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Discourse

Discourse

Overview

What is Discourse?

Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation product.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Discourse has proven to be a valuable documentation tool for businesses, offering a centralized space for technical questions and answers. …
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Pricing

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What is Discourse?

Discourse is an open-source community management and moderation product.

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services

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What is Higher Logic Vanilla?

Higher Logic Vanilla is a customizable and themable forum software. It can be used for support communities, Q&A Communities and more. There are numerous integrations, including SSO, and connectors to popular software such as Mailchimp, WordPress, Zendesk and Salesforce.

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Product Demos

UC Discourse Demo

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Demo Tamil Discourse

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One Late Night - Dead Line (Demo DEV.) (Discourse : Thai)

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Demo How To Move Discourse Forum Posts to new Topic

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Discourse Live Demo | Joshua Rosenfeld

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Discourse Demo | Sarah Hawk

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Product Details

What is Discourse?

Discourse Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(11)

Community Insights

TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!

Discourse has proven to be a valuable documentation tool for businesses, offering a centralized space for technical questions and answers. Customers have found it to be an efficient platform for email communication and customer interaction, streamlining discussions on specific subjects and facilitating collaboration. It serves as a well-organized repository for businesses to provide customer service, develop niche groups, and offer paid access to content. Additionally, Discourse has been utilized effectively by research labs to organize files and discussions in one forum, saving time and effort. It allows organizations to stay connected, share updates, and foster user support within their communities. The software's open-source nature and configurability make it a versatile tool for integration with various services, providing cost-effective communication solutions for businesses of all sizes.

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.

Basic and Cluttered User Interface: Many users have expressed dissatisfaction with the user interface of Discourse, finding it to be basic and not intuitive. Some users feel that the interface is cluttered and disorganized, making it difficult to navigate and find specific threads.

Unclear Tagging System: The tagging system in Discourse has been criticized by some users for being unclear and difficult to navigate. With all lowercase tags, it can be hard to find and read them. Some users find the tagging system obscure and challenging to use.

Difficulties with Organization: Several users have voiced their concerns about the organization of threads in Discourse. They feel that questions pile up quickly, making navigation challenging. The conversation system is seen as leading to disorganized discussions easily derailing conversations. Users desire administrators to start new threads more often to maintain organization.

Users have provided valuable recommendations for Discourse based on their experiences. They suggest the following:

  • Take the time to learn the navigation and organization of Discourse. Familiarize yourself with its features and layout to effectively manage projects and collaborate with coworkers.

  • Join the Discourse community to benefit from the knowledge and suggestions of others. Participating in these forums can provide valuable insights and enhance your experience with the software.

  • Consider giving Discourse a trial period. Try it out for a month or take a week to become accustomed to its functionalities. This will help you assess if Discourse meets your specific needs for managing communities, forums, or other online discussion platforms.

These recommendations emphasize the importance of understanding how to use Discourse effectively, engaging with its community, and evaluating its suitability through a trial period.

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
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Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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
  • 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.
[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.
  • 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
  • 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
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.
David McCann | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • Versatility
  • Customizability
  • Good product support services
  • Engaging metrics around user activity
  • 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
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.
  • Customizabililty/white-labelling
  • Engagement/activity statistics
  • User-friendly UI
  • 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
Discourse was primarily selected because it was open source and well-known by the team. Open source was a requirement for any tool we selected, and it is by far the easiest to set up, largest/most active contributor community and offers the best customer support.
Elio Qoshi | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
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.
  • 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.
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