Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion forum and community platform, run as managed hosting on Free, Pro, Business and Enterprise plans or self-hosted for free.

Discourse is an open source discussion and community platform: threaded forum topics with categories and tags, real-time chat channels, a moderation flag queue and a member directory, all in one product. It is available two ways, as free GPL-licensed software anyone can self-host or as managed hosting the company runs. It is made by Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc., a fully remote company founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward and Sam Saffron, which uses Discourse itself in place of a separate chat tool. Threaded forum discussions are the core, with private and gated categories, paid memberships and subscriptions, and an event calendar with RSVPs alongside them. Real-time chat channels sit next to the topics, a member directory with custom fields describes the community, and badges, points and leaderboards reward the people in it. A moderation flag queue handles reports, AI-powered summaries and moderation tools shorten long threads and flag problems, and weekly email digests bring members back. A custom domain, social login, single sign-on and SAML, Automation workflows, member engagement analytics, an API and webhooks, idea voting boards and an embeddable comments widget complete the platform, with a plugin ecosystem and the Discourse Hub mobile app on top. Gamification, Topic Voting and advanced reporting arrive on the Business tier, and Enterprise adds dedicated AWS hosting and staging sites. Discourse suits product and developer support communities, customer communities that want a forum and chat in one place, teams migrating off vBulletin, phpBB, Vanilla, Drupal or Khoros, organizations that want to self-host on their own infrastructure, and large deployments that need SAML and dedicated hosting. The self-hosted edition is free. Managed hosting comes as a Free plan plus the flat-priced Pro and Business tiers, each on a monthly or an annual term and open to a card-free trial, while Enterprise is quoted through sales. In daily use Discourse runs a product's support forum, a brand's customer community, an open source project's developer discussion and a company's internal collaboration, and it is the destination when an existing forum is migrated off older software. It integrates with Zoom for meetings, embeds YouTube and Vimeo links and links out to an external LMS through a plugin, so it sits beside a help desk, a video tool and a course platform rather than replacing them.