Discourse vs Gitter: 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, Gitter is detailed as "Messaging for people who make software. Integrated with your team, projects and your code". Free chat rooms for your public repositories A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations..

Discourse and Gitter are primarily classified as "Forums" and "Group Chat & Notifications" 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, Gitter provides the following key features:

• Know who's seen any message
• Edit messages after you've sent them
• Full emoji support

"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider Discourse over the competitors, whereas "Github integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Gitter.

Discourse is an open source tool with 28.8K GitHub stars and 6.51K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Discourse's open source repository on GitHub.

Binary.com, Reviewable, and Hazeorid are some of the popular companies that use Gitter, whereas Discourse is used by Twitter, Heroku, and CodeCombat. Gitter has a broader approval, being mentioned in 35 company stacks & 173 developers stacks; compared to Discourse, which is listed in 53 company stacks and 52 developer stacks.