Discourse vs ElkArte

Discourse has a simple user trust system that makes moderating the forum a lot easier. Users gain more permissions as they gain more trust, which limits the amount of damage spammers and trolls can do. Discourse co-founder Jeff Atwood also founded StackExchange, which is the gold standard for gamification/moderation systems so you can also expect Discourse to get better and better at moderation.

Discourse is powered by Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, PostgreSQL and Redis. The code is licensed under GPL and available on GitHub.

The best feature is its design: discourse is designed to aid in the creation of high quality online conversations. Flat discussions with well implemented quoting systems, expandable/collapsible replies, infinite scroll, clean UI and many more features come together to form a highly polished forum experience that makes legacy forums show their age.

Discourse has a comprehensive forum culture support hub at meta.discourse.org.

You can host it yourself in a $5 cloud server or on any Linux server you already have. And if you don't want to deal with this, you can use the hosting platform from the development team.

The post editor has a synchronized side-by-side preview of the Markdown rendering of the post.

Users can choose between the themes made avaliable on their instances, and even use different themes on different devices (mobile vs desktop, for example).

Discourse has sane, safe out of the box defaults, but a million dials and knobs to tweak.

Discourse can upgrade itself with one click in the admin panel. Not the same can be said about MyBB, or most other forums.

Runs in modern browsers and works identically on desktop and tablet and smartphone without the need for a native app.

Discussions can be tagged with an arbitrary number of tags, separately from categories. Categories are hierarchical and don't scale; tags do.

Official Akismet plugin vets posts by new users to make sure they don’t look spammy before they hit your site. Akismet key purchase required.

New users are greeted withe the disco bot which has an interactive experience to teach the basics of using Discourse.

Elkarte has BadBehaviour and other measures included into the core to protect your forum from spammers.

ElkArte has a notification center where you can see mentions, likes, quoted messages and other alerts, all included into the core of the software.

ElkArte comes out of the box with two responsive styles.

It is completely free to use and is licensed with an open source BSD-3 clause license.

Integrated video embedding for YouTube, Vimeo, and DailyMotion.