#13 in Collaboration & CommunicationUpdated 2026-08

Discourse

by Discourse · Community forum platform with chat, plugins and self-hosting

55.5 — BenchRank score out of 100

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Pricing page

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Overview

Discourse is a community platform for forum topics, built-in real-time chat, private messages and email replies. Sites are organised with categories, tags and member groups, moderated with built-in and AI-assisted tools, and extended through themes, plugins and API access. It is offered as managed hosting or self-hosting, with the codebase on GitHub and data exportable at any time.

Best for: Tech companies running a public support forum or product community they want to own outright.
Pricing: Free plan, then $100/month for Pro and $500/month for Business, with Enterprise on custom pricing; all prices in USD.
Runs on: iOSAndroidSelf-hosted

Strengths and trade-offs

Strengths

Entire codebase on GitHub; self-host or move hosts at will
Chat, private messages and email replies alongside topics
Themes, plugins and API access from the $100/month plan
Free plan plus 14-day trials, no credit card up front

Trade-offs

Cheapest paid plan is $100/month; no smaller per-seat entry point
Page views capped at 500k/month on Free, Pro and Business alike
SSO, automation and gamification only from Business at $500/month
Staff seats capped at 2/5/15; extra seats are a paid add-on

Pricing

Published plans from Discourse’s own pricing page, in USD. Usage charges and add-ons may apply on top.

Discourse pricing tiers, monthly rates in USD
Plan	Monthly	Includes
Pro	$100	5 staff seats, unlimited members and categories 15+ plugins, custom and community themes Custom domain, API and webhook access 500k monthly page views, 20GB storage, email support
Business	$500	Everything on Pro, plus 15 staff seats SSO (OpenID & OAuth2), automation, events, gamification 20+ additional plugins, advanced reporting and analytics Priority support and migration services
Enterprise	Contact sales	Everything on Business, plus unlimited staff seats 99.9% uptime guarantee, GDPR and CCPA compliant hosting 50+ plugins, dedicated cloud hosting on AWS Expert design and development services
Free plan	—	2 staff seats, unlimited members 10 categories, 5GB storage, 20k monthly emails 500k monthly page views, community support

How this score is made up

Each dimension is scored out of 100 and combined into the headline score using fixed weights.

MCP support: 0 out of 100
API quality: 45 out of 100
Documentation: 50 out of 100
Agent friendliness: 85 out of 100
Pricing transparency: 85 out of 100
Changelog: 100 out of 100
Marketing site structure: 60 out of 100
Operational trust: 75 out of 100

Measured, but not part of the score

Useful to know, but not a mark for or against the product — so these do not affect the ranking.

Openness: 40 out of 100
Maintenance: 100 out of 100

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