Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Discourse VS mailcow

Compare Discourse VS mailcow and see what are their differences

Discourse logo Discourse

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

mailcow logo mailcow

An open source mailserver suite.
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13
  • mailcow Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-01-24

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

mailcow videos

Install a mail server on Linux in 10 minutes - docker, docker-compose, mailcow

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Discourse and mailcow)
Forums
100 100%
0% 0
Email
0 0%
100% 100
Forums And Forum Software
Self-hosted Email
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Discourse and mailcow. 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 mailcow

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...

mailcow Reviews

The BEST Email Hosting Providers for Small Business in 2021
Mailcow also provides the necessary communication standards, integration with anti-virus software, anti-spam, firewall, etc. Furthermore, Mailcow stores the data on a hidden server somewhere in Germany and they have a growing base of users. The data center of their servers is operated on 100% green electricity. Installing this easy-to-use email service takes several steps....
20+ Options for hosting our own mail server
mailcow.github.io/mailcow-dockerized-docs The integrated mailcow UI allows administrative work on your mail server instance as well as separated domain administrator and mailbox user access. Mailcow forum. Gitrepo.
Source: dev.to
15 Best Email Hosting for Small Business (2019)
MailCow is open-source docker based email server suite. It is a collection of containers linked in one bridged network. Each container represent a single application, such as Dovecot, Memcached, MySQL, PHP, Postfix, Nginx, etc. MailCow provides a web user interface to manage the mail server and email accounts.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, mailcow should be more popular than Discourse. It has been mentiond 83 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
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mailcow mentions (83)

  • European Alternatives
    > Which different provider did you go with? I actually fell back to Gmail for the time being - I just don't like to "advertise" any Google product for known reasons, even though Gmail is a quite solid product, sorry about the confusion - but that's my temporary solution. I am planning to either give Migadu a try or host my own mail provider. (I have seen some good feedback about https://mailcow.email). - Source: Hacker News / 6 days ago
  • Ask HN: Self Hosting an Email Server?
    I've been running mailcow [1] on a Hetzner cloud server for a few years and am pretty happy with it. [1] https://mailcow.email. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Roundcube and docker-mailserver (Docker Mailserver) on the same VPS
    Yes, I switched to mailcow (https://mailcow.email) and installed Roundcube via the excellent tutorial (https://docs.mailcow.email/third_party/roundcube/third_party-roundcube). Source: 7 months ago
  • Free Zoho Mail alternatives for using custom email domain?
    I have been searching for a self-hosted suite similar to Google Worksuite. I found the following: 1. Mailcow - https://mailcow.email/. Source: 7 months ago
  • Mail-in-a-Box: a mail server in a box
    I’ve used both and personally prefer https://mailcow.email/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Discourse and mailcow, 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.

iRedMail - A fully fledged, free email server solution, an open source project (GPL v2).

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.

Mail-in-a-box - Mail-in-a-Box provides webmail and an IMAP/SMTP server for use with mobile devices and desktop mail software and also includes contacts and calendar synchronization.

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

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.