Software Alternatives & Reviews

Discourse VS Vanilla Forums

Compare Discourse VS Vanilla Forums and see what are their differences

Discourse logo Discourse

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

Vanilla Forums logo Vanilla Forums

Build an engaging community forum using Vanilla's modern cloud forum software.
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13
  • Vanilla Forums Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-03

  www.vanillaforums.comSoftware by Vanilla Forums

Discourse

Categories
  • Forums
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
  • Social Networks
Website discourse.org
Pricing URL Official Discourse Pricing
Details $paid Free Trial $100.0 / Monthly

Vanilla Forums

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website vanillaforums.com
Pricing URL Official Vanilla Forums Pricing
Details $-

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

Vanilla Forums videos

Vanilla Forums

More videos:

  • Review - Vanilla Forums: Moderation Queues
  • Review - Using Announcements in Vanilla Forums

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Discourse and Vanilla Forums)
Forums
73 73%
27% 27
Forums And Forum Software
Community Platform
70 70%
30% 30
Social Networks
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

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Reviews

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

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...

Vanilla Forums Reviews

We have no reviews of Vanilla Forums yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Discourse should be more popular than Vanilla Forums. 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 / 26 days 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 / 28 days 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 / 5 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 / 8 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 / 8 months ago
View more

Vanilla Forums mentions (3)

  • The (grim?) future of Daoist forums
    I used to use phpBB back in the day. Vanilla forums has seemed interesting to me for a while (https://vanillaforums.com/), I used HostGator back in the day (https://www.hostgator.com/). Source: almost 2 years ago
  • 1password is considering a self-hosted option to store vaults
    That one seems to be built with Vanilla Forums: https://vanillaforums.com/en/. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Boards.ie hamster has fallen off his wheel
    They're blaming their service provider for not working on the weekend, even though they should have been well aware of that when considering them as a service provider and should have planned their migration schedule accordingly. Source: almost 3 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Discourse and Vanilla Forums, 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.

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.

XenForo - Intuitive. Social. Engaging. Fast. XenForo brings a fresh outlook to forum software.

Forumbee - Forumbee offers community forums for discussions, feedback and Q&A.

NodeBB - NodeBB Forum Software - A better community platform for the modern web. NodeBB is a next generation forum software that's free and easy to use.

MyBB - MyBB is a discussion board software that runs on PHP and MySQL