Discourse Pricing Overview

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.

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.

We know discourse isn't the most robust forum software out there, but for the price, it does very well! Keeping things organized is incredibly easy - especially if you're wanting to have posts grouped by specific topics as well. The moderation customization is surprisingly robust though - you can assign key individuals specific roles that you want them to perform, and what abilities they'll be able to have while in the forum.

Wish it was more robust. There are other forum solutions out there, but they were all at exorbitant prices and required dev-level setup. Discourse integrated with our CRM and our support software, which were two of the big things we needed. But I wish you could customize more around the posts and folders. Meaning, you could add up-votes/down-votes to certain tickets/bugs. Or assign a post to a specific moderator using logic.

Help-center user-forum for both internal and external use.

Easy to log on, summarizes and condenses threads, blocks unwanted spam threats, is modern and versitile

The pricing tiers are a tad on the expensive side

Streamlining our needs in Marketing; i.e.: Direct mailers, etc. all while satisfying the needs in other areas so that we can focus on other main criteria for business

Easy to use software that lets users subscribing via mailing list mode without user interface.

The tags are all lower case which seems a bit obscure.

Tracking conversations and getting members of the community involved in discussions provides so much value.