Discord vs Discourse

Discord (A new way to chat with your communities and friends. Discord is the easiest way to communicate over voice, video, and text.) and Discourse (The 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Discord (rank #103) holds a narrow lead over Discourse (rank #190) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (55 vs 50). The gap of 5 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Discord carries 28,570 GitHub stars across 327 public repos, with 36 repositories active in the last 90 days and 41 external contributors on record. Discourse shows 55,678 stars across 620 public repos, 90 active in the last 90 days and 44 external contributors.

Discord is the stronger read for anyone weighting education. 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.