Discourse Reviews & Product Details

The ability to have both private and public threads make it possible to have as much privacy as you would like.

The tags are a bit confusing, could be more user friendly. Also, private messages are not private to admins.

Open source is a huge plus. Speaking to the discussion side, community members are more prone to engage here as well. You can easily track conversations and not be bogged down with hundreds of messages since posts are written more fluidly here.

It’s one of the easiest way to create forum online. The best part is we can assign n number of admins to any forum and The interface is very simple and modern.

So far this software works fine for me but when it comes to customisations or to edit any existing forum. It doesn’t perform well

I am using this in my organisation for taking opinions of my other colleagues.

Discourse is a simple yet great software for ANY sized online communities. I like the fact that it is easy to navigate, great design, simple layout and is FAST. This software definitely promotes productive online discussions.

When I first started using it, it took me some time to navigate through it and get used to the features. However, once I got used to it I found it super user-friendly.

The fact that this software comes with user trust system makes moderation a lot easier. It runs well in all of my devices.

It’s a very simple tool for keeping track is various sites that run on the discourse framework. Like a bookmarker, but for businesses.

The app is very barebones. If you’re looking to manage more than a dozen sites, you’re better off with the desktop client.

It helps me manage multiple discourse set-ups, giving me quick access to the info I need the most. It’s helpful in the communications department.

Discourse is already amazing. Yet, the pace of development is staggering. You can interact directly with the co-founders, developers, and the rest of the Discourse community at meta.discourse.org. That's something you probably won't get with any other community software! As an open source project, the level of innovation and collaboration from multiple stakeholders appears to be well beyond what any private company could sustain. Discourse is fast, modern, and easy to use. It can handle a small community and scale to work with millions of people. It is incredibly simple to moderate and serve as the admin for a Discourse community. The ability to integrate Discourse with other platforms is advanced and convenient. You absolutely have to spin up a version of Discourse and try it out before making a decision.

Whenever I have a complaint, I can bring it to the Discourse community at meta.discourse.org and see if others agree. When the concern is shared, the Discourse team will work to improve the product within months. Any dislikes about Discourse get resolved in a relatively short time.

It is enabling us to bring together a global community, provide customer service, offer paid access to content, develop niche groups, and even run our intranet.

I like the best that the discussions on Discourse are well organized and easy to read through

I have not found anything to dislike about Discourse as of now

I use it for research and technical advice/forums

I love how professional the community on Discourse is. There’s a ton of great information and it’s a safe place for constructive conversation.

Honestly I have no complaints although sometimes it can be difficult to find the threads I am looking to join.

Discourse has allowed my business to gain insight and feedback from other professionals and customers

I like that someone who is looking for my niche services can inquire about them here. Not only can they ask about them, I get a place where I can talk about what I do and what I can offer them. It’s where supply meets demand and demand meets supply. It also helps me and people like me to cultivate fans of what we do. It’s Hollywood for everyone else.

I wish it were a bit more colorful and eyegrabbing at first sight. It’s one thing to be searched but one wants to have the ability to really stand out from the rest.

Reaching more clients has always been a huge issue for me. Discourse can help me with that by allowing a platform for me to say “Hey, this is what I do. Could this work for you?” So mainly for me it would be the networking aspect of Discourse that solves a lot of my problems. It also gives me a chance to outline exactly what I do and don’t do. I don’t always get to do that with a basic website or just a pamphlet.

Its very useful for replacing the old mailing list software with an open source and user friendly experience. It also helps for users to choose and use forum threads without the user interface by subscribing via mailing list mode. It's also good for open communication for the whole organization too.

At first, I wasn't sure how to use tags since everything was lowercase and it feels a bit messy for an user-centric experience. Also, private messages can be seen by administrators which sometimes it might not be clear enough to the public.

It's an open source and configurable with many other add-ons in order to help with integration with other services. Also, every conversation are trackable easily without having the risk of being lost or disappear in a big storm of many many other messages too.

Discourse is a streamlined discussion platform that has greatly improved our discussion workflow by providing a clean and consistent interface and a simple to use platform that everyone can get started with in an instant

As the number of people scale up, Discourse can get very slow unless you have top of the line hardware that it can run on. Moments like those, you can't help but think of getting a cloud based solution

We've moved our ideas and communication workflow to Discourse. This has helped us work on the move, on simple web apps that everyone can contribute to using just a cell phone. It's just increased our turn around time, and made it easier, and fun even, to communicate

Discourse pares all the complexity away and puts just the essential stuff on screen – the conversations you care most about, based on your participation.

