Open-source Quora alternatives

Apache Answer is question-and-answer software for teams of any size. It can power a community forum, a help center or a knowledge management platform, letting people post questions and have them answered and organized in one searchable place. It is an Apache Software Foundation project released under the Apache License 2.0.

The backend is written in Go and the web interface in React and TypeScript. It can be run quickly with Docker, and the project documents installation, building from source and a plugin system that lets developers create custom plugins to extend the platform. The build requires Go, Node.js and pnpm.

Because the software is self-hosted, organizations keep control over their content and community. Contributions are welcome through the project's contributing guide, and a screenshots section on the site shows the interface. A project website at answer.apache.org provides further documentation.

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.