Software Alternatives & Reviews

XenForo VS Discourse

Compare XenForo VS Discourse and see what are their differences

XenForo

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

Discourse

Discourse is an open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.
  • XenForo Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-18
  • Discourse Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

XenForo

Categories
  • Forums And Forum Software
  • Forums
  • Community Platform
  • Community Management
Website xenforo.com  
Pricing URL Official XenForo Pricing  
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

XenForo videos

What is xenforo?

More videos:

  • Review - [Review] Phần mềm download resource free trên xenforo.com

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 XenForo and Discourse)
Forums And Forum Software
Forums
28 28%
72% 72
Community Platform
30 30%
70% 70
Social & Communications
100 100%
0% 0

User comments

Share your experience with using XenForo and Discourse. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare XenForo and Discourse

XenForo Reviews

Top 10 Best Free Open Source Forum Software to Setup own Discussion Forum
XenForo is one of the most intuitive extensible and highly flexible community software which provides speed, durability, and compelling community experience. It offers a wide range of useful features such as integration with Facebook for easy sharing of the content, allows members to follow each other and see the recent activities of your forum, style property editor to...
Source: technofizi.net
IndieHackers: Best forum software
If you don’t mind paying the most powerful and my personal favourite is https://XenForo.com constant updates and an overall great product with a good community marketplace!

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 XenForo. It has been mentiond 21 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.

XenForo mentions (10)

  • How to Create a Discussion Forum Using PHP and MySQL?
    XenForo (https://xenforo.com/) XenForo is a popular commercial forum software application that is widely used for creating and managing online discussion communities and forums. - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Poll Results & Re-Opening the Subreddit
    For the longer term migration options, I would like to recommend we set up a Xenforo forum one last time. It would be quick and easy to do, it's a well designed and maintained solution that has all the technical features we need and works well for communities like this, as demonstrated by the Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity forums. Finally, this community will only be free of interference if we go to a place... Source: 9 months ago
  • Some forum software written in Rust
    Obviously forums aren't as popular as they used to be, so this topic might not be of interest to many. For folks that want to run a forum, they'd most certainly go with Discourse (Ruby), Flarum (PHP), Xenforo (PHP), NodeBB (Javascript), Nimforum (Nim) and maybe Casnode (Go). Source: about 1 year ago
  • Best way to create a community website
    For something simple, I'd look into bbpress. For something more complex (but that can still integrate with WordPress, check out Xenforo (my favorite) or Vanilla. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Ask HN: Any forum/community dedicated to software and DevOps?
    Obligatory Lobsters[0] link. You may know it well already though. If you really need to scratch that itch, maybe start your own community based around those topics? I wouldn't build it from scratch though, and use something like XenForo[1]. The web needs more forums, there's not enough of them around! [0] https://lobste.rs/ [1] https://xenforo.com/. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
View more

Discourse mentions (21)

  • 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 / 3 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 / 6 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 / 6 months ago
  • Does Replit Use/Offer a Forum Template?
    It requires more RAM than the base price offers, but the software is Discourse, an open source forum. Https://discourse.org/. Source: 8 months ago
  • I am also resigning as a moderator and will be joining the "leftit" movement.
    Any way we could get an official Discourse (not discord, Discourse) OSM server going? Its the best forum software I've ever used. Source: 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing XenForo and Discourse, you can also consider the following products

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.

Flarum - Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun. It's simple, fast, and free.

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.

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

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

Forumbee - Forumbee offers community forums for discussions, feedback and Q&A.