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Discourse

Score7.1 out of 10

10 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Discourse?

Discourse is a community management and moderation product.

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Discourse Reviews

What users are saying about Discourse.
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The World's #1 Online Forum Software

Incentivized
Padraic Ryan
Community Manager in Information Technology at eCommerceFuel (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • It is a super-easy way for members to have online discussions
  • Very easy to administer and moderate discussions
  • The pricing is fair and the support is top-notch

Cons

  • I'd like a more robust plugin community to easily add functionality that doesn't currently exist
  • I'd love to see a live chat feature and more 'live' options like users online.

Most Important Features

  • Ability to define groups and have private categories
  • Ability to import/export data via API
  • Ability to see detailed metrics on the health of the community

Return on Investment

  • Since it is the core of our business, all of our success is because of Discourse!
  • We are able to do almost everything we need without expensive custom development

Alternatives Considered

Vanilla Forums

Other Software Used

Help Scout, Customer.io, Asana, HubSpot CRM, Chargify, Ahrefs, HelloSign, DocuSign, Ticket Tailor

Discourse: A Community Tool that "Just Works"

Incentivized
David McCannView profile
Software Engineer in Engineering at TMA - Technology Management Associates (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • Versatility
  • Customizability
  • Good product support services
  • Engaging metrics around user activity

Cons

  • Some configuration UIs are difficult to follow
  • Not well-suited for managing workflows (grant management as an example)
  • Bulk operations across multiple threads either impossible or difficult to figure out

Most Important Features

  • Customizabililty/white-labelling
  • Engagement/activity statistics
  • User-friendly UI

Return on Investment

  • It allowed us to stand up multiple community discussion forums for various project
  • It caused some difficulty when navigating our grant application process
  • It allowed us to track public interest in different discussions

Alternatives Considered

Atlassian Confluence

Other Software Used

Atlassian Confluence, GitLab, Deltek Talent Management

The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!

Incentivized
Elio QoshiView profile
Creative Lead in Marketing at The Tor Project (11-50 employees employees)

Pros

  • 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.
  • Gamification: Badges and Achievements can be customized for User Activity and frequent readers and writers.
  • Mailing List mode: Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.

Cons

  • Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
  • Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
  • 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.

Return on Investment

  • Community Members are eager to jump into the discussion.
  • 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.
  • It's open source and configurable with many other add-ons to help integration with other services.

Other Software Used

Slack, Thunderclap, GitHub