Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

DEV.to VS Discourse

Compare DEV.to VS Discourse and see what are their differences

DEV.to logo DEV.to

Where software engineers connect, build their resumes, and grow.

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
  • DEV.to Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-05-13
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

DEV.to videos

Ben Halpern founder of Dev.To & The Practical Dev

Discourse videos

Why We Chose The Discourse Platform For Our Forums

More videos:

  • Review - Why Discourse is the Best Forum Software Out There (No, Really) | Location Rebel
  • Review - A Grammar Review for Discourse Analysis

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to DEV.to and Discourse)
CMS
100 100%
0% 0
Forums
0 0%
100% 100
Blogging
100 100%
0% 0
Forums And Forum Software

User comments

Share your experience with using DEV.to and Discourse. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare DEV.to and Discourse

DEV.to Reviews

  1. It is a nice mini-blog, it's for free and such but

    As a mini-blog, it is a nice alternative for Medium to publish and share information about programming.

    However, the community and the organization are biased toward social justice (and they are open to it). You can read its Code of Conduct, it is so vague and politically leads (I prefer a term of service because it defines fair rules for everybody). So it alienates developers that we don't care about politics in pro of people that want to talk about any other topic such as sexuality, how women are unprivileged, and such. It even mandates to use inclusive language. Good grief.

    My main complaint is the quality of the community. It is not StackOverflow (so we don't want to ask for an answer here), and most of the top topics are clickbait, such as "how to become a rockstar developer in ... days", "100 tips to become a better programmer" (and it doesn't even talk about programming).

    Technically this "mini blog" site allows us to use markdown, and it is okay. However, the whole experience is really basic. Even the template is ugly.

    🏁 Competitors: Medium
    👍 Pros:    Free
    👎 Cons:    Social justice|Basic features|Quality of content

Discourse Reviews

20 Telegram Alternatives to Chat With in 2024
Discourse is a basic forum function that could be an alternative to Telegram if you want to stick to text discussions. It's pretty analog, missing both video and livestreaming tools. Instead, Discourse is a basic community that lets you organize discussions--it feels a bit like having your own reddit or Quora.
18 Best Discord Alternatives 2020 | Expert Reviews
Discourse comes in a couple of flavours. You can self-host it yourself in which case the software is free, and you simply need to sign up for server space, or you can pay Discourse for a hosted-for-you option, though self-hosting is a lot cheaper the premium option takes care of the technical side.
IndieHackers: Best forum software
I used Flarum when trying to get a community set up for my product (ended up abandoning it to revisit when we have a larger customer base). It worked fairly well and I enjoyed it but it's definitely beta and unless you're fairly tech savvy it's not quite worth the setup / maintenance. Lots of config changes, crashes, huge issues with plugins, and some features missing. I'd...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, DEV.to seems to be a lot more popular than Discourse. While we know about 396 links to DEV.to, we've tracked only 23 mentions of Discourse. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

DEV.to mentions (396)

  • Computer Science challenge, let's make it interesting!!
    If you haven’t checked it out yet, dev.to has introduced First Computer Science Challenge in honor of Alan Turing. The challenge is to explain a computer science concept in 256 characters or less. - Source: dev.to / 4 days ago
  • Writing an Obsidian Plugin Driven By Tests
    I recently developed the initial version of Obsidian DEV Publish Plugin, a plugin that enables publishing Obsidian notes as articles on DEV. The first prototype was developed during a ~4 hour live stream. - Source: dev.to / 13 days ago
  • Install Docker and Portainer in a VM using Ansible
    Note: The inventory.yml file is not shared since that depends on the actual environment So it will be different for everyone. If you want to learn more about the inventory file Watch the videos on YouTube or read the written version on https://dev.to. Links in The video descriptions on YouTube. - Source: dev.to / 28 days ago
  • How Can I Create a DevOps Pipeline That Automatically Resolves All Conflicts and Bugs Without Human Intervention?
    Also, follow DevOps best practices on Dev.to and explore the Jenkins Documentation. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
  • Two Days Indie Dev Life: Mailchimp, Webflow & Zapier - A Love Story
    I’ve been active on twitter for about a week now. It’s still kind of new to me but something really cool happened yesterday. DEV.TO put one of my daily blogs in one of their tweets, they have like 300k+ followers, I couldn’t believe it. Very very cool, thanks a lot 🙏. - Source: dev.to / 19 days ago
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Discourse mentions (23)

  • Qilin: A Starter Project Template For Every Open Source Project
    GitHub Discussions can also be a great place for support as long as these are regularly monitored. Another option along the same lines is Discourse and the Open Source Matrix which is used by quite a few Open Source and community-based projects. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Ask HN: How to run an old-school mailing list?
    A lot of communities use [Discourse ](https://discourse.org). [LPSF](https://forum lpsf.org) migrated to it when Yahoo Groups was discontinued. Some of the advantages are that it's open source, self-hostable, and can be configured to work as both a traditional mailing list and modern forum. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • My Fediverse use – I'm hosting everything myself – PeerTube, Mastodon and Lemmy
    More like https://discourse.org/. You can run it yourself, but I can also just have them ding a credit card every month and not think about it again (I do this for a community). - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
  • Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
    Discourse perhaps? I've seen it in use in a few places; it has a modern look and feel to it at least. https://discourse.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • So Long, Twitter and Reddit
    I fully agree with you see my comment here[0] -- I think you may have misread my comment, it says "Discourse" (as in the forum software[1]), not Discord. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37245220. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing DEV.to and Discourse, you can also consider the following products

WordPress - WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

Flarum - Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

Medium - Welcome to Medium, a place to read, write, and interact with the stories that matter most to you.

phpBB - Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is a cheap, credit-card sized computer. The official website uses phpBB for their discussion forums. phpBB is not affiliated with nor responsible for any of the sites listed on the showcase.

Hashnode - A friendly and inclusive Q&A network for coders

Vanilla Forums - Build an engaging community forum using Vanilla's modern cloud forum software.