Software Alternatives & Reviews

NodeBB VS Discourse

Compare NodeBB VS Discourse and see what are their differences

NodeBB logo 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.

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
  • NodeBB Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-12-23
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

NodeBB

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website nodebb.org
Pricing URL Official NodeBB Pricing
Details $

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

NodeBB videos

NodeBB reputation basics

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 NodeBB and Discourse)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
26 26%
74% 74
Community Platform
28 28%
72% 72
Social & Communications
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using NodeBB 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 NodeBB and Discourse

NodeBB Reviews

  1. SPACEBAR COUNTER

    NodeBB is a next-generation discussion platform that utilizes web sockets for instant interactions and real-time notifications. NodeBB forums have many modern features out of the box such as social network integration and streaming discussions. NodeBB is an open source project which can be forked on GitHub.

  2. Best Forum Experience

    I was lucky enough to stumble on NodeBB in the early days right as we were transitioning a large user base from another forum and needed a platform that could handle the volume and speed of interactions that our users demanded. We took a big risk on NodeBB in 2014 when it was brand new and it has paid off in spades over the years. For seven years our users have consistently raved about ease of use and performance of the platform while on the back end we have been thrilled with the ease of management and low resource needs of hosting even for a site hitting hundreds of millions of hits per month. It is modern, regularly updated, has a great community and team behind it. We've always gotten lots of support and know that we made the right choice and continue to choose NodeBB as our forum of choice.

    🏁 Competitors: Discourse
    👍 Pros:    Ease of use|High performance|Great customer support|Open-source|Free|Scalable|Seo friendly

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, Discourse should be more popular than NodeBB. 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.

NodeBB mentions (3)

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 / 25 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
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing NodeBB and Discourse, 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.

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

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

Simple Machines Forum - Simple Machines offers free open source software such as SMF, the powerful and easy to use community forum written in PHP. Start interesting discussions on your website!