Software Alternatives & Reviews

Simple Machines Forum VS Discourse

Compare Simple Machines Forum VS Discourse and see what are their differences

Simple Machines Forum logo 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!

Discourse logo Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
  • Simple Machines Forum Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-14
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

Simple Machines Forum

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website simplemachines.org
Pricing URL-
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

Simple Machines Forum videos

Forum Tutorials - Simple Machines Forums, Tutorial and Overview

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 Simple Machines Forum and Discourse)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
17 17%
83% 83
Community Platform
19 19%
81% 81
Online Services
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 Simple Machines Forum and Discourse

Simple Machines Forum Reviews

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Discourse Reviews

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 Simple Machines Forum. 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.

Simple Machines Forum mentions (4)

  • Just remember forums exist
    Https://simplemachines.org/ This looks nice. Doesn't look like it has tags/flair though. Lots of questions in regards to how it compares to the other options. Source: 10 months ago
  • Is there a painless way to set up a forum website on a raspberry pi?
    I've always been a fan of SMF. Install is pretty straight forward. Source: over 1 year ago
  • The Platformer #25: High-Impact Hacking
    This project, called YaBB — Yet another Bulletin Board (I’ve always been good at naming things) — is pretty much dead. A few months ago the website was still up, but it appears to be down now. Yes, the project was forked into YaBB SE (a direct PHP port), and ultimately evolved into Simple Machines Forum, which still seems to be under development today (and powers Bitcoin Talk — if you’re still into the crypto thing). - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Integrating Forums in an android app?
    Is it possible to integrate forums like Simple Machines Forum in an app or any other forum? Or is there any package/plugin that makes it easier to develop it and integrate it with firebase/firestore. Source: about 2 years ago

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 / 4 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 / 6 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 / 4 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 / 7 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 / 7 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Simple Machines Forum 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.

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

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.

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

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

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.