Apache Answer vs Discourse

Apache Answer is a free, open-source Q&A platform for community forums, help centers, and knowledge management. Members can ask and answer questions, comment, vote, and earn reputation and badges. Tags, advanced search filters, and live suggestions help organize discussions and find relevant questions. Administrators can manage admin, moderator, and user roles, add users in bulk, and inspect edits in revision history. Themes and layouts can be customized, and plugins can add capabilities such as Google or generic OAuth2 login, Slack notifications, Redis caching, Algolia or Elasticsearch search, and S3 storage. Deployment options include Docker Compose, Docker, binaries, and aaPanel. The project lists binaries for Darwin ARM64, Linux AMD64 and ARM64, and Windows AMD64, and supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, and SQLite. Documentation describes controls for registration, login methods, allowed email domains, and member access to content. Apache Answer is licensed under Apache License, Version 2.0. Its security guarantee covers official repository plugins only, not third-party plugins.

Discourse is community software for hosting discussions, with options to self-host or use managed hosting. It supports private spaces, event hosting, custom domains and moderation tools, and its codebase is freely available on GitHub. The free plan costs nothing and includes unlimited members, 2 staff seats, 500k monthly page views, 20k monthly emails, 10 categories and 5GB storage. Pro costs $100 a month and includes 5 staff seats, 500k monthly page views, 100k monthly emails, unlimited categories and 20GB storage. Business costs $500 a month, with 15 staff seats, priority support, standard migration services and 100GB storage. Enterprise pricing is custom; it includes unlimited staff seats, 1M+ monthly page views, 1.5M+ monthly emails and 200GB+ storage. Enterprise also includes SSO, SAML, enterprise authentication and a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Paid plans have a 14-day trial, and hosting plans require no credit card up front. Integrations include GitHub, chat providers, Zendesk and authentication providers. Support options range from community help to email support and professional services.