There is nothing I dislike about this product.

defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers — and the most engaged forum members can assist in the governance of their community.

I like that you can create a forum with your community or team members. Great for tips and discussions

Nothing that comes to mind at this time

If you find an easier way to do something and want to share it or if you have a question, great place for discussion

Discourse is easy to use and allows users to communicate easily and efficiently which is vital. Members can come together in one place and ask questions, answer questions, as well as get help and assistance when needed.

It takes a bit getting used to and I don't think its as organized as it could be. It seems that questions can pile up quickly and it almost feels like I am swimming in unread emails. The navigation takes a bit of practice.

This has helped our business come together and streamline communication between various business lines. It has also provided for a central place to ask questions and seek help and guidance which the employees find valuable.

We know discourse isn't the most robust forum software out there, but for the price, it does very well! Keeping things organized is incredibly easy - especially if you're wanting to have posts grouped by specific topics as well. The moderation customization is surprisingly robust though - you can assign key individuals specific roles that you want them to perform, and what abilities they'll be able to have while in the forum.

Wish it was more robust. There are other forum solutions out there, but they were all at exorbitant prices and required dev-level setup. Discourse integrated with our CRM and our support software, which were two of the big things we needed. But I wish you could customize more around the posts and folders. Meaning, you could add up-votes/down-votes to certain tickets/bugs. Or assign a post to a specific moderator using logic.

Help-center user-forum for both internal and external use.

everything is very good. I have no suggestions.

Sometimes the notifications do not work properly

answer customer questions and have history of answers kind of like stack overflow

This worked ok as a mailing list and enjoyed the forum option for fans to get engaged. It offers a unique tool that is why we chose the platform, but wish it could have done more so we could use it as a platform for multiple efforts.

....but for it to compete with other platform options, it needed more tools and options for increased usability. I would rather have one platform that manages several things, then have to use 3 including Discourse.

Simple way to send emails and liked the discussion forum options.

Users can choose to use forum threads without the User Interface by subscribing via mailing list mode.

Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.

We've used it several times to use it with our equipment.

There are several great things about this platform. You can assign TL (trust levels) to users, and you can use this system to onboard moderators, additional admins, and other people to help manage your community. You can organize topics, threads, and categories in nearly any way you want, and the system setup is pretty elaborate.

The way the replies system is set up, the conversation can get convoluted easily, and can lead to quickly derailing conversations. Also, to add features like a "solved!" Button to threads that ask for help with something, has to be a external integration. The search function is highly indexed, and unless you have a keyword or know exactly what you are searching the forum for, you might get lost in the forum queue.

As a freelancer, I'm a professional moderator. I specialize in creating, managing, and maintaining forums and online communinities. I use discourse to help administrate users in a forum-style setting. The discourse design is optimized for discussion, which means that topics get old quickly - discourse makes sure those old topics get pushed to the back, and make space for the new topics.

It simply breaks with the way of carrying the virtual community traditionally, It is not just about asking questions and writing answers like StackOverFlow, StackExchange, but it is about getting social interaction, maintaining a coexistence and establishing links with the community. I like this a lot because it is about empowering the community to lead itself, being the only way to keep at bay those who, instead of contributing, start publishing spam or behave like a troll.

Being free software, the company must be able to customize the software according to their needs. Obviously, each company is different, it does not make sense to apply a single solution. This power of personalization is only given by free software. Just as there are for WordPress, it is expected that for Discourse there will also soon be a wide variety of accessories, so that each organization can customize their installation to their liking.

A partner of our company requests a crisis management document in social media and obtains several examples of different real cases from our clients, it was very useful in that case.

Frankly that it's open source and easy to use. Plus I don't know of any other software or cloud-base program to handle communications and data in large group settings or forums. This was very helpful with a previous job. There are also a lot of threads you can add to keep information organized.

I never really understood the private message function. Not sure why I need it to contact administrators when I was handling a group meeting. Setting up mailing lists seemed to be too manual - not easy to upload IMO.

We used it for client and group meetings to record data in an effective and efficient way. We did use in it in that way although then uploaded it over to Basecamp which was used on a more corporate level.