Discourse

Discourse is an open source community platform for long-form, threaded discussion. It combines the structure of a classic forum — topics, categories, and tags — with modern features like real-time chat, private messaging, email participation, and mobile apps. Over 22,000 communities run on Discourse, including open source projects, product support forums, and interest groups.

Discord is built for fast, real-time chat where older conversations quickly scroll away. Discourse is built for discussions that last: every topic is threaded, searchable, and indexed by search engines, making it ideal for support communities and knowledge sharing. It even includes built-in chat for real-time moments, so you don't have to choose one or the other.

Slack is a team messaging tool organized around channels and ephemeral chat, aimed at internal collaboration. Discourse is a community platform organized around persistent, SEO-friendly topics — better suited for public forums, customer support, and knowledge bases where conversations need to stay discoverable over time.

Yes. Discourse ships with an official Docker-based installer that can have a community running on a cloud server in about ten minutes. Recent releases made self-hosting even easier: SMTP setup is now optional thanks to Discourse ID logins, and you can claim a free discourse.diy subdomain during installation. The official install guide walks through every step.

The software itself is free and open source (GPL v2) — self-hosting costs nothing but your server. If you prefer managed hosting, there's a free plan with unlimited members and chat, plus paid tiers starting around $100/month that add plugins, analytics, priority support, and more staff seats.

Discourse includes threaded topics with categories and tags, a trust-level system that promotes active members into moderation roles, built-in real-time chat, private messaging, email-in/email-out participation, full-text search, polls, badges, custom themes, and a large plugin ecosystem. Admins get granular moderation tools, AI-assisted spam detection, SSO support, and a full REST API, and official iOS and Android apps are available.