Discourse Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 7.1 out of 10

Score

7.1 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Discourse are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Interface: Users have found the software to be highly intuitive and easy to navigate, with a simple and modern interface. It is praised as one of the easiest ways to create online forums, requiring minimal effort to get started.

Convenient Collaboration Features: Users appreciate the ability to communicate with co-workers through private chats and forums, which greatly facilitates collaboration within organizations. The feature of assigning trust levels to users and onboarding moderators and additional admins is seen as valuable for effective community management.

Enhanced Social Interaction: The platform allows users to leave comments and engage with other users on various sites, fostering social interaction and community building. Users commend the well-organized discussions on Discourse that are easy to read, enhancing the overall user experience.

Reviews

3 Reviews

The World's #1 Online Forum Software

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 27, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Discourse is the core platform that we use for our online Community. It is the main area where our 1100+ members communicate on a daily basis and provides us with a reliable, easy-to-use, highly customizable experience for our members.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

[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.

Padraic Ryan

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

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Discourse: A Community Tool that "Just Works"

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

July 13, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

At a previous organization, Discourse was the main public-facing community support tool for discussing our project, and the services we provided. We also migrated another community we supported away from google groups, exporting the existing data and importing it into discourse. We also used it to manage a (financial) grant application process where proposals and other documentation could be submitted. At my current organization, it's used minimally by some teams.

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Discourse is great for asynchronous community discussion threads. As stated previously, it didn't handle more complicated workflows where state mattered (and needed to be filtered by), and potentially documents and other attachments needed to be passed back and forth. It also wouldn't be well-suited as a replacement for real-time chat products like Slack or Hipchat.

David McCann

Software Engineer in Engineering at TMA - Technology Management Associates (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization has over 1300 employees and even more volunteer contributors. Discourse was used as a pilot project years ago and positioned itself in a more canonical position, turning it into the main communication channel for the whole organization. It has been highly useful to replace old mailing list software with an open source and user friendly experience which didn't alienate power users as they could continue use Discourse via its mailing list mode.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.

Elio Qoshi

Creative Lead in Marketing at The Tor Project (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile

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Reviews and Ratings

The best forum software out there. Also Open Source!

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

August 17, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Elio Qoshi

Creative Lead in Marketing at The Tor Project (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

View profile