Discourse vs Help Scout

Discourse vs Help Scout: What are the differences?

What is Discourse? 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.

What is Help Scout? A help desk for teams that insist on a delightful customer experience. With best in-class-reporting, an integrated knowledge base, 50+ integrations and a robust API, Help Scout lets your team focus on what really matters: your customers.

Discourse and Help Scout are primarily classified as "Forums" and "Help Desk" 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, Help Scout provides the following key features:

• No ticket #'s or robo-text
• Get up and running in minutes
• Outstanding support, no matter plan

"Open source" is the primary reason why developers consider Discourse over the competitors, whereas "Email based helpdesk" was stated as the key factor in picking Help Scout.

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.

According to the StackShare community, Help Scout has a broader approval, being mentioned in 215 company stacks & 15 developers stacks; compared to Discourse, which is listed in 42 company stacks and 7 developer stacks.