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.

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