Discourse

Discourse fits communities whose conversations should stay public and findable: open-source projects, product support forums and company communities that answer the same questions year after year. Topics read as flat reply streams, and public sites serve crawlers a server-rendered layout, so old answers can turn up in search. Moderation scales with the membership rather than the staff team. Members gain abilities as they rise through trust levels, flags send posts to a review queue, and AI spam detection comes with every hosted plan.

It's a weaker fit when the community itself is the product being sold. Paid access comes from the Subscriptions plugin on Pro and up: it sells one-time or recurring subscriptions, adds each subscriber to a user group and runs on Stripe keys the owner supplies. Gamification, an events calendar and automation arrive only with Business, at five times Pro's price. The Free plan is a usable start but not a branded one, with a yourname.discourse.group address, no API, 2 staff seats and 10 categories.

Pro, at $100 a month, is where most communities will land. It adds a custom domain, themes, private categories, the API and webhooks, DiscourseConnect single sign-on and plugins such as Subscriptions, with 5 staff seats, 20 GB of storage and 500k monthly page views. Business costs $500 a month for 15 staff seats, 100 GB, the extra plugins, OAuth2 and OpenID Connect sign-in, priority support and a standard migration from phpBB, vBulletin, Slack and others. The pricing page lists no separate yearly price. Education and nonprofit communities can ask for 85% and 50% off Pro and Business, and the software itself runs free on your own servers. A backup moves a community between self-hosting and Discourse's hosting.

Choose Discourse for a public forum, a support community or an open-source project, and start on the Free plan to see whether members use it. A creator selling a membership will get more from Circle, whose paywalls sell the whole community or single spaces and which includes courses and live events from Professional, at $89 a month on annual billing with a 2% fee on payments. Skool is the plainer option for one paid group: Pro costs $99 a month with a fee of 2.9% + 30 cents per transaction.