47.8k stars · GPL-2.0 · verified alive 2026-09-04; ships continuously from main, 65,998 commits · Track this in Scout
The serious open-source community forum — user questions become indexable pages, which is user-generated SEO.
▶Repo detailsthe review · specs · pros & cons · install
What it is
Discourse is a forum platform written in Ruby, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis, built by the company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. It is the software behind a very large number of open-source project forums, including several named in this archive.
What it is good for. Anyone whose support is currently happening in a chat app where answers disappear. The argument for a forum over chat is that a question answered once stays answered and turns up in a search six months later; the argument over a ticket system is that other people can answer, and often do. It suits a small team with a growing number of users asking the same things. It is the wrong choice before you have those users — an empty forum is worse than none — but that is a reason to wait, not a reason to choose something weaker.
- Plain GPL-2.0-or-later, read from
/blob/main/LICENSE.txtand unmodified Free Software Foundation text. The README's words are "Licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 2.0 (or later)", copyright "Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc.", 2014 to 2026. There is official paid hosting if you want it, and nothing in the licence pushes you towards it. - It is complete in a way most self-hosted forums are not: trust levels that grant privileges as people earn them, full-text search, email replies, moderation queues, and a plugin system with a large number of plugins already written.
- It is maintained at a serious pace by a company whose business depends on it, which is a different kind of safety from a volunteer project.
- The newest release this report could read is not a release at all, and this is a new shape of fault for this archive. GitHub's
/releases/latestpage — the page this report switched to in September precisely because the releases list page is unreliable — returns a tag called_gh-attach-assets, marked as a pre-release, which the project itself describes as "a dummy release used by gh-attach as storage for attachment files linked from issues and pull requests", dated "15 Jul". It is a file dump, not a version. The real version had to be read from the source:lib/version.rbdefines MAJOR 2026, MINOR 9, TINY 0 and the string"2026.9.0-latest". Discourse has moved to dating its versions rather than numbering them, so the 3.x series people remember is gone. - The project's own two documents disagree about how much memory it needs.
docs/INSTALL.mdstates "1 GB RAM minimum (with swap)", a modern single-core processor with dual-core recommended, 10 GB of disk and 64-bit Linux, and says plainly that "The only officially supported installs of Discourse are Docker based." The development guide on the project's own forum suggests "at least 4 GB RAM and 2 CPU cores", and a reader in that same thread reports that 1 GB failed to compile. Both figures are the project's; plan for four. - It is a large application to keep patched — Ruby 3.2 or later, PostgreSQL and Redis 7 — and it brings a permanent moderation job with it. 239 open pull requests. Neither of those costs goes away after the install.
- NodeBB/NodeBB
The closest direct alternative: the same forum job, written in Node.js, lighter to run on a small machine, but with a smaller plugin ecosystem and nothing like Discourse's trust-level system.
Track this in Scout - flarum/framework
A PHP forum that is far simpler to install on ordinary shared hosting, and correspondingly less capable: extensions are fewer and several basics are add-ons.
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apache/answerEdition 34 covered this: shaped as a question-and-answer site rather than a conversation, which is better for a help centre and worse for a community, and much smaller to run.
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# The only supported route is Docker. The project's own beginner guide is # docs/INSTALL-cloud.md in the repository; the advanced route uses the # separate discourse_docker repository. # Plan for 4 GB of memory, 10 GB of disk, and a domain name with # working email before you start — Discourse will not finish setup without # a way to send mail.
