Discourse vs Yoast

Discourse (The 100% open source discussion platform built for the next decade of the Internet.) and Yoast (This is where the Yoast.com team shares its public code: from our WordPress plugins to other small projects.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Discourse (rank #190) holds a narrow lead over Yoast (rank #209) on the overall Smoower ecosystem score (50 vs 49). The gap of 1 points reflects composite signals across code, docs, community and reach.

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

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. Yoast shows 3,439 stars across 78 public repos, 12 active in the last 90 days and 21 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Discourse's footprint is roughly 16.2x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Discourse is the stronger read for anyone weighting momentum. Yoast 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.