Discourse Reviews & Product Details

I have worked with a number of all inclusive, expensive, enterprise level community platforms. I was unaware of Discourse until my last job. I was really impressed by the flexibility and opensource nature of the product. The pricing is great which makes this a viable option for SMD level businesses. The leadership and support folks are amazing. They are very responsive and really do care about their customers. I really liked that support tries to resolve issues if they are simple instead of just pushing me to open a professional services ticket.

The UX is pretty basic. If you want some really unique experience or functionality you need to go custom which can be a big project. There are limited out of the box plugins but I believe they are adding as they work on customizations so that makes integrations with your other systems more likely.

Self-Service Support and Product Awareness.

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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 Discoruse tutorials available.

Recently, communication within my department has went down. And it wasn't only there, it seemed like all platforms we tried were just like the other ones - non-customisable, costy, and way too simple. Discourse was simple, but the "simple" which actually was fine with us.

It is a open source software, where the main topics can be discussed orderly. It doesn't matter how big or small the project is, you'll find the adequate tool to find a solution and talk about it within your community or the people you want to reach. For example, you'll be able to do surveys, bookmark, chat and keep track of your main interests. It's not only easy to host, but also easy to follow up.

It's a relatively new forum, where people aren't used to the privacy terms, for example, private messages not being private to the admin. Also, constant updates means interface changes, you need to adapt.

Efficient organization between a whole group of people regarding an specific subject. Ease to contact other members and let them know what's going on at the moment.

Simple to use and read. It presents a simple list of discussions with suitable categories, as opposed to cluttered sub-forums that divide discussions. It provides a easy and effective way to highlight and pin topics and identify active discussions. Users can even hide certain categories they are not interested in. Creating and replying to topics is a great experience and has editor support.

This might be a quibble, but at times the UI can be perceived as cluttered, disorganized. Also, one cannot hide categories that you don’t frequent, and you can’t block users that pester you.

We needed a way to distribute lots of content, embed videos, images, tweets, quotes, code, etc. Since our teams are geographically dispersed, and across multiple time zones, this way of keeping everyone updated is a simple exercise. Content can be pulled in and utilized based on time stamping.

The best thing about this online discussion forum is that there is a soft flagging system in which positive and constructive commenters are rewarded and those comments that are spam or junk are flagged and deleted

Sometimes the forums can become unorganized and change topics quickly it would be nice if a new thread would be started by administrators to keep the organization

solving issues with customer feedback and finding new ways to improve communications with consumer base

We chose Discourse about five years ago because we wanted to create a place for an in-depth conversation about new research that was coming out in occupational therapy. And it has delivered! I am consistently amazed by the quality of conversation that the platform fosters. The added bonus has been all of the customization options on the platform. This has allowed us to roll out new tools we did not anticipate initially. The best surprise was when they recently updated the layout to prioritze sidebar navigation-it gave the platform a freshness to rival other social platforms!

One thing to be aware of with Discourse is that it gives a lot of flexibility, but we've had to leverage a developer to capitalize on creating our more advanced tools. Overall, we've been pleased with this tradeoff though! And, luckily, Discourse really does provide amazing support for more complex projects.

Discourse helps us manage our private community for occupational therapists to discuss new research and earn their continuing education hours.

Discourse is really easy to use and allows an open discussion in a forum style platform. It's quite customizable where you can create different topics and categories, and also tracks user engagement.

Discourse is quite a robust platform, and depending on how the company uses and organises it, it can be quite overwhelming. Fortunately, they have a fantastic bot that teaches you the basics and get you up-to-speed.

We like to use Discourse for community discussion threads and company/team announcements. It's a way to help us seperate from our knowledge-base and have a simpler workflow.

main resource for internal communication and support outside of live channels

interface is very minimal and flat, but not necessarily simple and intuitive

Provides an online discussion platform to engage in product discussion

One of the things that I like best is the ability to support other people in the same field of work. All of the discussion is useful, and anything negative is quickly corrected. All of the users seem to want to help one another in a friendly and helpful discourse.

One thing that I dislike is that some user posts are completely deleted when a user is removed.

Discourse is solving the problem of community engagement within a niche. Users are able to post and help each other out within different industries.

Probably the best feature of this software is its being open source. Allows seamless integration into other platforms, and lets you customize it to fit your specific needs, which is a unique feature compared to other similar softwares.

Sometimes managing the thread can lead to disarray and makes it a bit disorganized. The organization of the thread can use a better format. Additionally, some features require external integration to be added in order to function.

When I was working with a dozen other people in a research lab, it naturally lead to many Google docs and hundreds of files and documents all over the place, but discourse helped us organize all of them into one single forum and it allowed us to keep track of where things were and what we were discussing without having to scramble to find the corresponding Google Doc! Saved us a lot of time and effort overall.

Ease of communication. This makes communication among our group of Experts really easy, and it provides a great place for our members to get help, ask questions, and interact with each other. It has helpful notification preferences with intelligent defaults that can be customized to your liking. There are ways to easily pick up where you left off and link to specific posts or content to easily share with others.

The design and navigating around takes getting used to. Using the markup language for text editing is difficult to remember.

Communication with members, communication among community experts, providing troubleshooting help, linking to documentation, content access for groups that need different permission and editing levels.

A choice of seamless communication in the forms of a great messenger-type chat room, with conversation records, a mailing list platform, or discussion forum.

Managed forum hosting is not free, it actually costs around $100 per month for a standard subscription. And for business scale traffic, it costs upwards of $300 a month.

An easy solution to connect my ecommerce network of sales associates. With the mobile application's discussion chat room feature the whole team can stay connected, as long as there's internet access. At least, it would be great if it wasn't so expensive.

The Discourse UI is clean and intuitive and very easy to get the hang of. Having had no prior experience with it, I was able to pick it up in a relatively short timeframe. Makes communication a breeze , and the customization options are wonderful for adding brand specific content.

Honestly not much, some of our computers are a bit older so it definitely took some browser updates to bring them up to speed, but after that, it was smooth sailing. I guess I would say I'm not as in love with the mobile version as I am with the desktop version, but that's more personal preference.

Discourse keeps us connected as an organization and makes it easy to update everyone on recent successes / useful tips for initiatives or programs we're all apart of.

I really like the ability to tag (add categories) articles and easily search by and organize those tags. The ability to sort the page by newest posts versus a more traditional Category listing is also great. The badges you earn when doing things in Discourse don't do anything, but they are a fun touch.

Haven't found a way to edit/remove tags/categories. For example, if you've misspelled something, even if you don't use that tag, it still shows up in the list.

We had best practice documents in Dropbox, in Google docs, on various internal servers. Information was all over the place. Discourse was a good, inexpensive way to bring it all together in one centralized place that's easy to search and find.