🆚 Discourse vs. Simple Machines Forum
- 📈 Discourse is noticeably more popular than Simple Machines Forum.
- 🌎 Discourse is more popular in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
- 🌍 Simple Machines Forum is more popular in France, Russia, and the Netherlands.
Simple Machines ForumType
About
Discourse is an open-source community platform built on 
Ruby on Rails.
It supports 
Markdown, BBCode, and 
HTML formatting in posts, infinite scrolling discussions, real-time chat, AI automation for detecting toxic and NSFW content, single sign-on and social login, and the topic summarization features.
Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is open-source 
PHP forum software used to host and manage online community discussion boards with a SQL database backend.
It provides an advanced permission and user management system, support for themes and extensions, email notifications, attachment handling, topic and post tracking, moderation tools, over 45 interface languages, and compatibility with MySQL, 
PostgreSQL, and 
SQLite databases.
Headquarters
Pricing
Categories
Popularity
Determined by the number of sites using each technology.
Market share
Popularity by country
Determined by the number of sites detected from each country.
Awards
- 🥈 Second most popular in Canada in the Internet Forum Software category.
- 🥉 Third most popular in the United States in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 5th most popular in the United Kingdom in the Internet Forum Software category.
- ⭐ 7th most popular in the United States in the Internet Forum Software category.
Popularity by domain category
Determined by the number of sites in each category.
Top sites
Top-ranked sites that use these technologies.
Compare alternatives
Technologies with similar characteristics.
🗃️ About This Data
- We evaluate the popularity of technologies based on the number of websites where we detect their usage.
- Technologies without a detectable web footprint, and those we do not track, are not reflected in the calculated market share.
- This report is based on the analysis of 3,653,460 websites.
- Statistics were last calculated on .
- For more details, see our methodology and disclaimer.