Discourse is the best pure forum software around. It's open source, it has more than a decade of plugins behind it, and for long-form technical discussion it's still hard to beat. Most teams that leave it aren't unhappy with the threads. They leave because of what sits around the threads: the server they have to run, the plan they have to buy, a design that looks like Discourse instead of their product, or a CRM that can't see any of it.
So this list is grouped by reason. Find the one that sounds like you and start there. We make Bettermode, which is the first entry, and every other entry says plainly where it's the better choice. I checked every price on the vendor's own site on September 23, 2026.
What changed at Discourse in 2026
Two things, both this summer. Discourse launched a hosted Free plan on July 14, and it discontinued the $20 a month Starter plan that used to sit between free and Pro. So hosted Discourse now goes Free, then Pro at $100 a month, Business at $500 and a quoted Enterprise tier.
The Free plan is genuinely free forever, but it's a trial-sized community: it lives on a yourname.discourse.group address, allows two staff seats and ten public categories, has no private categories or API, and logs members in through Discourse's own shared account system. Your own domain, custom themes, the API and single sign-on all start at $100.
The detail that surprises people is the traffic cap. Free, Pro and Business all allow the same 500,000 page views a month. The jump from $100 to $500 buys staff seats (5 to 15), email volume, storage and Business features like events, idea voting, automation and advanced reporting. It doesn't buy traffic. That takes Enterprise, which is also the only tier with SAML (at an added cost), a 99.9% uptime guarantee and the Salesforce plugin.
Self-hosting went the other way and got easier. The official Docker install runs on a 2 GB server, email setup is now optional, and plugins that are Business-only on hosted plans, like automation, events and gamification, ship free in the open-source core. SAML still isn't one of them.
Why teams move off Discourse
The server or the bill
Self-hosting is free to license, but somebody on your team becomes the forum's sysadmin. Discourse ships a release every month, plugins can break on upgrades, and security patches don't apply themselves. The hosted route skips all that and now starts at $100 a month for anything beyond the free plan, or $500 once you want events and voting.
It looks like a forum
Discourse can be themed, but it takes code, and custom themes and a custom domain start on Pro. Communities that sit next to a product usually want the community to feel like part of that product, and a Discourse theme rarely gets all the way there.
The CRM can't see it
Discourse's Salesforce plugin is Enterprise hosting only, and it syncs people to leads and contacts rather than recording what they did. There's no official HubSpot plugin in its directory. If your CS lead wants to know what an account asked before a renewal call, that's a problem.
Threads are the whole shape
Discourse does chat on every plan, but the other shapes a customer community needs are gated. Q&A with accepted answers starts on Pro. Events, idea voting and automation start on Business. Teams that want a help center, an ideas board and an events calendar as first-class spaces tend to outgrow it, or outgrow the $100 plan quickly.
If none of those four sound familiar, stay on Discourse. It's good software, and migrating a healthy community for its own sake is a bad trade.
Discourse alternatives at a glance
| Platform | Pick it if | Starting price | Open source |
|---|---|---|---|
 DiscourseBaseline | What you run today | Free plan,then Pro $100/mo; free to self-host | Yes |
 BettermodeOur product | You want a customer community on your domain, connected to your CRM, with nothing to host | $149/mobilled yearly, or $199 monthly | No |
 NodeBB | You want a modern open-source forum, self-hosted or hosted | Free to self-host,hosting from $20/mo | Yes |
 Flarum | You want a lighter forum you run yourself | Freeself-host only | Yes |
 GitHub Discussions | Your community is an open-source project on GitHub | Includedwith GitHub | No |
 Gainsight Customer Communities | Your CS team already runs Gainsight | Quote | No |
 Khoros | You're a large enterprise already on Khoros | Quote | No |
 Higher Logic Vanilla | You run a support-led forum and knowledge base | Quote | No |
 Salesforce Experience Cloud | Your whole company runs on Salesforce | $4/loginor $10/member, Service Cloud portal pricing | No |
 Circle | Members pay you for access and courses | $89/mobilled yearly, plus 2% of member payments | No |
 Discord | Members want real-time chat, and search traffic doesn't matter | Free | No |
Discourse sits at the top as the baseline, and the second row is our product. Prices read from each vendor's own pricing page on September 23, 2026.
Best for a customer community connected to your stack
1. Bettermode
Bettermode is built for the community that sits next to a product people already pay for. It runs on your own domain in your own design, answers questions before they turn into tickets, and sends member activity into the systems your company runs on.
It looks like your product without a line of code. Every plan includes your own domain and removes our branding. Design Studio handles layout and theme, and Premium adds Advanced Design Studio and a custom CMS for teams that want full control.
Devon Park
A Bettermode community on the brand's own domain and design. Illustrative, fictional brand.
It goes past threads. Q&A with best answers, discussions, events and polls come on every plan, and each lives in its own space with its own permissions. On Growth, Ask AI answers a member's question from your community, help center and docs in one reply, and federated search pulls those sources into one results page.
