Discourse Platform Details & Review

Discourse gives you the tools to build an online community and drive real business value. It's a platform for engagement.

Discourse

Discourse is an online discussion platform. With it, you get the power and flexibility of social networking with the best of the traditional forum software. This software is easy to use, comes with many features and can be scaled without paying for any add-ons.

Discourse Features

Conversations, not pages - Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button? We’ve replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.
Simple, but with context - Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Expand context at the bottom and top of each post, and also in quotes, to reveal the full conversation without losing your place.
Social login - Easily add common social logins like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.

Discourse Pricing

Starts at $100/mo.
Free version available.

Pros

Anything you see on screen, you can also do via an API call.
Automatic notification of new versions in the dashboard, with a one-click web upgrade process.
Very easy to administer and moderate discussions.

Cons

Some configuration UIs are difficult to follow.
Not well-suited for managing workflows (grant management as an example).
Bulk operations across multiple threads either impossible or difficult to figure out.

See Comparision

Discourse Reviews

"Discourse - An amazing platform"

Discourse was very straightforward to install, the Let's Encrypt integration is amazing. Discourse is an amazing platform with even more of an amazing design. My team enjoyed using it a lot. The cost of running is also very small. Overall it is a great experience. I didn't really like that you can't deploy Discourse without a domain. It was very hard for me to use Discourse with my mail server at first, although I quickly got around that by using the numerous Discourse tutorials available.

Review on G2.

"Discourse Review"

It's not the most intuitive tool to use. While tagging and searching usually get me to where I want to go, there seems to always be duplicate information and no way to determine which is the 'newest' or 'validated' answers.

Review on G2.

"Good open source forum software"

Discourse is open source and can be used extensively within a company. The interface of the older versions was not as neat as it is today. Our self-hosted version was an old version. Other than that, it's great.

Review on Capterra.

Disclaimer: To curate the pros, cons and reviews - we mine the internet for customer references regarding the said software. Some of our sources include Reddit, Product Hunt, Twitter & Quora (and sites like G2 & Capterra).

What you should do now

Whenever you’re ready! Here are 3 ways we can help:

If you’d like to turn your business into a community-led business, book a call with us. One of our community experts will understand your current situation, and suggest how a community can work for you.
If you’d like to learn the exact community-building formula we’ve used to help build 2000+ communities, watch this masterclass or read this guide.
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Curated under the supervision of Sid Ramesh

Sid is a master community builder with 10 years of experience. Having started his journey working with Harvard University’s CS50x at age 17, Sid has catalysed growth for communities across domains - Travel and Hospitality, Coding, Finance, Marketing, Music, and Entrepreneurship to name a few. Currently, he leads Community at Build on Scenes.