Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Discourse VS SmugMug

Compare Discourse VS SmugMug and see what are their differences

Discourse logo Discourse

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

SmugMug logo SmugMug

SmugMug is a platform that allows amateurs and professional photographers to host their pictures and create a virtual gallery for promoting and selling their work.
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13
  • SmugMug Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-12

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

SmugMug videos

SmugMug vs Squarespace vs Wordpress For Photography Website Review

More videos:

  • Review - All New SmugMug Review | Trey Ratcliff
  • Review - Why I chose SmugMug Photography website OVER SquareSpace!

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Discourse and SmugMug)
Forums
100 100%
0% 0
Photos & Graphics
0 0%
100% 100
Forums And Forum Software
Image Hosting
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Discourse and SmugMug. 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 SmugMug

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...

SmugMug Reviews

23 Best Free Image Hosting Sites (Upload & Share) in 2022
SmugMug is a fully-hosted solution with support for unlimited photo and video uploads. You can embed videos and photos on other websites, take advantage of its robust SEO tools — including meta tags and XML sitemaps — to get your site ranking well on search engines, and share photos and perspectives with an engaged community.
11 Best Image Hosting Sites for Personal to Business
SmugMug does not sell, share, or mine your photos or videos. You can print high quality photos from trusted brands and get a 100 percent guarantee on printing. To simplify your workflow and save time, you can use it with Lightroom or On1 to edit images.
Top 10 TinyPic Alternatives in 2022 for Images Sharing
SmugMug’s arrangements range from $40 a year to around $300 a year. While the cost of the plan increases, more features are offered such as different highlights, customization choices, and more stockpiling. Moreover, you can also set up your own eCommerce shop where you can sell your photographs and prints.
Source: www.imymac.com
10 Best Image Hosting Sites for Personal and Business Purposes
SmugMug is an image hosting, image sharing, and online video platform. You can securely upload your pictures and videos without compromising their quality. The image hosting site also allows you to share the desired photo or video with a person. You can upload unlimited pictures and videos on SmugMug and control who can view and access them. One of the most exciting features...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Discourse seems to be a lot more popular than SmugMug. While we know about 23 links to Discourse, we've tracked only 2 mentions of SmugMug. 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 / about 2 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 / 2 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 / 9 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 / 9 months ago
View more

SmugMug mentions (2)

  • Hide CGI (or whatever those images are) or other alternatives
    The images are "Second Life" CGI, and they are fairly disgusting to me as well. There are other photography sites: smugmug.com, pexels.us, pixabay.com, unsplash.com, 500px.com, shutterstock.com, etc. Smugmug is the only one that comes close to the searching you can do on Flickr. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Sending Photos to client
    If you can keep your total uploaded photos under 2gb, you can use dropbox for free, and choose the 1% of your invoice option with photoinvoice. Or you can look at something like smugmug.com which does it all for you, but the pricing varies from $7/mo to $42/mo (the price goes down considerably if you prepay for a whole year). There are other sites like smugmug that will also do this for you. Source: over 2 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Discourse and SmugMug, 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.

Flickr - image and video hosting website

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.

Imgur - Imgur is a free and simple image hosting service with image editing feature. Signup is optional.

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

Google Photos - All your photos are backed up safely, organized and labeled automatically, so you can find them fast, and share them how you like.