---
title: Discourse
tags:
  - opensource
  - rails
  - selfhosted
  - community
  - ember
  - discourse
  - forum
---

> Civilized discussion for your community

[Discourse](https://www.discourse.org) is super flexible open source forum software. It's a top [[Community Tool]].

The private company behind Discourse is _Civilized Discourse Construction Kit, Inc._. They offer paid hosting for forums starting at $100/month.

You can [apply for free hosting for open source projects](https://blog.discourse.org/2018/11/free-hosting-for-open-source-v2/)

## Discourse for Teams

There is a new (late 2020) [Discourse for Teams](https://teams.discourse.com) offering that starts at $20/month for up to 5 team members on a fully private forum.

> Discourse for Teams is a private, focused version of Discourse with special tools to enhance remote work, productivity and internal discussions.

Self-hosting Discourse is quite reasonable to do on a ~$10 month VPS. The instructions and updates are very well done to be automated, and you can just cut-and-paste commands. It uses [[Docker]], plus a pretty simply process to add additional plugins and re-run the Docker process.

There are instructions for running a second Docker instance to enable [[Discourse email posting]] in an integrated way as well.