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Most buyers should pick Discourse.
Choose Discourse if you need a full community for support, collaboration, feedback, or developer discussions: its listed features include structured topics, chat, moderation, voting, themes and plugins, export, and self-hosting. Choose Disqus if you mainly need website comments and want a lower-cost paid entry: its pricing lists free, ad-supported Basic and Plus from $11/month with annual billing ($12 monthly). Discourse also has a free plan, but paid plans start at $100/month. The published Disqus homepage text doesn’t describe its features, so verify fit before switching.
01Side by side
| Discourse | Disqus | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free; paid plans start at $100/month | Free; Plus starts at $11/month annually |
| Free plan | Yes: 2 staff seats, 500k monthly page views | Yes: unlimited page views, mandatory ads |
| Best for | Support, collaboration, feedback, and developer communities | Sites needing basic or ad-free comments |
| Core strength | Organized discussions, chat, moderation, and voting | Commenting plans for sites, including ad-free Plus |
| Learning curve | Not published on the vendor's site | Not published on the vendor's site |
| Integrations and data | Themes, plugins, exports, and self-hosting | Not stated on the vendor's site |
| Team and seat costs | 2 free staff seats; 5 on $100 Pro | 3 Plus moderator seats; other limits not published |
| Support | Review score: 5/10 | Review score: 5/10 |
Discourse Choose Discourse if
- Choose Discourse if you need structured community discussions.
- Choose Discourse if you want export or self-hosting options.
- Choose Discourse if its staff, view, and storage limits fit.
Disqus Choose Disqus if
- Choose Disqus if you mainly need website comments.
- Choose Disqus if free comments with ads are acceptable.
- Choose Disqus if Plus’s site, moderator, and traffic limits fit.
02Pricing compared
Discourse has a free plan, then paid hosting starts at $100 per month for Pro. The free tier lists 2 staff seats, 500,000 monthly page views, 20,000 monthly emails, 10 categories, and 5GB of storage. Pro keeps the 500,000-page-view cap and raises storage to 20GB. Annual prices or discounts are not published. Business is $500 per month; Enterprise pricing is not published.
Disqus Basic is free but includes mandatory ads. Plus costs $12 monthly or $11 per month with annual billing, with traffic tiers from 100,000 to 900,000 monthly page views. Pro starts at $115 monthly or $105 per month annually; higher-traffic annual rates are not published. Business requires a custom quote. Add-on and overage costs are not published.
03Features and depth
Discourse is built for a full community, not just a comment area. Its listed features include topics, categories, tags, and accepted answers; real-time chat and private messages; moderation tools, including AI-assisted features; and voting with stages and status updates for feedback. Themes and plugins allow customization, and the product supports data export and self-hosting. That breadth may suit support, workplace collaboration, product feedback, or developer discussions, but it also means more capabilities to evaluate.
The published Disqus homepage text does not describe its product features. Its pricing page does identify Basic as a plan for sites needing free commenting, and Plus as a plan for ad-free comments. That supports a narrower comparison: Disqus is the lower-cost option when the need is site comments, while Discourse lists community-management features. The available Disqus material does not establish whether it offers comparable chat, voting, moderation, or customization tools. Check its current product documentation before switching if those capabilities matter.
04Ease of use and learning curve
The better fit depends on how much you need to manage. Discourse lists categories, tags, accepted answers, chat, moderation, feedback workflows, themes, and plugins. Those options add scope to configure and maintain, though the published information does not document setup steps or a learning curve. Its review scorecard rates ease of use 6.5 out of 10.
Disqus is positioned in the published pricing information around website comments, and its review summary calls it worth considering for quick comments. The scorecard gives it 7 out of 10 for ease of use. But the vendor's homepage does not explain implementation or feature details, so confirm what setup involves before deciding.
Questions people ask
Which should I choose for a support or product community?
Discourse is the clearer fit based on the published feature list: it includes organized topics, accepted answers, moderation, chat, and feedback voting. Disqus’s published product text does not describe comparable community features, so verify its capabilities before choosing it for a support or product community.
Which is cheaper, Discourse or Disqus?
Disqus has the lower paid entry price in the published pricing: Plus starts at $11 per month with annual billing, or $12 monthly. Discourse has a free plan, but its first paid plan is $100 per month. Compare limits and ads as well as the headline price.
Can I use Discourse without managed hosting?
Yes. The published Discourse information says you can self-host and that its codebase is freely available on GitHub. It also lists managed hosting plans. The information does not provide self-hosting costs, so those costs are not published here.
Does Disqus offer the same features as Discourse?
The published Disqus homepage text does not describe its features. Its pricing identifies plans for website commenting, but does not establish whether it offers Discourse-like chat, voting, accepted answers, or self-hosting. Check Disqus’s current product documentation for those specifics before switching.