Companies Using Discourse

We detect Discourse on 3,760 domains, including Shopify Inc., HubSpot, Inc., Okta Ventures. A detection means the technology is present on that domain, which for large organisations is often a single storefront or subdomain rather than a company-wide deployment. Among domains we matched to a company with a resolved industry, the most common is Software Development (27.88%).

We detect 3,760 domains running Discourse across our monthly crawl of live business domains. Company data could be matched for 2,140 of them (56.9%), and every company-size, industry and country breakdown on this page describes that matched subset rather than the full detected base. A further 76 domains carried a Discourse detection previously and no longer do.

Discourse holds 1.33% of the Community & Comments category, ranking #5. This is a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category — not a share of all websites, and not a share of spending — so it is not directly comparable to figures published on other denominators.

The top alternatives to Discourse include Livefyre (80.11% market share), Disqus (4.6% market share), XenForo (2.78% market share), phpBB (2.31% market share) — measured as a share of the domains we detect running a platform in this category.

United States leads with 835 matched Discourse domains, followed by United Kingdom (163), Germany (122), France (102), Canada (71). These are counts within the 2,140 domains we could match to a company record, not the full detected base.

The most common company size is 1-10 employees, representing 46.83% of the Discourse domains we could match to a company record and size — a subset of 2,140 matched companies, not of all 3,760 detected domains. This is followed by 11-50 employees (29.74%) and 51-200 employees (13.56%).

Among the Discourse domains we could match to a company with a known founding date, most were founded in the 2020s (17.98%), followed by the 2010s (53.94%). That matched subset is drawn from 2,140 companies and is not representative of all 3,760 detected domains. This suggests Discourse is most popular among relatively young companies.

The ideal Discourse customer is: Company Size: 1-10 employees, Location: US, UK, or Germany, City: San Francisco, London, Munich, Founded: 2010-2019, Company Age: ~5-15 years old — based on our analysis of 2,140 enriched companies at TechnologyChecker.io.

Discourse offers a free hosted tier with unlimited members, 2 staff seats, 500K monthly page views, and 5GB storage. It's also 100% open source and free to self-host via Docker. Paid managed hosting starts at $20/month (Starter) with email support and unlimited categories, scales to $100/month (Pro) with 15+ plugins and custom domains, $500/month (Business) with 100GB storage and priority support, and custom Enterprise pricing with 50+ plugins and 99.9% uptime SLA. Discourse also offers free hosted plans for qualifying open-source projects through free.discourse.group.

Discourse is used to build online discussion forums, community support portals, and knowledge bases. Tech companies like Shopify, NVIDIA, and OpenAI use it for developer communities. Nonprofits and open-source projects use it as a mailing list replacement. Based on our data at TechnologyChecker.io, 27.1% of Discourse customers are software development companies, making developer forums the dominant use case.

The largest companies using Discourse include Siemens, Samsung, NVIDIA, BBC, Shopify, and Atlassian. These enterprises typically run Discourse for developer forums or customer communities on subdomains like community.shopify.com and forum.developer.samsung.com. OpenAI, Cloudflare, MongoDB, and Unity3d also operate active Discourse communities, as confirmed by both our detection data and Discourse's published customer page.

BbPress is a lightweight WordPress plugin that adds forum functionality to existing WordPress sites. Discourse is a standalone, full-featured forum platform with real-time updates, markdown editing, and a trust system. Our migration data shows a 2.7:1 ratio in Discourse's favor: 105 companies switched from bbPress to Discourse, while only 39 went the other direction.

Yes, discourse was designed partly as a mailing list replacement. Users can participate entirely via email -- replying to notification emails posts directly to the forum. This feature made it popular with open-source projects that migrated from Google Groups or Mailman. Our data shows many nonprofits (18.3% of Discourse customers) and research institutions use this email-based workflow.

Software Development dominates at 27.88% of the 2,140 Discourse domains we can match to a company — the highest single-industry concentration in our recent refresh work. Adding Technology and Internet (9.87%) and IT Services (7.51%), technology verticals reach roughly 45%. The non-technical tail is modest: Financial Services (3.34%), Non-profit Organizations (2.41%), E-Learning Providers (1.77%) and Computer Games (1.62%).

