Discourse vs Semrush

Discourse (The 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.) and Semrush (We do love open source and have an opportunity to make it better from now.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Discourse (rank #189) holds a narrow lead over Semrush (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), Discourse is ahead of Semrush. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Semrush is ahead of Discourse. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Discourse is slightly ahead of Semrush. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Semrush is slightly ahead of Discourse. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Discourse is clearly ahead of Semrush.

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. Semrush shows 454 stars across 11 public repos, 2 active in the last 90 days and 7 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Discourse's footprint is roughly 122.6x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Discourse is the stronger read for anyone weighting momentum. Semrush looks better where education 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.