Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Discourse VS iRedMail

Compare Discourse VS iRedMail and see what are their differences

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.

iRedMail logo iRedMail

A fully fledged, free email server solution, an open source project (GPL v2).
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13
  • iRedMail Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-18

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

iRedMail videos

Part 1: iRedMail

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Complete Email Server iRedMail Installation Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Discourse and iRedMail)
Forums
100 100%
0% 0
Email
0 0%
100% 100
Forums And Forum Software
SMTP Server
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Discourse and iRedMail. 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 Discourse and iRedMail

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...

iRedMail Reviews

10 Microsoft Exchange Server Alternatives
iRedMail is a free email server solution that is a fully-fledged and open source project. This platform can use the official binary package from the distributions of Linux/BSD, having the support of both i386 and x86/64. It is easy to use with a fast deployment process in almost less than one minute. iRedMail allows the user to work on both virtualized and non-virtualized...
15 Best iRedMail Alternatives 2021
You might want a service that offers better security and protections, more features, or faster processes than what iRedMail provides. Hence, it’s important to consider other options out there that can competently replace iRedMail.
The BEST Email Hosting Providers for Small Business in 2021
There are three products offered by iRedmail. The first one is the iRedMail downloadable installer. To start with iRedMail you need to download the installer package, and after installation, you need to set up DNS records for your iRedMail server. After you have done these two steps, you will need to upgrade with additional installations. The second one is iRedMail Easy....
15 Best Email Hosting for Small Business (2019)
iRedMail is an open source mail server since 2007. It works on most Linux/BSD distributions. It offer paid version ($499/year) with professional support.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Discourse should be more popular than iRedMail. It has been mentiond 23 times since March 2021. 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.

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 / 7 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
View more

iRedMail mentions (3)

  • Ask HN: Custom domain for personal email – yay or nay?
    Yay! I use the free version of iRedMail [0] under OpenBSD since 2017 and every email I send gets through with any issues (except the first days when I screwed up my SPF/DKIM configuration). [0] https://iredmail.org/. - Source: Hacker News / 25 days ago
  • Selfhosted backup solution for iCloud Backup
    For photo I use Immich. For contact and calendar I use my own mail server (iRedMail). For Cloud I have my own nextcloud server. With nextcloud you can sync contact and calendar of uou don't have a mail server likes iRedMail. Source: 12 months ago
  • I am highly excited and overjoyed to share this post.
    I used to spend all my time maintaining e-mail quirks for my server. Adjust this, updated that, fix this breakage, yada yada. But then I decided to setup iRedMail which uses postfix, dovecot, certbot, roundcube, spamassasin, mariadb, ldap and all the bells and whistles. All I have to do now is make sure I don’t break it doing any software upgrades on freebsd. 10/10 scores after configuring and blacklist free. Source: about 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Discourse and iRedMail, you can also consider the following products

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

Zimbra - Zimbra is trusted by over 500 million users to increase productivity with a complete set of collaboration tools while maintaining total control over security and privacy.

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.

mailcow - An open source mailserver suite.

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

Roundcube - Web-based IMAP email client