🆚 Discourse vs. XenForo

Compare technologies based on real-world usage data *

📈 XenForo is four times more popular than Discourse.
🌎 XenForo is more popular in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
🌍 Discourse is more popular in Ireland, China, and Japan.

Type

Internet forum software

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.

XenForo is a commercial Internet forum software based on PHP and MySQL.

It includes built-in support for question and answer threads, articles, media embedding, Markdown and BBCode editing, a robust add-on ecosystem with thousands of extensions and custom themes, and a full REST API for external integrations.

Headquarters

Dover, Delaware, United States

London, United Kingdom

Website

discourse.org #180,837

xenforo.com #20,016

Pricing

Free version ✔️Self-hosted, open source

HostedStarter (20K pageviews)$20/month
Pro (100K pageviews)$100/month
Business (500K pageviews)$300/month

Free version ❌

XenForo License$195

Branding Removal$350

XenForo CloudStarter (400K pageviews)$60/month
Standard (1M pageviews)$100/month
Business (4M pageviews)$250/month

Popularity

Determined by the number of sites using each technology.

The XenForo Internet forum software is 4 times more popular than Discourse.

Total websites

Market share

Internet Forum Software

Popularity by country

Determined by the number of sites detected from each country.

XenForo is more popular in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom, while Discourse is more popular in Ireland, China, and Japan.

United States

Germany

United Kingdom

Russia

Vietnam

Turkey

Canada

Netherlands

France

Spain