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Discourse Alternatives
Similar projects and alternatives to Discourse
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AppSignal
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed. Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
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Mattermost
Mattermost is an open source platform for secure collaboration across the entire software development lifecycle..
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Zulip
Zulip server and web application. Open-source team chat that helps teams stay productive and focused.
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windmill
Open-source developer platform to power your entire infra and turn scripts into webhooks, workflows and UIs. Fastest workflow engine (13x vs Airflow). Open-source alternative to Retool and Temporal.
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phpBB
phpBB Development: phpBB is a popular open-source bulletin board written in PHP. This repository also contains the history of version 2.
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lenny
Discontinued ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) A more user-respectful fork of Lemmy. Created for https://derpy.email.
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HumHub
HumHub is an Open Source Enterprise Social Network. Easy to install, intuitive to use and extendable with countless freely available modules.
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SaaSHub
SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives
NOTE:
The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives.
Hence, a higher number means a better Discourse alternative or higher similarity.
Discourse discussion
Discourse reviews and mentions
Posts with mentions or reviews of Discourse.
We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives
and similar projects. The last one was on 2026-07-16.
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Reaching an Internal OpenAI Repository Through an HEIF RCE and Overprivileged SSO Token Chain
Related Sources: SecurityWeek Coverage, Discourse GHSA-vhm9-85gw-x335
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The four places a hand-rolled Ruby facade gives out
This is not a strawman. It's how Discourse does it, in a real 1,300-line Discourse module that is exactly the facade we're talking about:
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Death of the Status Update: Why 55% of Americans Stopped Posting on Social Media
discourse combines web forum and email, people can use either one as they see fit.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
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Pressure-testing Ota on Discourse: repo-wrapper truth matters more than a passing bundle command
Draft PR: discourse/discourse#40620
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How to Fix Your Team's Scattered Knowledge Problem With a Self-Hosted Forum
Fair warning: Discourse is resource-hungry. It wants at least 2GB of RAM, and 4GB is more realistic once you have a handful of active users. The official install process uses their own discourse_docker launcher rather than a standard Docker Compose setup, so check their official install guide before going to production.
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Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally
Every single forum I see now is using this:
https://github.com/discourse/discourse
Seems to work okay in general. I'm not a big fan of the gamified notification system it seems to have - whenever I sign up for an instance, it'll send me things like "Super reader achievement unlocked! You read 10 threads." or whatever. I suppose it can be turned off since it's OSS.
- Ask HN: Is there an open source HN?
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N8n added native persistent storage with DataTables
You're looking at the community forum, which uses Discourse (https://www.discourse.org/).
Check out the n8n home page (https://n8n.io/), which is actually great at clearly communicating the point of the platform.
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Slack is extorting us with a $195k/yr bill increase
Lots of criticism here but feels like a community that would have been better served by spinning up a forum server or something along those lines. These are pretty easy to get going. Cheers!
https://www.discourse.org/
https://flarum.org/
https://www.simplemachines.org/
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Lessons from open source in the Mexican government
Everything I see is moving to Discourse [1] now.
The experiment SW is a lot like the buildings and labs in every physics department I've been to: everyone is on a separate 3-5 year grant cycle and as such is contractually obliged not to push for newer infrastructure. People stick to the same software/lab until it is discontinued/condemned.
[1]: https://www.discourse.org/
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A note from our sponsor - AppSignal
www.appsignal.com | 5 Oct 2026
Stats
Basic Discourse repo stats
215
47,932
10.0
3 days ago
discourse/discourse is an open source project licensed under GNU General Public License v3.0 only which is an OSI approved license.
Discourse is marked as "self-hosted". This means that it can be used as a standalone application on its own.
The primary programming language of Discourse is Ruby.
Sponsored
AppSignal knows why the f*#k it crashed.
Stop vibe-debugging. Every exception, every backtrace, grouped so you see patterns, not noise.
www.appsignal.com