13
      Awesome integration support
    • 12
      IRC gateway
    • 12
      Star for each message / attached files
    • 11
      Good communication within a team
    • 11
      Dropbox Integration
    • 10
      Jira Integration
    • 10
      Slick, search is great
    • 9
      New Relic Integration
    • 8
      Great communication tool
    • 8
      Asana Integration
    • 8
      Combine All Services Quickly
    • 7
      Awesomeness
    • 7
      This tool understands developers
    • 7
      Google Drive Integration
    • 7
      XMPP gateway
    • 6
      Replaces email
    • 6
      Twitter Integration
    • 6
      Google Docs Integration
    • 6
      BitBucket integration
    • 5
      GREAT Customer Support / Quick Response to Feedback
    • 5
      Jenkins Integration
    • 5
      Guest and Restricted user control
    • 4
      Gathers all my communications in one place
    • 4
      Clean UI
    • 4
      GitHub integration
    • 4
      Excellent multi platform internal communication tool
    • 4
      Mention list view
    • 3
      Perfect implementation of chat + integrations
    • 3
      Android app
    • 3
      Visual Studio Integration
    • 3
      Easy to start working with
    • 3
      Easy
    • 3
      Easy to add a reaction
    • 3
      Timely while non intrusive
    • 3
      Great on-boarding
    • 3
      Threaded chat
    • 2
      Eases collaboration for geographically dispersed teams
    • 2
      Message Actions
    • 2
      Simplicity
    • 2
      So much better than email
    • 2
      It's basically an improved (although closed) IRC
    • 2
      Great Channel Customization
    • 2
      Great interface
    • 2
      Intuitive, easy to use, great integrations
    • 2
      Markdown
    • 1
      API
    • 1
      Easy remote communication
    • 1
      Get less busy
    • 1
      Targetprocess integration
    • 1
      Better User Experience
    • 1
      Multi work-space support
    • 1
      Travis CI integration
    • 1
      It's the coolest IM ever
    • 1
      Dev communication Made Easy
    • 1
      Community
    • 1
      Integrates with just about everything
    • 1
      Great API
    • 1
      Very customizable
    • 1
      Great Support Team
    • 1
      Flexible and Accessible
    • 1
      Finally with terrible "threading"—I miss Flowdock
    • 1
      Archive Importing
    • 1
      Complete with plenty of Electron BLOAT
    • 1
      Watch
    • 1
      I was 666 star :D
    • 0
      Easy to useL
    • 0
      Platforms
    CONS OF SLACK
    • 13
      Can be distracting depending on how you use it
    • 6
      Requires some management for large teams
    • 6
      Limit messages history
    • 5
      Too expensive
    • 5
      You don't really own your messages
    • 4
      Too many notifications by default

    related Slack posts

    Lucas Litton
    Founder & CEO at Macombey · | 24 upvotes · 260.3K views

    Sentry has been essential to our development approach. Nobody likes errors or apps that crash. We use Sentry heavily during Node.js and React development. Our developers are able to see error reports, crashes, user's browsers, and more, all in one place. Sentry also seamlessly integrates with Asana, Slack, and GitHub.

    See more
    Yonas Beshawred

    Using Screenhero via Slack was getting to be pretty horrible. Video and sound quality was often times pretty bad and worst of all the service just wasn't reliable. We all had high hopes when the acquisition went through but ultimately, the product just didn't live up to expectations. We ended up trying Zoom after I had heard about it from some friends at other companies. We noticed the video/sound quality was better, and more importantly it was super reliable. The Slack integration was awesome (just type /zoom and it starts a call)

    You can schedule recurring calls which is helpful. There's a G Suite (Google Calendar) integration which lets you add a Zoom call (w/dial in info + link to web/mobile) with the click of a button.

    Meeting recordings (video and audio) are really nice, you get recordings stored in the cloud on the higher tier plans. One of our engineers, Jerome, actually built a cool little Slack integration using the Slack API and Zoom API so that every time a recording is processed, a link gets posted to the "event-recordings" channel. The iOS app is great too!

    #WebAndVideoConferencing #videochat

    See more
    XenForo logo

    XenForo

    530
    17
    0
    A compelling community experience
    530
    17
    + 1
    0
    PROS OF XENFORO
      Be the first to leave a pro
      CONS OF XENFORO
        Be the first to leave a con

        related XenForo posts

        Answer logo

        Answer

        8
        15
        0
        Build Q&A community
        8
        15
        + 1
        0
        PROS OF ANSWER
          Be the first to leave a pro
          CONS OF ANSWER
            Be the first to leave a con

            related Answer posts

            Threads Forum logo

            Threads Forum

            3
            4
            0
            A modern forum for work where focused discussions and decisions take place
            3
            4
            + 1
            0
            PROS OF THREADS FORUM
              Be the first to leave a pro
              CONS OF THREADS FORUM
                Be the first to leave a con

                related Threads Forum posts

                PeerBoard logo

                PeerBoard

                3
                12
                0
                Embed a community into any website
                3
                12
                + 1
                0
                PROS OF PEERBOARD
                  Be the first to leave a pro
                  CONS OF PEERBOARD
                    Be the first to leave a con

                    related PeerBoard posts