Discourse

Discourse is an open-source community platform for running discussion forums on infrastructure you control. You create discussion topics to organize conversation, giving a community a single online home, with an optional hosted service if you would rather not manage your own server.

Real-time chat is built in, and the experience can be reshaped with official and community themes and plugins, from chatbots powered by Discourse AI to SQL analysis through the Data Explorer plugin. The platform runs on Ruby on Rails with an Ember.js front end, backed by PostgreSQL and Redis.

Discourse can run on your own servers or on official hosting from the company that builds it. It has been in active use for over a decade and supports the latest stable releases of major desktop and mobile browsers, including Safari on iOS 16.4 and later.