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Discourse

276
244
+ 1
115
Gitter

232
256
+ 1
277
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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.

Advice on Discourse and Gitter
Needs advice
on
SlackSlackDiscordDiscord
and
GitterGitter

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."

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Replies (4)
Rebecca Driscoll
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration

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Arnaud Lemercier
Expert En Dveloppement Web Et Systmes Dinformations, Designer UX, UI, Co-grant at Wixiweb · | 4 upvotes · 205.4K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications

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Michael Ionita
Recommends
on
SlackSlack
at

We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.

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Julien Tanay
Lead DevOps. Every day product hacker. at Dior · | 2 upvotes · 200.7K views
Recommends
on
DiscordDiscord
at

Our Discord Server is our n°1 community stop; we gather feedback from our users from here, discuss about new features, announce new releases, and so on.

We even use it for internal meetings and calls !

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Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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Pros of Discourse
Pros of Gitter
  • 28
    Open source
  • 19
    Fast
  • 13
    Email digests
  • 9
    Better than a stereotypical forum
  • 8
    Perfect for communities of any size
  • 7
    It's perfect to build real communities
  • 7
    Made by same folks from stackoverflow
  • 7
    Built with Ember.js
  • 6
    Great customer support
  • 3
    Made by consolidated team with a working business
  • 3
    Translated into a lot of Languages
  • 3
    Configurations
  • 2
    Easy flag resolution
  • 63
    Github integration
  • 55
    Free
  • 45
    Markdown support
  • 19
    Markdown
  • 17
    Graceful integration
  • 16
    Project-oriented
  • 15
    MARKDOOOOWN
  • 12
    IRC bridge
  • 9
    Integrates with everything
  • 8
    LaTeX
  • 4
    Apps available for most platforms
  • 2
    Cross-repository issue reference
  • 2
    Github login
  • 1
    IRC support
  • 1
    My new fav'rite thing is on it
  • 1
    Very fast work
  • 1
    Very open
  • 1
    Now open source
  • 1
    Open source
  • 1
    Free unlimited archives
  • 1
    Open access (no invitation needed)
  • 1
    Single account for all communities
  • 1
    Free, open & free hosting

Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

Cons of Discourse
Cons of Gitter
  • 3
    Heavy on server
  • 2
    Difficult to extend
  • 2
    Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA
  • 2
    Sends data to US Gov

Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

- No public GitHub repository available -

What is Discourse?

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.

What is Gitter?

Free chat rooms for your public repositories. A bit like IRC only smarter. Chats for private repositories as well as organisations.

Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

What companies use Discourse?
What companies use Gitter?
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
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Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

What tools integrate with Discourse?
What tools integrate with Gitter?

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What are some alternatives to Discourse and Gitter?
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 is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.
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
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.
WordPress
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
See all alternatives