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  5. Discourse vs GitHub Pages

Discourse vs GitHub Pages

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Discourse
Discourse
Stacks278
Followers246
Votes115
GitHub Stars45.5K
Forks8.7K
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages
Stacks17.7K
Followers13.0K
Votes1.1K

Discourse vs GitHub Pages: What are the differences?

Developers describe Discourse as "The 100% open source, next-generation discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet". 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. On the other hand, GitHub Pages is detailed as "Public webpages freely hosted and easily published". Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

Discourse and GitHub Pages are primarily classified as "Forums" and "Static Web Hosting" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Discourse are:

  • Remembers your place
  • Log in with … anything
  • Paste to share images

On the other hand, GitHub Pages provides the following key features:

  • Blogging with Jekyll
  • Custom URLs
  • Automatic Page Generator

"Open source" is the top reason why over 20 developers like Discourse, while over 283 developers mention "Free" as the leading cause for choosing GitHub Pages.

Discourse is an open source tool with 28.6K GitHub stars and 6.47K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Discourse's open source repository on GitHub.

Lyft, CircleCI, and HubSpot are some of the popular companies that use GitHub Pages, whereas Discourse is used by Twitter, Heroku, and CodeCombat. GitHub Pages has a broader approval, being mentioned in 576 company stacks & 683 developers stacks; compared to Discourse, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.

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Advice on Discourse, GitHub Pages

Howie
Howie

Full Stack Engineer at Yintrust

Aug 13, 2020

DecidedonNetlifyNetlify

We use Netlify to host static websites.

The reasons for choosing Netlify over GitHub Pages are as follows:

  • Netfily can bind multiple domain names, while GitHub Pages can only bind one domain name
  • With Netfily, the original repository can be private, while GitHub Pages free tier requires the original repository to be public

In addition, in order to use CDN, we use Netlify DNS.

238k views238k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Discourse
Discourse
GitHub Pages
GitHub Pages

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.

Public webpages hosted directly from your GitHub repository. Just edit, push, and your changes are live.

Remembers your place;Log in with … anything;Paste to share images;Search that actually works;Scalable moderation;Bring your friends;Your stuff belongs to you;Comprehensive API
Blogging with Jekyll; Custom URLs; Automatic Page Generator
Statistics
GitHub Stars
45.5K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
8.7K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
278
Stacks
17.7K
Followers
246
Followers
13.0K
Votes
115
Votes
1.1K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 28
    Open source
  • 19
    Fast
  • 13
    Email digests
  • 9
    Better than a stereotypical forum
  • 8
    Perfect for communities of any size
Cons
  • 3
    Heavy on server
  • 2
    Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA
  • 2
    Difficult to extend
Pros
  • 290
    Free
  • 217
    Right out of github
  • 185
    Quick to set up
  • 108
    Instant
  • 107
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 4
    Not possible to perform HTTP redirects
  • 3
    Supports only Jekyll
  • 3
    Limited Jekyll plugins
  • 1
    Jekyll is bloated
Integrations
WordPress
WordPress
Zapier
Zapier
Zendesk
Zendesk
GitHub
GitHub

What are some alternatives to Discourse, GitHub Pages?

DomainRacer

DomainRacer

It is a blazing fast hosting solution that provides Customer Satisfaction driven Web Hosting services since 2016.

Netlify

Netlify

Netlify is smart enough to process your site and make sure all assets gets optimized and served with perfect caching-headers from a cookie-less domain. We make sure your HTML is served straight from our CDN edge nodes without any round-trip to our backend servers and are the only ones to give you instant cache invalidation when you push a new deploy. Netlify is also the only static hosting service with integrated continuous deployment.

Vercel

Vercel

A cloud platform for serverless deployment. It enables developers to host websites and web services that deploy instantly, scale automatically, and require no supervision, all with minimal configuration.

Surge

Surge

Surge makes it easy for developers to deploy projects to a production-quality CDN through Grunt, Gulp, npm.

Webflow

Webflow

Webflow is a responsive design tool that lets you design, build, and publish websites in an intuitive interface. Clean code included!

Flarum

Flarum

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

Divshot

Divshot

Divshot makes building and hosting front-end web applications simple. Build locally and deploy using a simple command-line interface. Divshot supports multiple environments, pushState routing, atomic deploys, and more.

GitLab Pages

GitLab Pages

Host your static websites on GitLab.com for free, or on your own GitLab Enterprise Edition instance. Use any static website generator: Jekyll, Middleman, Hexo, Hugo, Pelican, and more

Firebase Hosting

Firebase Hosting

It is production-grade web content hosting for developers. With a single command, you can quickly deploy web apps and serve both static and dynamic content to a global CDN (content delivery network). You can also pair it with Cloud Functions or Cloud Run to build and host microservices.

Runkod

Runkod

It provides decentralized hosting platform and management tools for modern javascript applications and static web publishing.

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