Discourse Reviews: 4.0/5 — Solid Choice

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.

Discourse is already amazing. Yet, the pace of development is staggering. You can interact directly with the co-founders, developers, and the rest of the Discourse community at meta.discourse.org. That's something you probably won't get with any other community software! As an open source project, the level of innovation and collaboration from multiple stakeholders appears to be well beyond what any private company could sustain. Discourse is fast, modern, and easy to use. It can handle a small community and scale to work with millions of people. It is incredibly simple to moderate and serve as the admin for a Discourse community. The ability to integrate Discourse with other platforms is advanced and convenient. You absolutely have to spin up a version of Discourse and try it out before making a decision.

Whenever I have a complaint, I can bring it to the Discourse community at meta.discourse.org and see if others agree. When the concern is shared, the Discourse team will work to improve the product within months. Any dislikes about Discourse get resolved in a relatively short time.

It is enabling us to bring together a global community, provide customer service, offer paid access to content, develop niche groups, and even run our intranet.

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.

Its very useful for replacing the old mailing list software with an open source and user friendly experience. It also helps for users to choose and use forum threads without the user interface by subscribing via mailing list mode. It's also good for open communication for the whole organization too.

At first, I wasn't sure how to use tags since everything was lowercase and it feels a bit messy for an user-centric experience. Also, private messages can be seen by administrators which sometimes it might not be clear enough to the public.

It's an open source and configurable with many other add-ons in order to help with integration with other services. Also, every conversation are trackable easily without having the risk of being lost or disappear in a big storm of many many other messages too.

I like that someone who is looking for my niche services can inquire about them here. Not only can they ask about them, I get a place where I can talk about what I do and what I can offer them. It’s where supply meets demand and demand meets supply. It also helps me and people like me to cultivate fans of what we do. It’s Hollywood for everyone else.

I wish it were a bit more colorful and eyegrabbing at first sight. It’s one thing to be searched but one wants to have the ability to really stand out from the rest.

Reaching more clients has always been a huge issue for me. Discourse can help me with that by allowing a platform for me to say “Hey, this is what I do. Could this work for you?” So mainly for me it would be the networking aspect of Discourse that solves a lot of my problems. It also gives me a chance to outline exactly what I do and don’t do. I don’t always get to do that with a basic website or just a pamphlet.

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

I love how professional the community on Discourse is. There’s a ton of great information and it’s a safe place for constructive conversation.

Honestly I have no complaints although sometimes it can be difficult to find the threads I am looking to join.

Discourse has allowed my business to gain insight and feedback from other professionals and customers

I like the best that the discussions on Discourse are well organized and easy to read through

I have not found anything to dislike about Discourse as of now

I use it for research and technical advice/forums

Discourse is a streamlined discussion platform that has greatly improved our discussion workflow by providing a clean and consistent interface and a simple to use platform that everyone can get started with in an instant

As the number of people scale up, Discourse can get very slow unless you have top of the line hardware that it can run on. Moments like those, you can't help but think of getting a cloud based solution

We've moved our ideas and communication workflow to Discourse. This has helped us work on the move, on simple web apps that everyone can contribute to using just a cell phone. It's just increased our turn around time, and made it easier, and fun even, to communicate

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

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.

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.

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.

Discourse is easy to use and allows users to communicate easily and efficiently which is vital. Members can come together in one place and ask questions, answer questions, as well as get help and assistance when needed.

It takes a bit getting used to and I don't think its as organized as it could be. It seems that questions can pile up quickly and it almost feels like I am swimming in unread emails. The navigation takes a bit of practice.

This has helped our business come together and streamline communication between various business lines. It has also provided for a central place to ask questions and seek help and guidance which the employees find valuable.

I like that you can create a forum with your community or team members. Great for tips and discussions

Nothing that comes to mind at this time

If you find an easier way to do something and want to share it or if you have a question, great place for discussion

Discourse pares all the complexity away and puts just the essential stuff on screen – the conversations you care most about, based on your participation.

There is nothing I dislike about this product.

defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers — and the most engaged forum members can assist in the governance of their community.

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.

everything is very good. I have no suggestions.

Sometimes the notifications do not work properly

answer customer questions and have history of answers kind of like stack overflow

There are several great things about this platform. You can assign TL (trust levels) to users, and you can use this system to onboard moderators, additional admins, and other people to help manage your community. You can organize topics, threads, and categories in nearly any way you want, and the system setup is pretty elaborate.

The way the replies system is set up, the conversation can get convoluted easily, and can lead to quickly derailing conversations. Also, to add features like a "solved!" Button to threads that ask for help with something, has to be a external integration. The search function is highly indexed, and unless you have a keyword or know exactly what you are searching the forum for, you might get lost in the forum queue.

As a freelancer, I'm a professional moderator. I specialize in creating, managing, and maintaining forums and online communinities. I use discourse to help administrate users in a forum-style setting. The discourse design is optimized for discussion, which means that topics get old quickly - discourse makes sure those old topics get pushed to the back, and make space for the new topics.

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.

It simply breaks with the way of carrying the virtual community traditionally, It is not just about asking questions and writing answers like StackOverFlow, StackExchange, but it is about getting social interaction, maintaining a coexistence and establishing links with the community. I like this a lot because it is about empowering the community to lead itself, being the only way to keep at bay those who, instead of contributing, start publishing spam or behave like a troll.

Being free software, the company must be able to customize the software according to their needs. Obviously, each company is different, it does not make sense to apply a single solution. This power of personalization is only given by free software. Just as there are for WordPress, it is expected that for Discourse there will also soon be a wide variety of accessories, so that each organization can customize their installation to their liking.

A partner of our company requests a crisis management document in social media and obtains several examples of different real cases from our clients, it was very useful in that case.

Frankly that it's open source and easy to use. Plus I don't know of any other software or cloud-base program to handle communications and data in large group settings or forums. This was very helpful with a previous job. There are also a lot of threads you can add to keep information organized.

I never really understood the private message function. Not sure why I need it to contact administrators when I was handling a group meeting. Setting up mailing lists seemed to be too manual - not easy to upload IMO.

We used it for client and group meetings to record data in an effective and efficient way. We did use in it in that way although then uploaded it over to Basecamp which was used on a more corporate level.

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.

1. User Privileges : Teams, Trust Levels, Moderation, Private and Public Threads make it possible to have as much transparency, privacy or power decentralization as one wishes. 2.Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.

1.Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody. 2.Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.

1.Conversations can be tracked easier without the risk of being lost in a sea of messages as people tend to construct their posts more carefully than on any workspace messenger. 2.It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.

Discourse is a great server for conversation, and it's functions are very user-friendly. I like that there are both public and private forums, so my conversations could be as transparent or private as I want.

The tagging system is a little unclear, and at best semi-functional. The all lowercase tagging system makes things hard to find, and difficult to read. Additionally, mailing list mode is a bit tiresome to set up.

Discourse is great for community interaction and some of the best open-source software I've seen. If you need a forum software, I would absolutely recommend Discourse.