Open-source Disqus 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.

Remark42 is a comment engine you run yourself and embed into blogs, articles or any page where readers leave comments. It is built to be lightweight and simple while staying functional, and it does not track its users, which makes it a privacy-friendly alternative to hosted commenting widgets. It is written in Go.

Readers can sign in through social providers such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, GitHub, Apple, Yandex, Patreon, Discord and Telegram, through custom OAuth2 providers, or by email, with optional anonymous access. Comments support multi-level nesting in tree or plain views, Markdown with a formatting toolbar, drag-and-drop image upload, voting, pinning and verification. Moderators can remove comments and block users, and administrators can import data from Disqus and WordPress and receive notifications.

Remark42 is MIT-licensed and typically deployed as a Docker container next to your site. It suits bloggers and small publications that want control over comment data without relying on a third-party service.

Isso is a lightweight commenting server that lets you add a discussion section to your own website without relying on a third-party service. It is written in Python and JavaScript and aims to be a drop-in replacement for Disqus, with comments stored in a local SQLite database.

Visitors write comments in Markdown, and can edit or delete their own comments within a time window that is 15 minutes by default. Comments can be held in a moderation queue so they stay hidden until approved. Existing discussions can be brought over by importing from Disqus or WordPress, and the site embeds a single configurable JavaScript file of about 20 kB gzipped.

Isso is licensed under MIT and requires Python 3.8 or later and SQLite. It can be installed from PyPI or run from a Docker image published on GitHub's container registry, with a quickstart guide and full documentation online. A live demo is available on the project website.

Waline is a simple, lightweight comment system with its own backend, aimed at blogs and similar websites. It supports full Markdown syntax in comments and emphasizes safety, including spam and abuse controls. Its topics reference Disqus, so it is often considered by sites looking for a self-managed alternative to hosted commenting services.

A client library, @waline/client, is embedded in the page, while the server can run on Vercel, CloudBase, Railway, Render, Zeabur, Netlify, Alibaba Cloud ComputeNest or in Docker on your own machine. Storage options include PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, TiDB, MongoDB, CloudBase and GitHub. The project advertises a very large number of deployment combinations.

Moderation and engagement features include email, WeChat, QQ and Telegram notifications, Akismet spam checking, IP-based rate limits, keyword restrictions, an IP disallow list, duplicate content checks, sticky comments, comment likes and comment management with deletion. Login support covers social accounts, there is an article counter, and the interface is internationalized with custom language support. It is licensed under GPL-2.0.

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.