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.
- Social & Forums
- Go
- Apache-2.0
- Docker
- Actively maintained
GitHub stats
- GitHub stars
- 15,691
- Forks
- 1,374
- Open issues
- 101
- Commits, last 12 months
- 257
- Last commit
- Sep 22, 2026
- Latest release
- v2.0.2Jul 21, 2026
- Created
- Sep 29, 2022
Data from the GitHub API, refreshed daily.
About 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. Answer is open source under the Apache-2.0 license and written mainly in Go, so you can read the code, run it on your own hardware and keep full control of your data.
The project has 15,691 stars and 1,374 forks on GitHub, with 257 commits over the last year. It ships a Docker image, which makes it a good fit for a small VPS or a home server running Docker Compose.
Topics
- community
- golang
- react
- forum
- question
- go
- q-and-a
- hacktoberfest
- typescript
Open-source alternative to
Answer can replace these commercial products. Compare every option on each page.
Repository preview
Similar apps
More apps like Answer
Other projects in Social & Forums, ranked by GitHub stars.
Mastodon
mastodon/mastodon
Federated microblogging server.
Social & ForumsRubyDockerDiscourse
discourse/discourse
Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.
Social & ForumsRubyDockerFlarum
flarum/flarum
Delightfully simple forums. Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun again.
Social & ForumsPHPNodeBB
NodeBB/NodeBB
Forum software built for the modern web.
Social & ForumsJavaScriptDockerLemmy
LemmyNet/lemmy
Link aggregator for the fediverse (alternative to Reddit).
Social & ForumsRustDockerdiaspora*
diaspora/diaspora
Distributed social networking server.
Social & ForumsRuby
What is Answer?
Answer is a free, open-source app you can host on your own server, listed in our Social & Forums category. 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. The source code lives at github.com/apache/answer, where it has 15,691 stars.
Is Answer free and open source?
Yes. Answer is open-source software released under the Apache-2.0 license, so you can self-host it at no cost. You only pay for the server it runs on, and some projects also offer an optional paid cloud plan.
Can I run Answer with Docker?
Yes. Answer provides a Docker image, so you can run it on any Linux server with Docker and Docker Compose installed. The project README lists the image name and the environment variables to set.
What are the best alternatives to Answer?
Popular open-source alternatives to Answer include Mastodon, Discourse and Flarum. Answer itself is a self-hosted alternative to Reddit.
Is Answer actively maintained?
The most recent commit to Answer was on Sep 22, 2026 with 257 commits in the past twelve months. The latest release is v2.0.2, published Jul 21, 2026. Check the open issues on GitHub to gauge how quickly maintainers respond.