Discourse

Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.

Actively maintained

At a glance

GitHub stars
48k
Forks
9.1k
Open issues & PRs
286
Last activity
2026-11-04
Latest release
_gh-attach-assets
2026-07-15
Commits (12 mo)
7k
License
GPL-2.0
Language / platform
Docker

Maintenance health: Actively maintained — Commits in the last 3 months. GitHub data fetched 2026-11-04.

Run Discourse yourself

  • RAM: ~2 GB server (1 vCPU), including postgres
  • Docker: yes — image discourse/discourse on Docker Hub (164.6k pulls)
  • Storage: plan disk for your data (media/files grow fast); attach a volume or use object storage.
  • federated servers grow with followers and media

Estimated monthly server cost

ProviderPlan size~ USD / month
Vultr2 GB$10Deploy →
DigitalOcean2 GB$12Deploy →
Akamai (Linode)2 GB$12Deploy →

Rough estimate from the app's stack and category, not a benchmark. Several light apps can share one server. Some hosting links may be affiliate links. We may earn a commission at no extra cost to you; it never affects which apps we list.

Prefer managed hosting? Check PikaPods or Elestio.

Discourse is an alternative to

Similar self-hosted apps

Mastodon

Federated microblogging server.

Actively maintained ★ 50.5k AGPL-3.0 ~$20/mo

Flarum

Delightfully simple forums. Next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun again.

Actively maintained ★ 16.4k MIT ~$20/mo

Answer

Knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more.

Actively maintained ★ 15.7k Apache-2.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

NodeBB

Forum software built for the modern web.

Actively maintained ★ 15.2k GPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

Lemmy

Link aggregator for the fediverse (alternative to Reddit).

Actively maintained ★ 14.7k AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

Misskey

Decentralized app-like microblogging server/SNS for the Fediverse, using the ActivityPub protocol like GNU social and Mastodon.

Actively maintained ★ 11.4k AGPL-3.0 🐳 Docker~$20/mo

Is this your project? Get it featured or send a correction upstream to awesome-selfhosted-data.