Introduction

In this article, we will discuss how to choose a right open source discussion forum. Discussion forums can be used not only for products support but also help community to participate in product bugs. In this way, Discussion forums are a great tool to build a community of a company’s products.

In order to choose an open source discussion forum, we’ll base on below article which sets general guidelines for open source project selection:

https://docs.containerize.com/common-how-tos/choose-a-right-open-source-product/

Evaluate Open Source Discussion Forum Options

When we Google “Open Source Discussion Forum”, some of the prominent top results include:

When we check open source popularity on GitHub, we’ll get below ranking:

By looking at Google and GitHub, the ranks and popularity are same so we can conclude that Discourse is the most popular and top ranked discussion forum.

Crosscheck Popularity and Reviews

In this section, we cross check popularity and reviews on some comparison and review sites.

Product Hunt:

Alternative To:

Hacker News:

By looking at the above 3 review sites, the ranking is crosschecked and remains unchanged after this review.

Compare Features and Quality

In this section, we’ll have a look at the features and quality.

Discourse:

Flarum:

Vanilla:

If we compare the features and the live sites, we can conclude that above three forums provide modern and trendy features with the following high level difference:

  • Discourse forums provide the most features like theming, mobile first, notifications, single sign on etc.
  • Flarum is a little behind Discourse but they have more features on their roadmap e.g Single Sign on is missing at Flarum as of now.
  • Vanilla offers many features but some of the features only belong to its commercial offering called Vanilla Cloud. e.g Browse through Help Docs to see which features belong to Vanilla cloud only.

Based on the features review done in this section, we can keep the ranking still same. i.e Discourse at #1, Flarum at #2, Vanilla at #3. Since Vanilla offers some critical forum features at only Vanilla Cloud so we can drop Vanilla after this review as we are only interested in full open source discussion forum.

Assess Team Repute

In this exercise, we’ll try to assess repute of the teams behind Discourse and Flarum.

Discourse Team: https://www.discourse.org/team.html Flarum Team: https://github.com/flarum/flarum/graphs/contributors , https://github.com/tobyzerner, http://tobyzerner.com

By looking at the Team Leads of the above projects, we can see that Discourse Team Lead (Jeff Atwood) is more experienced in the field of forum softwares being cofounder of successful community websites like Stack Overflow, where as Flarum Team lead (Toby Zerner) is relatively new in this field. Based on this assessment, we can keep Discourse at #1 and Flarum at #2.

Extensibility Options

Both Discourse and Flarum provide extensibility frameworks and community contributes their extensions:

Discourse: https://www.discourse.org/plugins Flarum: https://discuss.flarum.org/t/extensions

Licensing Model

Discourse: https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/LICENSE.txt (GPL 2) Flarum: https://github.com/flarum/flarum/blob/master/LICENSE (MIT)

If you want to monetize Discourse, then its license (GPL 2) requires you to open source your customizations as well. On the other hand, Flarum distributes its open source project with MIT so you can monetize it without obligation like open sourcing your customizations.

Conclusion

As long as you want to use a winner open source software for your own needs, Discourse is the best option. If you want to monetize Discourse as well, then you will have to open source your commercial offering. However, if you don’t have an RoR team and want to earn money without open sourcing commercialized version of a discussion forum, Flarum may suite your needs.

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