Discourse vs. Website Toolbox

[Discourse is by] far the best online forum platform in the industry. It may be a little pricey for people looking for a cheap option for their hobby forum, but for any type of business that relies on a forum, the pricing is more than fair.

Incentivized

Website Toolbox is a huge improvement over self-hosted forums. It attempts to host forums that failed over the effort required to keep these free of spam.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Fights spam.
• Prevent fake accounts.
• Keep forums clean by requiring post approval.

• 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

Incentivized

• Customization of JavaScript/CSS.
• Billing notifications.

Support is rarely needed. When needed, they are friendly and fast to understand and address the problem.

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It has improved our self-service customer support.