Discourse

Open-source forum platform

Free tier + paidRealtime, comments & collabdiscourse.org

What it is

Mature open-source discussion platform with categories, trust levels that grant moderation powers as members participate, a genuine moderation toolkit, full-text search, reply-by-email and a large plugin ecosystem. Ships a comment-embed mode that mirrors blog post comments into forum topics through a single script tag.

Why it earns a slot

The serious answer when comments should grow into a community rather than stay a per-article afterthought. Embed mode gives you article comments today and a full forum later without migrating any content.

Know before you commit

It is a Rails app needing Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq, so self-hosting is real sysadmin work and the official floor is a 2 GB VPS. Communities also need active human moderators — trust levels reduce that burden but never remove it.

Getting started

Run the official Docker discourse-setup script, or use hosted

Field notes

0 from the community

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Pricing snapshot

Self-host free and open source. Hosted: free plan (2 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 5 GB); Pro $100/mo (5 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 20 GB); Business $500/mo (15 seats, 100 GB); Enterprise custom. 85% education and 50% non-profit discounts available

Snapshots move fast — verify at checkout, and post a field note if it changed.

Drop into your Lovable chat

Evaluate Discourse (https://www.discourse.org) for this project, then use it only if it fits what we are already building.
Context: Open-source forum platform. Mature open-source discussion platform with categories, trust levels that grant moderation powers as members participate, a genuine moderation toolkit, full-text search, reply-by-email and a large plugin ecosystem. Ships a comment-embed mode that mirrors blog post comments into forum topics through a single script tag.
Reviewer notes (general, not written for this codebase): The serious answer when comments should grow into a community rather than stay a per-article afterthought. Embed mode gives you article comments today and a full forum later without migrating any content.
Watch out for: It is a Rails app needing Postgres, Redis and Sidekiq, so self-hosting is real sysadmin work and the official floor is a 2 GB VPS. Communities also need active human moderators — trust levels reduce that burden but never remove it.
Pricing: Self-host free and open source. Hosted: free plan (2 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 5 GB); Pro $100/mo (5 staff seats, 500k pageviews, 20 GB); Business $500/mo (15 seats, 100 GB); Enterprise custom. 85% education and 50% non-profit discounts available
Setup: Run the official Docker discourse-setup script, or use hosted
Rules: treat the notes above as background only. Do not assume a theme, style, layout or feature that is not already in this project — inspect the existing code first and ask me before changing visual direction.

/api/public/tools/discourse

Neighbourhood

How Discourse sits against the rest of the atlas — swaps, companions and the tools builders actually save alongside it.

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