15Five vs Discourse

15Five and Discourse (The 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Discourse (rank #189) holds a modest lead over 15Five (rank #693) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (50 vs 31). The gap of 19 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), Discourse is clearly ahead of 15Five. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Discourse is slightly ahead of 15Five. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Discourse is ahead of 15Five. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Discourse is clearly ahead of 15Five. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Discourse is clearly ahead of 15Five.

15Five carries 141 GitHub stars across 29 public repos, with 2 repositories active in the last 90 days and 5 external contributors on record. Discourse shows 55,678 stars across 620 public repos, 90 active in the last 90 days and 44 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Discourse's footprint is roughly 394.9x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

15Five is worth a look for teams already invested in its stack. Discourse looks better where momentum is the deciding factor. The table below breaks the scores down pillar by pillar; the linked profiles cover the underlying repos, docs and community signals in full.