Open-source Circle alternatives

Discourse is a fully open-source platform for online community discussion. It is aimed at those who prefer to decide for themselves how and where their site runs, and it is written mainly in Ruby on Rails with a JavaScript front end and PostgreSQL. It is released under the GPL-2.0 license.

Discourse lets you start discussion topics, talk live through its integrated chat, change the look with official and community themes, and extend the site with plugins, ranging from chatbots powered by Discourse AI to the Data Explorer plugin for SQL analysis. Current stable versions of the major browsers are supported across desktops, tablets and phones.

You can self-host it on your own infrastructure by following the install guide, or choose the official Discourse hosting if you would rather skip setup and server management. Development setups use Docker or a VS Code dev container and need Ruby, PostgreSQL and Redis. It suits companies, open-source projects and groups running forums and support communities.

Forem is open-source software for building communities for peers, customers, fanbases, families, friends or any group that wants a shared space. It is the codebase behind dev.to, a community of software developers who write articles, discuss and build professional profiles. The project is written in Ruby on Rails and released under the AGPL-3.0 license.

The repository includes installation documentation, developer documentation and instructions for deploying with Kamal. Contributors are welcome to open pull requests on any issue, provided they include appropriate tests, with the maintainers currently focused on backend regression tests while frontend changes may need more user review. The project states that AI-assisted pull requests are welcome if they meet quality standards, and it points AI agents to an AGENTS.md file. A vulnerability disclosure process and acknowledgements are also documented.

NodeBB is forum software built on Node.js that keeps the traditional bulletin board format, with category hierarchies, local user accounts and asynchronous messaging, while adding modern features. It uses web sockets for instant interactions and real-time notifications, is mobile responsive, and exposes rich RESTful read and write APIs.

It supports Redis, MongoDB or PostgreSQL as its database. The core contains a common set of basic functionality, and additional features and integrations come from third-party plugins. A theming system extends base templates and styles with SCSS or CSS, and the base theme uses Bootstrap 5. A minimalist theme called Harmony is available for getting started without coding.

NodeBB is released under the GPL-3.0 license and is self-hosted. It requires a recent Node.js release (version 22 or later) plus MongoDB 5 or later or Redis 7.2 or later. Translations are managed with Transifex, and the project invites developers, designers and translators to contribute.

Flarum is a discussion platform for websites, offered as open-source forum software. It aims to be simple and lightweight, with no complex dependencies, and the README says it is built with PHP so that it is quick to deploy.

The interface is powered by Mithril, a small JavaScript framework, and is designed to look consistent and responsive across devices. Flarum can be customized, extended and integrated through an Extension API, which is how most added features are provided. The repository contains Flarum's core code, so anyone setting up an actual forum should start from the separate skeleton repository.

Flarum is licensed under the MIT licence. Support is available through the documentation, the Flarum Discuss community forum and a Discord server, and security issues are reported by email under a published policy. It suits communities that want to host their own forum rather than use a social platform.

Open Source Social Network, or OSSN, is a PHP application for creating a social networking website. It supports the typical building blocks of a community platform, including user registration, profiles, newsfeeds, photos, groups, blogs, notifications and chat, and it is intended for communities built around shared professional or personal interests.

The software is multilingual, with translations listed for languages such as English, French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese, so a site can reach audiences in different regions. It is modular and can be extended with components, and the project website provides documentation and details. Screenshots show the landing page, newsfeed and profile pages.

OSSN is written in PHP and runs on your own web hosting. The README states that it is licensed under the Open Source Social Network License 4.0 and the Cryptographic Autonomy License 1.0, while repository metadata lists the licence as other. It suits individuals, organizations and communities that want to run an independent social site instead of relying on a large platform.

Talkyard is a community discussion platform that brings together features from several kinds of tools. Its description names StackOverflow, Slack, Discourse, Reddit and Disqus as the sources, so one installation can host a forum, question-and-answer boards, chat channels and comments for a blog.

The platform emphasizes thoughtful discussion, with insightful comments rising to the top and the ability to upvote ideas and sort by votes. Question topics let participants select an accepted answer, chat channels offer fairly basic real-time messaging, and an embedding option lets website owners collect anonymous blog comments. The project provides a comparison page against other software, a demo forum, a discussion forum for the project and documentation that it describes as incomplete.

Talkyard is written mainly in TypeScript and Scala with a React front end, and is licensed under AGPL-3.0. Self-hosting is supported through the separate talkyard-prod-one repository, and this repository is where development takes place.