Discourse vs. Website Toolbox

Discourse is perfect for communities and basically the best forum software out there. Wherever a forum would make sense, Discourse is probably the best solution. Having said that, small corporations with little external outreach have limited advantages with Discourse, since it's designed to facilitate discussions which happen at a slower pace while startups and small corporations will probably want to move faster with software like Slack.

Incentivized

Website Toolbox is a huge improvement over self-hosted forums. It attempts to host forums that failed over the effort required to keep these free of spam.

• It is a super-easy way for members to have online discussions
• Very easy to administer and moderate discussions
• The pricing is fair and the support is top-notch

Incentivized

• Fights spam.
• Prevent fake accounts.
• Keep forums clean by requiring post approval.

• Unsure of how to use tags, since they are all lowercase and it feels a bit messy for a user-centric experience.
• Private Messages can be seen by Administrators, something which might not be clear to everybody.
• Mailing List Mode is very powerful but it's a bit tiresome to set-up consistently compared to the experience of the Graphical User Interface.

Incentivized

• Customization of JavaScript/CSS.
• Billing notifications.

Support is rarely needed. When needed, they are friendly and fast to understand and address the problem.

Vanilla's mobile functionality was downright awful and it felt like it was stuck in the 2000s. While they have similar features, Discourse blows them away in almost every department. We don't regret switching at all.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to stand up multiple community discussion forums for various project
• It caused some difficulty when navigating our grant application process
• It allowed us to track public interest in different discussions

Incentivized

• It has improved our self-service customer support.