Circle vs Discourse

Choose Circle if the community is part of something you sell, such as a course or a cohort program, and you want lessons, live video sessions and possibly your own branded mobile apps in the same product. Choose Discourse if the community is mainly a discussion forum, as in a support or developer community, if you want to run it on your own servers, or if you want to start on a free plan. Both offer paid memberships, chat, events, an API and a custom domain, so those features do not separate them.

Circle suits a creator or coach whose community is also the product. Of the two, only Circle lists courses with lessons, live streaming and live rooms, and branded iOS and Android apps. It is priced per community, not per seat, and its limits sit on the money side: no free plan, and Circle takes a cut of member payments on top of the subscription.

Discourse comes from the forum side. It is GPL-licensed open source that anyone can self-host at no cost, or have the company host on its Free, Pro, Business or Enterprise plans, and only Discourse lists idea voting boards. Discourse also names teams moving off vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla, Drupal or Khoros. Its limits: gamification, topic voting and advanced reporting come with the Business tier, and for courses it points to an outside LMS via a plugin.

For Circle, reviews of the product are undated, while reviews of the company as a whole are mostly from 2026. In both, some praise easy onboarding, a clean interface and customization; reviews of the company also praise quick support. Complaints on both centre on price, such as a costly entry plan for testing an idea, costs that rise with scale and transaction fees, and a few say live meetings needed Zoom or streaming is capped. Discourse has few public reviews, mostly from 2020 to 2025, so its themes are light. Reviewers praise it as open source, usable extensively and good for discussion, and some from 2022 to 2025 found navigation and notifications hard.

Miro, which Circle's customer story calls an AI innovation workspace, used Circle to fold three user programs into one community, Miro Heroes, with branded spaces, engagement data through the Open API and Email Hub segmentation. Circle reports the community size doubled (September 2025). Katalon, a software testing platform, runs a Discourse-hosted community for customers, practitioners, partners and developers, and Discourse's 2022 blog says activity and sentiment improved. Both are vendor accounts, and Katalon's is older.

One check first: Discourse's own comparison page says its team handles content, member records and discussion history when a community leaves Circle, and that Circle runs only on Circle's servers. Those are Discourse's claims only, unconfirmed on Circle's side, so a buyer should ask both vendors directly before deciding.