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Discord Alternatives, Ranked
(taggart-tech.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Technology
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I don't really see how someone can position Discourse as the number one Discord alternative. Surely most people looking to ditch Discord want live chat, audio/video calls, and screen sharing... Or am I just in the minority here?
For the record, I think Discourse looks awesome and even thinking about how I might use it for a project, but I do not see it as a Discord alternative.
Lots of communities use discord as a replacement for a forum despite it not being fit for it at all
Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.
Isn’t it though? A forum wouldn’t do all the things discord does, but the argument is that trying to use discord for a forum was a mistake in the first place. So replacing discord with a forum and then a dedicated chatting app makes sense, no?
I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.
I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.
I mean, for at least the first five letters, I can't even tell the difference.
~~I thought Discourse was bought by Roblox, merged into Roblox, and then discontinued outside of Roblox?~~
I'm thinking of something else, I think.
You're thinking of Guilded.
Looks like Roblox forced everyone using Guilded to suddenly have a Roblox account in 2024, and then Guilder officially shut down about 2 months ago (end of 2025).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilded
I love that Discourse is open. I hate that it's just horrendous from a usability perspective. Flarum is much better than that, in my opinion, while being way more flexible. Examples:
https://discuss.grapheneos.org/
https://orionfeedback.org/
I find discourse perfectly usable.
Rocket.chat uses Matrix though, too. It's not only Matrix but it makes use of Matrix federation among other things and they built their own Matrix server implementation in TypeScript last year
Discourse isnt free
And its been described as more of a forum than a chat service
This is misinformation.
You can self host it, for free.