It talks to your CRM. On Growth, member activity lands in Salesforce as native objects within seconds (Community Member, Community Post, Community Activity), so a rep sees what an account has been asking about right on the contact record. Support can turn a post into a Salesforce case. HubSpot connects natively too.
Community activity on a Salesforce contact record. Illustrative, fictional company.
There's nothing to host. We run the servers, the upgrades and the security. Single sign-on is there when you need it, OAuth2 and JWT on Growth and SAML on Premium, and plans are sized by members rather than page views.
Webflow and Nubank both moved their communities from Discourse to Bettermode. Webflow's old discourse.webflow.com address now points at community.webflow.com, which runs on Bettermode. Lenovo Legion, Logitech, Yoto, FlutterFlow and Xano run theirs on it too.
Starter is $149 a month billed yearly, or $199 month to month. Growth is $1,500 a month billed yearly ($18,000 a year), and Premium is priced on request (full pricing). Starter and Growth come with a 14-day trial, no credit card needed.
Where Discourse wins: Bettermode isn't open source and can't be self-hosted, and it doesn't do courses, payments or native mobile apps. If owning the code matters more to you than anything else here, one of the next three is the honest answer.
Bettermode now includes Toggy: three AI agents that set up the community, keep conversations moving and review every post. Toggy plans start at $750 a month. See Toggy on your own community →
Best if you want to stay open source
If the plan is to keep running your own forum, just a different one, these are the three worth a serious look.
2. NodeBB
NodeBB is the closest like-for-like swap. It's a modern, real-time forum built on Node.js, licensed GPL-3.0, and it ships a new release roughly every two weeks (4.16 landed on September 16). Unlike most open-source forums it also sells official hosting: Starter is $20 a month for 50,000 page views on a NodeBB subdomain, and Hamlet is $100 a month for 500,000 page views with your own domain and custom plugins. Every plan has unlimited staff accounts, and qualifying open-source projects can get Starter-level hosting free. If you miss Discourse's old $20 plan, this is the nearest thing to it.
3. Flarum
Flarum is the lightweight pick: a clean, fast forum written in PHP under the MIT license, with an extension system for the features it leaves out. It's popular with self-hosters who find Discourse heavy. Check the version before you commit, though. The stable line is still 1.8, and Flarum 2.0 has been a release candidate for a while (rc.8 came out on August 27). There's no official managed hosting, so you're running it yourself.
4. GitHub Discussions
If your community is really the contributors and users of an open-source project, the forum might belong next to the code. Repository owners can turn on Discussions for public and private repositories, or at the organization level, and members use the GitHub accounts they already have. It's the simplest move on this list and the least customizable. Your community lives on github.com, under GitHub's design, with no brand or CRM connection.
Two more names come up in self-hosting threads. Apache Answer (2.0.2) is a Stack Overflow style Q&A tool rather than a threaded forum, and Talkyard publishes its own comparison against Discourse.
Best inside an enterprise suite
These four are sold to large companies, usually alongside a bigger platform they already own. None of them publish a straightforward community price.
5. Gainsight Customer Communities
Gainsight's community product, formerly inSided, is now sold on its own as Customer Communities. It makes the most sense when your customer success team already runs Gainsight CS, because that's where the two products connect. Pricing is by quote. Its integrations page doesn't list HubSpot, so check before you assume.
6. Khoros
IgniteTech bought Khoros in May 2025, and in April 2026 it relaunched the community product as Aurora AI, on the same backend as Khoros Communities Classic. It's a large-enterprise platform with connectors for Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow and Freshdesk. Existing Khoros customers get a free conversion from Classic to Aurora through the end of 2026, though front-end customizations don't carry over. Pricing is by quote.
7. Higher Logic Vanilla
Higher Logic sells two community products: Thrive for associations and Vanilla for customer communities. Vanilla has been a forum and knowledge base platform for a long time, and it's most at home with support-led communities. Pricing is by quote. We compared the two forums directly in Vanilla Forums vs Discourse.
8. Salesforce Experience Cloud
If your whole company runs on Salesforce, Experience Cloud builds portals and communities on the same platform, so members and their activity are Salesforce records from the start. Salesforce no longer lists Experience Cloud as its own product on its pricing page. The closest published figure is Service Cloud's self-service portal pricing: $4 per login or $10 per member. Treat it as a build project rather than a product you switch on, and budget admin time accordingly.
Best for creators and paid memberships
9. Circle
Circle is the strongest creator platform around. Courses, events, live streams, paid memberships and iOS and Android apps all come in one product. If members pay you for access, it's built for that job in a way Discourse never was.
Billed yearly, Professional is $89 a month, Business $199 and Scale $419, with Circle Plus priced on request. Circle also takes 2% of member payments on Professional, 1% on Business and Scale, and 0.5% on Plus. Removing Circle's branding starts on Business, custom single sign-on starts on Scale, and a branded app in the app stores is Circle Plus only. We go line by line in Bettermode vs Circle.
