Discourse vs Recurly

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

Discourse (rank #189) holds a narrow lead over Recurly (rank #317) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (50 vs 44). The gap of 6 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

Discourse carries 55,678 GitHub stars across 620 public repos, with 90 repositories active in the last 90 days and 44 external contributors on record. Recurly shows 1,564 stars across 53 public repos, 26 active in the last 90 days and 5 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Discourse's footprint is roughly 35.6x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Discourse is the stronger read for anyone weighting reach. Recurly looks better where code quality 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.