Discourse vs Nodyx

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.

Nodyx is a self-hosted community platform that brings forums, real-time chat and voice channels into one installation. Each installation serves an independent community rather than part of a shared multi-community service. Forum tools include categories, threads, rich editing, polls, pinned posts, reactions, thanks and tags; chat and voice features include WebRTC channels and screen sharing. The maker says direct messages use ECDH P-256, AES-256-GCM and an ESY layer for end-to-end encryption. Its Grid Builder supports resizable columns, previews, theme editing and ZIP-uploaded widgets running in Shadow DOM. Installations can discover one another through a global directory and relay through NAT using nodyx-relay. Documented security features include TOTP and Signet two-factor authentication and a honeypot suite. Nodyx is AGPL-3.0 licensed and listed as free, with no feature gating. Setup options include Docker, a Windows Server PowerShell installer or manual installation on Linux, Mac or Windows; manual installation requires Node.js 22+, PostgreSQL 16+ and Redis 7+.