The Discourse ecosystem is growing
- 22k+ communities
- 23 countries
- 16 timezones
- 62k+ Community members
Great communities don't happen by accident
Our mission is to give every community the building blocks and tools they need to succeed. Every organization needs a reliable foundation for communication and collaboration. Discourse provides the adaptable infrastructure that helps teams share ideas, solve problems, and preserve what they learn along the way.
Whether you're building a global developer community, coordinating across time zones, or need to strengthen your workplace collaboration, we equip you with the tools and structure you need to succeed at scale.
Enterprise communities that scale
When organizations like OpenAI, Mozilla, and NVIDIA need community infrastructure they can trust, they choose Discourse. We provide enterprise teams with the security, compliance, and dedicated support that large-scale deployments require, along with the flexibility to customize everything from authentication to workflows. Our professional services team handles migrations, builds custom integrations, and works alongside your team to create community experiences that match your brand and meet your standards.
Open source at heart
Discourse has been open source since 2013, with our full codebase on GitHub. Your community data is never locked into a proprietary system; you can self-host, migrate away if your needs change, or customize the platform in ways closed software won't allow. Hundreds of developers have contributed security patches, accessibility improvements, and new features over the years. It's how we believe community software should be built.
- 950+ Contributors
- 62k+ commits
- 36k+ pull requests
Our Story
Discourse was founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron with a simple goal: to bring thoughtful conversation back to the internet. Frustrated by the limitations of existing forum software, they set out to create an open-source platform that prioritizes clarity, civility, and long-term knowledge over quick reactions and fleeting engagement.
What started as a small project has grown into a platform trusted by communities of all sizes, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Discourse has been shaped by a global community of contributors, developers, and community managers who share our vision of better online communication. Today, our distributed team continues to build tools that help people have meaningful conversations, share knowledge, and build lasting communities—all while staying true to our open-source roots and commitment to thoughtful, open communication.
Questions & Answers
Why do we exist?
At Discourse, our mission is to democratize online community and teamwork by raising the standard of civilized discourse on the Internet. We achieve this through delivering the best community and forum software.
We started in 2013 with 3 co-founders unusually passionate about online discussion. Today, we have over 100 team members and are trusted by some of the largest companies in the world.
What's different about it?
All-in-one
No more needing multiple providers to build your online community. In addition to our product, our services include hosting, design and custom development, making us a complete solution for all kinds of organizations from small teams to large enterprises.
Multifaceted Communication
Discourse combines the depth of discussion with the immediacy of real-time chat, enhanced by features like expressive emoji reactions and the ability to seamlessly incorporate videos and images, fostering more impactful conversations and valuable resources for your community.
Moderation
Say goodbye to bots, spam, and bad actors. Our trust system means that the community builds a natural immune system to defend itself from trolls, bad actors, and spammers — and the most engaged forum members can assist in the governance of their community.
Customization
Customize everything from button text to email templates with no coding required! We have an extensive list of officially supported plugins and a powerful theming engine that enables you to build out whatever functionality your audience needs.
AI
Community Managers, members and moderators can experience better discussions and easier forum management with our Discourse AI plugin. We offer a wide range of modules that can be enabled independently to assist with a variety of community needs. From summarizing topics and chat channels to getting assistance composing a message to toxicity detection and more.
Open Source
There is only one version of Discourse – the awesome open source version. There's no super secret special paid commercial version with better or more complete features. Our open API can fit into any workflow and can integrate with just about any online platform. It's your space, your data, your community.
How do I get it?
Try our official hosting (get up and running in less than 5 minutes), host Discourse on your own server using the 30-minute installation guide or explore services from our partners.
Discourse is 100% free open source forum software, now and forever.
What are the requirements?
Discourse is designed for the next 10 years of the Internet, so the minimum browser requirements are high.
Discourse supports the latest, stable releases of all major browsers and platforms:
- Microsoft Edge
- Google Chrome
- Mozilla Firefox
- Apple Safari (including Safari on iOS 16.4+)
What license is the code under?
The GNU General Public License, version 2.
We happily accept pull requests, however, we do ask that you sign a Contributor License Agreement so that we have the right to relicense your contributions.
What is it built with?
Discourse is a JavaScript application that runs in your web browser, using the Ember.js framework.
The server side of Discourse is Ruby on Rails backed by a Postgres database and Redis cache. You can deploy our standard Discourse Docker container on any virtualized cloud server (Digital Ocean, Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Azure) with 1 GB RAM.
