Discourse
Discourse is an open-source, self-hosted app in the Social & Forums category, licensed GPL-2.0 and written mainly in Ruby. It is a self-hosted alternative to Reddit and ships a Docker image. It has 48,012 GitHub stars and its last commit was on Oct 26, 2026 (data as of Oct 26, 2026).
GitHub stats
- GitHub stars
- 48,012
- Forks
- 9,054
- Open issues
- 0
- Commits, last 12 months
- 7,452
- Last commit
- Oct 26, 2026
- Latest release
- _gh-attach-assetsJul 15, 2026
- Created
- Jan 12, 2013
- License
- GPL-2.0Open source
Data as of from the GitHub API. Report an error
Project health
ActiveActive: last commit Oct 26, 2026, 7,452 commits in 12 months.
- Security policyPublishes a security policy on GitHub
| Last commit | Oct 26, 2026 |
|---|---|
| Commits, last 12 months | 7,452 |
| Latest release | _gh-attach-assets (Jul 15, 2026) |
| Releases, last 12 months | 0 |
| Releases, all time | 1 |
| Open issues | 0 |
| Open pull requests | 253 |
| Good first issues | 0 |
| Contributing guide | Yes |
| Security policy | Yes |
| Created | Jan 12, 2013 |
Health as of , from the GitHub API. A label describes activity, not quality or security. How we label project health · Report a data error
About Discourse
Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.
Description adapted from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source code: github.com/discourse/discourse.
Topics
- discourse
- javascript
- rails
- ruby
- ember
- forum
- postgresql
Open-source alternative to
Discourse can replace these commercial products. Compare every option on each page.
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Is Discourse free and open source?
Yes. Discourse is open-source software released under the GPL-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 Discourse with Docker?
Yes. Discourse 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 Discourse?
Popular self-hosted alternatives to Discourse include Mastodon, Flarum and Answer. Discourse itself is a self-hosted alternative to Reddit.
Is Discourse actively maintained?
The most recent commit to Discourse was on Oct 26, 2026 with 7,452 commits in the past twelve months. The latest release is _gh-attach-assets, published Jul 15, 2026. It had 0 open issues on GitHub. appsgit's project-health label for it is "Active" as of Oct 26, 2026.