Open-source Groups.io 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.

Loomio is open-source software for making decisions together. It gives a group a dedicated place to share context, discuss proposals, gather input, vote and record the outcome, so participants in different time zones can take part without scheduling more meetings. Each discussion, reason and outcome stays in one searchable record of what was decided and why.

The project says it is used by cooperatives, nonprofits, boards, unions, community groups, membership organizations and distributed teams. It aims to help groups move important decisions out of scattered email and chat threads, involve the right people, work through differences and agree on what happens next. Transparency and inclusiveness are the stated goals.

You can start a free trial of the hosted service at Loomio.com, or set up your own Loomio server from the source. A development environment guide is provided for contributors. The application is written in Ruby, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and bug reports are handled through GitHub issues, with email available for other contact.