Discourse vs Sprout Social

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

Discourse (rank #189) holds a modest lead over Sprout Social (rank #401) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (50 vs 41). The gap of 9 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 Sprout Social. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Discourse is slightly ahead of Sprout Social. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Discourse is clearly ahead of Sprout Social. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Sprout Social is ahead of Discourse. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Discourse is clearly ahead of Sprout Social.

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. Sprout Social shows 313 stars across 68 public repos, 4 active in the last 90 days and 3 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Discourse's footprint is roughly 177.9x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Discourse is the stronger read for anyone weighting community. Sprout Social looks better where reach 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.