Discourse is a 100% open-source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet. It works as:

a mailing list

a discussion forum

a long-form chat room

What’s Discourse the company about?

We build a community platform for civilized discussion on the web — we feel so strongly about it that we even named our company Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc. We started in 2013 with 3 co-founders unusually passionate about online discussion. We’re now a team of 47 and growing fast.

First and foremost we are a hosting company. The product that we host and develop, Discourse, is of course 100% open source software.

We are a completely remote company, working from 18 different countries and 15 different timezones. You’ll never guess how we coordinate our work. Wait, did you just guess Discourse? That’s right, we use Discourse as our primary team coordination tool to build Discourse! Discourse excels at asynchronous, distributed teamwork, so we can keep interruptions like instant messaging, calls, and meetings to a minimum.

Features

Conversations, not pages

Why break conversations into awkward and arbitrary pages, where you have to constantly find the Next Page button? We’ve replaced all that with the power of just-in-time loading. Want to read more? Keep scrolling down.

Topic thread page

Summary Page

Create a new topic requires categorization

Category list

Dynamic notifications

When someone quotes your post, we’ll notify you. When someone mentions your @name, we’ll notify you. When someone replies to your post… well, you get the idea. And if you’re not around, we’ll email you, too.

Simple, but with context

Discourse is a simple, flat forum, where replies flow down the page in a line. Expand context at the bottom and top of each post, and also in quotes, to reveal the full conversation without losing your place.

Born mobile, born to touch

Discourse was designed for high resolution touch devices, with a built-in mobile layout. Read or post from your laptop, tablet, and phone in your browser of choice, or our Discourse iOS app and Discourse Android app.

Links automatically expand

Want to share a cool link you found? Just paste it in on a single line and we’ll make it awesome. Links to Wikipedia, YouTube, Amazon, GitHub, Twitter, Flickr, and hundreds of other popular websites automatically expand to provide additional context and information.

Single sign-on

Seamlessly integrate Discourse with your existing site’s login system with easy, robust single sign on.

Trust system

As members become trusted regulars over time, they earn abilities to help maintain their community.

Community moderation

Let the community suppress spam and dangerous content, and amicably resolve disputes.

Spam blocking

Built in Akismet spam protection and heuristics including new user sandboxing, user flag blocking, and standard nofollow.

Social login

Easily add common social logins like Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, and GitHub.

Summarize topics

Use the Summarize button to condense long topics to just the most interesting and popular posts.

Badges

Encourage positive community behaviors through the included set of badges, or add your own custom badges.

Emoji

Access a searchable list of standard emoji. Choose from four different emoji sets, or define your own custom emoji.

Reply via email

When you aren’t active on the website, your notifications will be automatically sent to you via email. Reply via email from anywhere, on any device.

Two-factor authentication

Enhance your account security with the free Android or iOS authenticator apps.

Admin dashboard

Your most relevant and essential community health metrics are only a click away.

Official plugins

Add chat integration, topic voting, Google Adsense, and more with our officially supported plugins.

Comprehensive API

Anything you see on screen, you can also do via an API call. Discourse is a JavaScript app that talks to our Discourse API.

100% open source

Incorporate Discourse into your site with complete confidence – the code belongs to everyone.

One-click upgrades

Automatic notification of new versions in the dashboard, with a one-click web upgrade process.

Configure

Translations for 46 languages and counting.

SEO optimized for Google indexing and searching.

Markdown, BBCode, and HTML formatting in posts

Automatic backups

CDN support

Blog integration

Automatic & custom avatars

Email invitations

Mailing list support

Discuss

Anonymous posting

File attachments

Hide spoilers

Embeddable polls

Desktop notifications

Auto-save drafts

Post revision history

Personal messaging

Drag & drop image uploads

Collaboratively edit wiki posts

Admin

Inline & bulk moderation

Moderator flag queue

Sitewide alerts & pinned topics

Make your site invite-only

Easily add private spaces

Site analytics dashboard

Post approval

Self-managing usergroups

Promote popular topics

Incoming & outgoing link tracking