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Discourse vs XenForo: What are the differences?
- Cost: One key difference between Discourse and XenForo is their cost. Discourse is an open-source platform that offers both a free version with limited features as well as paid plans with additional features and support. On the other hand, XenForo is a commercial software that requires a one-time license fee to be paid upfront.
- Community Engagement: While both platforms offer community engagement features, Discourse is designed with a focus on user-centric community discussions. It provides a modern and intuitive interface with real-time updates, enabling users to engage in conversations easily. XenForo, on the other hand, offers traditional forum features with a more structured layout, including thread categorization and sub-forums.
- Customization and Themes: Discourse provides extensive customization options and allows users to create custom themes using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It also has an active community that shares themes and plugins. In contrast, XenForo offers a rich set of customization options through its admin control panel, allowing users to tailor various aspects of their forum's appearance and functionality without the need for coding.
- Ease of Use: Discourse is known for its ease of use and intuitive interface. It has a clean design and emphasizes simplicity in navigation and interaction. XenForo also provides a user-friendly experience, but it may require some initial learning for users familiar with more traditional forum platforms.
- Integration and Add-ons: Discourse provides a robust API and supports integrations with popular services, allowing users to extend its functionality. It also has a plugin system that enables the installation of various add-ons to enhance the forum's features. XenForo, on the other hand, offers a wide range of built-in features and integration options, providing a comprehensive forum solution without additional add-ons required.
- Support and Updates: Discourse offers various options for support, including a community forum for peer-to-peer assistance and paid support plans for faster response times. It also has regular updates and improvements driven by its active open-source community. XenForo provides official support through its customer support system and releases updates to address bugs and introduce new features.
In Summary, Discourse and XenForo differ in terms of cost, community engagement approach, customization options, user-friendliness, integration capabilities, and support models.
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Learn MorePros of Discourse
Pros of XenForo
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 XenForo
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Cons of Discourse
Cons of XenForo
Cons of Discourse
- Heavy on server3
- Difficult to extend2
- Notifications aren't great on mobile due to being a PWA2
Cons of XenForo
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- 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 XenForo?
It is a commercial Internet forum software package written in the PHP programming language.
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What are some alternatives to Discourse and XenForo?
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.
JavaScript
JavaScript is most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic,and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.