Open-source Khoros 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.

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.

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.