Started in 2013 in San Francisco by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood and others, Discourse rebuilds the forum experience on Ruby on Rails with trust-level mechanics and a plugin ecosystem, available self-hosted or managed.
TAG COLLECTION
open-source forum collection
Explore providers, articles, and companies related to open-source forum for practical research and comparison.
Providers
Maintained since 2000 on PHP and MySQL, phpBB combines low resource use with a mature extension ecosystem, a classic open-source choice for cheap long-running discussion boards, though mobile experience and automated governance lag.
Started around 2014 by Australian developer Toby Zerner, Flarum pairs a PHP backend with a single-page front end for a lightweight modern forum under MIT, with a minimal core and on-demand extensions for small communities.