15.7k stars · Apache-2.0 · v2.0.2 (2026-07-21) · Track this in Scout
Apache's Q&A platform — user questions become indexable pages, which is user-generated SEO.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
A question-and-answer platform with voting and accepted answers, written in Go with a React interface. It is a project of the Apache Software Foundation, and it is aimed equally at a public community forum, a product help centre and internal knowledge management.
What it is good for. Anyone answering the same questions repeatedly in private. A support inbox loses every answer the moment the thread closes; a question-and-answer site keeps them and lets search find them. It also suits a team whose knowledge lives in chat history, which is the worst possible place to keep it.
- Apache-2.0, read from the LICENSE file and completely plain, with no paid edition and no feature held back.
- Under the Apache Software Foundation, which means governance that does not depend on one company's plans.
- One command gets a working instance on port 9080, with the data in a named volume so it survives a restart.
- An empty question-and-answer site is worse than none, because the emptiness is the first thing a visitor sees. This is premature until there are enough people asking to keep it looking alive, and that is an editorial judgement rather than a fault in the software.
- The README on the main branch tells you to pull image tag 2.0.3, and there is no stable 2.0.3 release — the newest stable is v2.0.2 from 21 July 2026, with a 2.0.3 release candidate on 23 September. Use the 2.0.2 tag until a stable 2.0.3 exists.
- No memory, processor or disk figures appear anywhere in the repository, so sizing a machine is guesswork. And a public site means moderation, which is ongoing human work that no software removes. Building from source needs Go 1.25, Node.js 20 and pnpm 9.
- discourse/discourse
47,918 stars, code on 28 September 2026; the best-known self-hosted community platform, but a threaded forum first, without accepted answers and voting as the main structure, and much heavier to run.
Track this in Scout - NodeBB/NodeBB
15,161 stars, code on 25 July 2026; a real-time forum in Node.js with a large plugin collection, again thread-shaped rather than question-shaped.
Track this in Scout - q2a/question2answer
1,672 stars, the closest match in shape, and its last code landed on 20 August 2024, over two years ago.
Track this in Scout
docker run -d -p 9080:80 -v answer-data:/data \ --name answer apache/answer:2.0.2
