Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

HackMD VS Discourse

Compare HackMD VS Discourse and see what are their differences

HackMD logo HackMD

Fast and flexible, real-time collaborative markdown, inspired by Hackpad.

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
  • HackMD Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-04
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

HackMD videos

hackmd.io opensource application review

More videos:

  • Demo - Techstars Paris 2018 Demo Day - HackMD pitch
  • Review - Screencast-Tutorial zu HackMD

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 HackMD and Discourse)
Task Management
100 100%
0% 0
Forums
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Forums And Forum Software

User comments

Share your experience with using HackMD 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 HackMD and Discourse

HackMD Reviews

We have no reviews of HackMD yet.
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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, HackMD should be more popular than Discourse. It has been mentiond 63 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.

HackMD mentions (63)

  • Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
    It seems, at the beginning of the 90s there were a lot of expectations in regard to DC-nets, considered to be a way better alternative to remailers of the time [1]. At least that's my impression after reading Tim May's FAQ (The Cyphernomicon) [2]. Any progress on this front? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer [2]: https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon. - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Meta Llama 3
    Actually right now the OSI is hosting ongoing discussion this year on what it means for AI to be open source. Here is their latest blog post on the subject: https://opensource.org/blog/open-source-ai-definition-weekly-update-april-15 Here is the latest draft: https://hackmd.io/@opensourceinitiative/osaid-0-0-7 And a discussion about the draft:... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Hackmd.io - Real time collaboration & writing tool for markdown format docs/files. Like Google but for markdown files. Free unlimited number of "notes", but the number of collaborators (invitee) for private notes & template will be limited. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Markdown as Fast as Possible
    Alternatively, you can use an online markdown editor like StackEdit or HackMD. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Ask HN: Is there a service for uploading Markdown files that render beautifully?
    I am really not sure. Maybe you can ask support? There is also https://telegra.ph and https://hackmd.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months 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 / 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 / 10 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

Documize - Enterprise-grade wiki and knowledge management platform

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

ReadTheDocs - Spend your time on writing high quality documentation, not on the tools to make your documentation work.

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.

Boardist - Personal workspace for all the data

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