Mighty Networks and Skool play in the same lane, and our Bettermode alternatives roundup covers both.
Best for real-time chat
10. Discord
Discord is free, your members probably already have it, and it's the best place on this list for live conversation. Servers with Community turned on also get forum channels, with tags, post guidelines and a gallery view, which covers a lot of what a small Discourse forum does.
The catch is search. Discord's robots.txt tells search engines not to crawl anything under discord.com/channels, which is where every server's content lives, and reading it requires a login. Every answer your members write stays inside Discord, where Google can't find it. A Discourse forum that ranks for your product's questions loses that traffic the day it moves to Discord. Plenty of teams run both: Discord for chat, and an indexed community for answers. More in Discord alternatives.
How to move off Discourse without losing what you built
A Discourse community of any age has two assets you can't rebuild: years of answered questions and the search traffic those answers earn. Protect both.
Take a full backup first. Discourse lets admins download one from the browser at any time, and it says exports that include every attachment and upload are available on request, so ask for that if you're on hosted Discourse. The API covers anything else you need to pull.
Keep your URLs working. Every /t/topic-name/123 address has search history behind it. Map each old topic to its new home, serve permanent 301 redirects from the old domain, and keep that domain alive until Google has recrawled the new pages. Webflow pointed its old discourse.webflow.com address at its new community when it moved.
Sort out single sign-on before launch day. If members log in through DiscourseConnect today, pick the replacement early so accounts carry over cleanly. On Bettermode that's OAuth2 or JWT on Growth and SAML on Premium.
Run the two side by side for a short while. Set Discourse to read-only, tell members where the conversation is going, and leave the archive up until the redirects are indexed.
You don't have to do it alone. On Bettermode, migration support is an add-on on Growth and Premium, and our team moves your users, content and structure with you.
Toggy runs on Bettermode. If your community lives on Discourse today, the Toggy demo starts with Build. Book a Toggy demo →
FAQ
What is the best alternative to Discourse?
Pick by the reason you're leaving. For a customer community that looks like your product and connects to Salesforce or HubSpot, Bettermode. To stay open source, NodeBB or Flarum. For an open-source project that already lives on GitHub, GitHub Discussions. For paid memberships and courses, Circle. For real-time chat, Discord.
How much does Discourse cost in 2026?
Hosted Discourse has a Free plan, Pro at $100 a month, Business at $500 a month and custom Enterprise pricing. The $20 Starter plan was discontinued in July 2026. Self-hosting is free to license, and you pay for your own server.
Is Discourse still free?
Yes, in two ways. The software is open source and free to self-host, and since July 2026 there's a hosted Free plan that Discourse calls free forever. The hosted Free plan runs on a discourse.group subdomain with two staff seats, ten public categories, no private categories and no API.
What's the best free alternative to Discourse?
Self-hosted NodeBB or Flarum cost nothing to license. GitHub Discussions comes with a GitHub repository, and Discord is free for chat, though its content isn't indexed by search engines. Bettermode doesn't have a free plan; Starter and Growth come with a 14-day trial.
What is the best open-source forum software?
NodeBB and Flarum are the two open-source forums that come up most often next to Discourse. NodeBB is built on Node.js, updates every couple of weeks and offers official hosting from $20 a month. Flarum is lighter and written in PHP, and its 2.0 release is still a release candidate.
Can I move from Discourse without losing SEO?
Yes, if you redirect. Map every old topic URL to its new home, serve permanent 301 redirects, keep the old domain alive and let Google recrawl. Webflow pointed its old discourse.webflow.com address at its new community when it moved to Bettermode.
Does Discourse have a mobile app?
Yes. Discourse has free iOS and Android apps with push notifications for hosted communities. They are Discourse's own apps rather than apps branded for your community.
Is Bettermode better than Discourse?
For a branded customer community connected to your CRM, with nothing to host, yes. For a self-hosted, open-source forum where engineers own the code, no. Our Bettermode vs Discourse comparison goes line by line.
TL;DR
- Discourse launched a hosted Free plan in July 2026 and dropped its $20 Starter plan. Hosted now goes Free, $100, $500 and Enterprise, and the first three share a 500,000 page-view cap.
- Customer community on your own domain, connected to Salesforce or HubSpot, nothing to host: Bettermode, from $149 a month billed yearly.
- Staying open source: NodeBB (hosting from $20 a month) or Flarum. Open-source project on GitHub: GitHub Discussions.
- An enterprise suite you already own: Gainsight Customer Communities, Khoros, Higher Logic Vanilla or Salesforce Experience Cloud.
- Paid memberships and courses: Circle. Real-time chat: Discord, though search engines can't see it.
- Moving? Take a full backup, 301 every topic URL, and keep the old domain alive.
