# Discourse

The open-source forum engine behind thousands of dev, gaming, and support communities.

https://topboilerplates.com/discourse

Framework: Ruby on Rails | Pricing: Freemium, from $1 | GitHub stars: 47700

## Verdict

Best for: Teams that want a dedicated, deeply-featured public forum or support community and are fine owning the Rails/Postgres/Redis stack behind it.

Skip if: You just need a lightweight embeddable comments widget, or you don't want to operate Ruby/Rails infrastructure.

## Description

Discourse is a self-hostable community platform built on Rails and Ember, combining classic forum threads with modern touches like real-time updates, trust-level based moderation, and a large plugin/theme ecosystem. It's free and fully open source (GPLv2) to run yourself, or available as a managed hosted product with paid tiers for larger communities.

## Pros and cons

+ Mature, battle-tested forum engine running thousands of large communities for over a decade

+ Fully open source under GPLv2 - self-host for free with no feature gate

+ Deep plugin/theme ecosystem plus real-time updates, trust levels, and moderation tooling out of the box

- Rails + Redis + Postgres stack adds real operational overhead to self-host well

- It's a full standalone site, not a drop-in embed for an existing app

- Hosted plans jump from free to $100/mo (Pro) to $500/mo (Business) fast as a community grows

## Features

- auth-included
- social-login
- rbac-roles
- invitations
- in-app-notifications
- full-text-search
- realtime-subscriptions
- background-jobs
- file-uploads
- i18n
- dark-mode
- open-source
- free-tier
- docker-compose-dev
- written-docs

## Stack

- Ruby
- Postgres
- Redis
- Docker
- Self-hosted

## Links

- Website: https://topboilerplates.com/go/discourse
- GitHub: https://github.com/discourse/discourse
- Demo: https://meta.discourse.org

## Alternatives

- [NodeBB](https://topboilerplates.com/nodebb)
- [Mastodon](https://topboilerplates.com/mastodon)