It is used at that scale but the base skews small: 76.6% of matched Discourse companies have fewer than 50 employees, with 4.92% at 201-500 and 0.43% above 10,000. Discourse's enterprise credibility comes from who runs it rather than how many — its own customer list includes OpenAI, Shopify, NVIDIA and Docker. The self-hosting option matters here, since larger organisations often want the data on their own infrastructure.

Discourse is a modern open-source platform; vBulletin is proprietary PHP software that has powered forums since the early 2000s. Our crawl detects Discourse on 3,760 domains against vBulletin's 2,154, but the sharper difference is generational: only 0.65% of vBulletin's matched customers were founded in the 2020s against 17.98% of Discourse's, and 49.68% of vBulletin's base dates from the 2000s. vBulletin is being maintained by long-standing communities; Discourse is where new ones start.

Discourse is a Ruby on Rails application with an Ember.js front end, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis. Our detection data reflects that directly: Ember.js appears on 99.64% of Discourse domains, which is effectively the same detection rather than a separate finding. Around it, Google Analytics runs on 61.88%, Cloudflare Browser Insights on 20.28%, and privacy-first tools Matomo (5.58%) and Plausible (4.99%) appear at several times their usual rates.

The United States leads with 835 matched companies (39%), followed by the United Kingdom (163), Germany (122), France (102) and Canada (71). The tail is genuinely international for a technical product, with India (58), the Netherlands (56), Australia (52), China (44) and Brazil (36) all registering. Open-source software with no licence cost distributes by developer population rather than sales coverage.

They serve different purposes. Slack is real-time chat that works best for fast, ephemeral conversations. Discourse creates persistent, searchable discussion threads that build a knowledge base over time. Our data shows 37.9% of Discourse sites also use Slack, suggesting most organizations run both. Discourse is better for structured Q&A and long-form discussions; Slack is better for quick coordination.

Our August 2026 crawl detects Discourse on 3,760 active domains, ranking #5 of 63 in the Community & Comments category at 1.33% share. Only 76 domains have dropped it, about 2% of the live base and the lowest churn in the forum category. Note the nominal category leader, Livefyre at 227,094 domains, was discontinued by Adobe in 2017 and those are abandoned script tags.

Yes, discourse offers an official WordPress plugin that replaces the native WordPress commenting system with Discourse threads. Each WordPress post automatically creates a matching Discourse topic, and comments sync between both platforms. Our data shows Discourse is often deployed alongside WordPress-powered sites, with many companies running WordPress for their marketing site and Discourse for community.

Among products still operating, the Community & Comments category runs Disqus (13,033 domains), XenForo (7,881), phpBB (6,550), Discourse (3,760), Invision Power Board (3,001) and vBulletin (2,154). They are not equivalent: Disqus is a comment widget on an existing page, while XenForo, phpBB, Invision and vBulletin are self-hosted PHP forums of an older generation — only 0.65% to 2.37% of the latter two's customers were founded in the 2020s. For a WordPress site wanting a simple board, Asgaros Forum (2,068) is the lightweight option.

Discourse was co-founded in 2013 by Jeff Atwood (co-creator of Stack Overflow), Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron. The company has raised $21M in total funding, including a $20M Series A in August 2021 led by Pace Capital and First Round Capital. The company has approximately 101 employees and generates over $10M in annual revenue through a hybrid model: open-sourcing the software while selling managed hosting plans starting at $20/month.

Discourse is one of the most popular open-source projects in its category, with 46,500+ GitHub stars and 8,800+ contributors as of March 2026. The discourse/discourse repository is actively maintained with regular releases. The codebase is built on Ruby on Rails (backend API) and Ember.js (frontend), licensed under GPL-2.0. The project's contributor count of 8,800+ makes it one of the most collaborative open-source community platforms on GitHub.

According to discourse.org/customers, Discourse organizes its customers into six categories: Brand Communities (Western Digital, Wyze, Monzo, MetaMask, Solana, Samsung SmartThings), Support Communities (UiPath, Elastic, OpenAI, Asana, Netlify, GitLab, Docker, Brave), Developer Communities (Atlassian, Zoom, Unreal Engine, Ruby on Rails, Ember.js), Learning Communities (TrainerRoad, SitePoint, Motley Fool), Fan Communities (EVE Online, Infinite Flight, Canadian Football League), and Workplace Collaboration (Forvia Hella, Carwow). Discourse claims to support 3,000+ communities through its hosting and software.