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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.
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."
We use Slack to increase productivity by simplifying communication and putting Slack in the middle of our communication workflow #Communications #Collaboration
We use Discord to tracking some action and errors (logs / alerting / assertion). it's free and simple to use with mobile application et notifications
We use Slack because we can let "tools talk to us" and automate processes in our dev team using bots.
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 !
Pros of Discourse
- Open source28
- Fast19
- Email digests13
- Better than a stereotypical forum9
- Perfect for communities of any size8
- It's perfect to build real communities7
- Made by same folks from stackoverflow7
- Built with Ember.js7
- Great customer support6
- Made by consolidated team with a working business3
- Translated into a lot of Languages3
- Configurations3
- Easy flag resolution2
Pros of Gitter
- Github integration63
- Free55
- Markdown support45
- Markdown19
- Graceful integration17
- Project-oriented16
- MARKDOOOOWN15
- IRC bridge12
- Integrates with everything9
- LaTeX8
- Apps available for most platforms4
- Cross-repository issue reference2
- Github login2
- IRC support1
- My new fav'rite thing is on it1
- Very fast work1
- Very open1
- Now open source1
- Open source1
- Free unlimited archives1
- Open access (no invitation needed)1
- Single account for all communities1
- Free, open & free hosting1
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Cons of Discourse
- Heavy on server3
- Difficult to extend2
- Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA2
Cons of Gitter
- Sends data to US Gov2