Discourse is the 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It works as a mailing list, a discussion forum and a long-form chat room.
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- Real-time updates and notifications
- Reply-while-you-read
- Highly customisable
- Inbuilt community moderation tools; incremental privileges based on user activity
- Under continuous development by 10+ full-time developers
- SSO supported out of the box
- Potential to be extremely future proof and ahead of other platforms
- Established migration scripts and processes for many of the key forum platforms
- Rich and customisable user profile cards
- Sophisticated anti-spam filters
- Single flat forum
- Mark-up based UI makes complex formatting difficult
- The roadmap is strongly dictated by paid clients on enterprise plans
- Frequent updates mean ongoing UI changes
Pricing
- 0 to 1.2m: $1.2k
- 1.2m to 6m: $3.6k
- 6m+: Negotiated
- Standard migration included on Business/Enterprise. Enterprise required for fully custom migration. Services also available through external agencies.: $ varies
Details
- Two-factor authentication
- Login IP Ranges
- SSAE 16 SOC 2 audits
- ISO 27001/27018
- Secure data centers
- Continuous security penetration testing
- Independent security penetration testing
- Canned Reports
- Customizable Reports
- Realtime data visualization
- Supports Google Analytics
- Omniture
- Download CSV detail data
- API for integration/selective exports
- Akismet anti-spam
- Google AdSense / DFP
- Cakeday — celebrate join date or birthday
- Solved — mark a reply as the solution
- Slack — real time chat notifications
- Data Explorer — run live SQL queries and ad-hoc reports
- Staff Notes — annotate user accounts
- Canned Replies — automate common staff replies
- Other analytics tools (Plausible, Matomo, Segment)
- General oAuth 2.0 and LinkedIn login support
- Social sign-up (Google)
- Social sign-up (Twitter)
- Social sign-up (Facebook)
- Social sign-up (Other)
- SSO (native or 3rd party)
Notable Clients
Features
Customer Reviews of Discourse
Reviews Summary
4.4 out of 5
- Wonderful moderation tools
- Tons of great plugins
- Very responsive to paid customer needs
- Easy to theme and manage the look and feel of
- Trust level is unique and meaningful without feeling game-like
- Could use more sales focus, they can be a bit hard to buy from.
- Support could be easier to navigate could use a dedicated support environment.
- Training and Start-up help could be improved. Normal start-up training, consulting and guidance would be useful.
- Enterprise outage management could improve (not bad but could be better)
- The lack of automation rules, especially in regards to sending emails to members
Latest Reviews
Discourse is our favorite forum so far!
I have used, managed and deployed many forum discussion platforms and Discourse, by far, was the easiest to move to, It has great features designed to focus meaningful member-to-member communication. ... Read Full Review
February 20, 2018 | Sean Rivers
Advanced and Innovative Forum Software
When you compare and contrast platforms, the most important comparison is this: how advanced is this platform? You can use an iPhone or an iPhone X to browse the web, so they can both get a checkmark ... Read Full Review
February 16, 2018 | Anonymous
Robust and flexible but difficult to analyze data
Discourse has served my company well for the past two years as a forum platform. It definitely shines when you prompt users toward open-ended discussion and sharing as opposed to stricter Q&A, tho... Read Full Review
March 16, 2017 | Miriam Swords Kalk