Discourse
Discourse is a free, open-source platform for community discussion — a modern forum engine designed as the online home for your community. Originally created by Jeff Atwood and Robin Ward in 2013, it has become one of the most widely deployed self-hosted discussion platforms, powering support forums, product communities and open-source project hubs. Discourse is written in Ruby on Rails with a PostgreSQL database and an Ember.js front-end, and it is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later. You can run it entirely on your own infrastructure, or use the vendor’s optional official hosting if you would rather skip server management.
Key Features
- Structured discussions — Organise conversations into categories and topics with threaded replies, quoting, mentions and full-text search.
- Built-in chat — Real-time chat channels sit alongside the classic forum threads for instant, ephemeral conversation.
- Themes and customisation — An ever-growing selection of official and community themes lets you change the look and feel without touching the core.
- Plugin ecosystem — Extend the platform with official and third-party plugins, from chatbots powered by Discourse AI to SQL analysis with the Data Explorer plugin.
- Trust levels and moderation tools — Granular user permissions, flagging, automated spam protection and moderation queues keep large communities manageable.
- Mobile-friendly interface — The responsive UI works as a progressive web app on phones and tablets, not just on the desktop.
- Accessibility — Development follows the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1, with a dedicated accessibility contact for reporting issues.
- Battle-tested at scale — Over a decade of active development, a documented security process and release notes for every security fix.
Why Use Discourse?
Discourse gives you a complete, actively maintained community platform rather than a bare bulletin board. It combines long-form threaded discussion with real-time chat, ships sensible moderation and spam controls, and stays extensible through themes and plugins — so a forum can grow from a handful of members to hundreds of thousands without changing platform. Because it is 100% open source and self-hostable, you keep control over where your community’s data lives, and you can migrate away at any time.
Use Cases
- Support and customer communities for a product or service, with official answers and community-driven help
- Open-source projects that need a public forum for users and contributors alongside their issue tracker
- Internal company or association discussion boards where data must stay on your own servers
- Interest groups and membership organisations running a long-lived, moderated community
Alternatives
- Flarum — A deliberately lightweight PHP forum that favours speed and simplicity over feature breadth.
- NodeBB — Node.js forum software with real-time web socket updates and a classic bulletin-board structure.
- Lemmy — A federated link aggregator and forum that talks to the wider Fediverse over ActivityPub.
- Mattermost — Self-hosted team messaging, better suited to chat than to long-form forum threads.
- phpBB — The long-standing classic PHP bulletin board, familiar to a generation of forum administrators.
Platform
Self-hosted via Docker (Linux server, 64-bit) · PostgreSQL · Ruby on Rails · Web and mobile browsers · Optional official managed hosting
Licence
GNU General Public License v2.0 or later