Discourse

Dover, Delaware, United States

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.

According to our data, Discourse is the 6th most popular Internet forum software on the web.
It has 6.6% of the Internet forum software market share and is detected on 0.03% of all websites.

Statistics based on 3.8M+ analyzed websites. About this data

💸 Pricing

Discourse is available in both free and paid versions.

Free version ✔️ Self-hosted, open source
Hosted
Starter (20K pageviews) $20/month
Pro (100K pageviews) $100/month
Business (500K pageviews) $300/month

📊 Rankings and Market Share

🏆 Discourse Awards

⚡ Sites Powered by Discourse

We have data on 1,084 websites that use the Discourse Internet forum software. Here is a list of some of the top ranked ones.

The highest rated site using Discourse is localguidesconnect.com.

#WebsiteRankCountryLanguage
1 localguidesconnect.com #24,253 United States English
2 sorumatik.co #37,489 English
3 community.letsencrypt.org United States English
4 image.sc #57,228 Seychelles English
5 t-nation.com #65,033 English
6 kicad.info #79,902 English
7 blenderartists.org #119,707 English
8 mamapedia.com #120,141 English
9 discussion.fedoraproject.org United States English
10 forum.avast.com United States English
11 community.spiceworks.com English
12 forum.ghost.org Singapore English
13 elektronauts.com #142,498 Sweden English
14 mediaspy.org #145,959 English
15 elitefourum.com #161,419 English
16 hungryonion.org #173,373 United States English
17 akkudoktor.net #175,669 Germany German
18 eroscripts.com #184,858 English
19 telecomhall.net #185,554 English
20 help.micro.blog United States English

📈 Usage Statistics

Most of the sites that use Discourse:

Most of the sites using Discourse are from the United States, Germany, and Canada.

  • United States 39%
  • Germany 9.6%
  • Canada 9.2%
  • United Kingdom 8.3%
  • France 4.1%
  • Ireland 3.2%
  • China 2.3%
  • Australia 1.9%
  • Finland 1.8%
  • Other 20.6%

Most Discourse users speak English.

  • English 87.1%
  • German 2.2%
  • French 1.7%
  • Chinese 1.7%
  • Russian 1%
  • Spanish 1%
  • Portuguese 0.7%
  • Italian 0.6%
  • Vietnamese 0.6%
  • Other 3.4%

The Discourse Internet forum software is especially popular on .com, .org, and .io top-level domains.

  • .com 46.4%
  • .org 18.3%
  • .io 5.1%
  • .net 4%
  • .de 1.7%
  • .community 1.6%
  • .co 1.1%
  • .network 0.9%
  • .ai 0.9%
  • Other 20%

The primary market segments for websites utilizing Discourse include forum, bulletin boards, technical, business forums, and business.

  • Forum/Bulletin Boards 25.9%
  • Technical/Business Forums 11.1%
  • Business 9.3%
  • Software/Hardware 7.4%
  • Blogs/Wiki 6.5%
  • Sports 6.5%
  • Marketing/Merchandising 5.6%
  • Education/Reference 3.7%
  • Entertainment 3.7%
  • Other 20.3%

🔢 Discourse Versions

The most common version of Discourse is 2026.8, used by 16.3% of sites where versions were detected. In addition, 13.4% of sites use Discourse 3.5, and 11.4% use Discourse 3.6.

  • 2026.8 16.3%
  • 3.5 13.4%
  • 3.6 11.4%
  • 3.4 7.4%
  • 2025.12 6.8%
  • 2026.7 6.2%
  • 2026.9 5.1%
  • 2026.4 3.8%
  • 3.3 3.5%
  • Other 26.1%

🕵️ Similar Technologies

These are some of the best Discourse alternatives.

RankName
2
XenForo
London, United Kingdom

A commercial internet forum software based on PHP and MySQL.

$195+
4
Invision Community
Richmond, Virginia, United States

A commercial, customizable community software built with PHP and MySQL.

$99+/month
5
vBulletin
El Segundo, California, United States

A commercial forum software platform written in PHP that uses a MySQL or MariaDB database.

$179+
11
Higher Logic Thrive
Arlington, Virginia, United States

A cloud-based community platform for associations.

$10,000+/year
12
Khoros Communities
Austin, Texas, United States

An enterprise-grade community management platform that enables organizations to build, manage, and scale branded online communities.

$100,000+/year

🆚 Compare Alternatives

Compare Discourse to…

💬 Frequently Asked Questions

Where is Discourse from?

Discourse is from Dover, Delaware, United States.

Does Discourse offer a free plan?

Yes, there is a free version with limited functionality.

How much does it cost?

Discourse is priced from $20 per month for the Starter plan.

Does Discourse offer a free trial?

Yes, it provides a free trial for 14 days, so you can test it before purchasing.

Which country uses Discourse the most?

The majority of Discourse users are from the United States.

Who uses Discourse?

According to our data, Discourse is used on over a thousand sites, including localguidesconnect.com, sorumatik.co, and community.letsencrypt.org.

How does Discourse compare to its competitors?

Discourse is a moderately popular Internet forum software, ranking ahead of 14 other Internet forum software we track.

What are the alternatives to Discourse?

Alternatives and possible competitors to Discourse may include XenForo, Invision Community, and vBulletin.

👉 See Also

🗃️ About This Data