Curious why NodeBB instead of Discourse?

[marcusquinn]

Given you guys have thousands of posts experience with NodeBB, and to my eyes it seems to get the job done, so very happy with the community.

I'm just wondering if your experience or anyone else can help guide me on why NodeBB instead of Discourse?

Of course Discourse is popular, mature and largely familiar across the net.

I just wondered, since putting time into setting any App us is a risk because later migration is usually a headache if every it gets done.

Be nice to get your hindsight and see you're still happy with the choice and any pros & cons between the two?

Of course I should search the wider web these things - but the experience and community here is really helping with time-saving, so maybe the same anecdotal evidence will help others too.

[girish]

The main reason is that we packaged NodeBB first and Discourse was only a recent addition. NodeBB is easier to maintain and package (for us) because Cloudron is also written in Node. Discourse is very nice but is a behemoth to package (it's a ruby app). Discourse is also very much into this docker style packaging as the "standard" mechanism and not supporting any other method.

As for stability and maturity, NodeBB works very well for us and I don't think we have had any issue so far. We don't install many plugins though (only the answered plugin and the spam plugin are the critical ones) . Also, before we started this forum, we had a talk with the NodeBB founder (Julian/Andrew) and they were nice and friendly. That also played a big role

[marcusquinn]

@girish Nice, much appreciated. I had quick skim over the net, added to experience here, tells me NodeBB is still the right decision. Thanks for sharing - I'm in!

[marcusquinn]

@girish There wouldn't happen to be a NodeBB plugin/Theme with a Dark Mode?

[girish]

@marcusquinn You can select a skin from your profile (like 'darkly')

[marcusquinn]

@girish ****ing amazing! Light mode made me blind to it!

Could you make an already happy man any happier!

[taowang]

I am choosing a forum for my users recently.
Just wondering if Nodebb is still the best option in 2024?
Discourse has 43k github stars as of date whereas Nodebb has 14k stars.
Which platform has better builtin search functionality?
I feel like a robust search feature is crucial when there is too manny posts and discussions.
Does any of them support Algolia search?

[girish]

Discourse is more popular than NodeBB for sure. I think it's best to just try out various public forums and decide for yourself. NodeBB based forums are probably harder to find than Discourse ones (atleast for tech forums). The Qt Forum is nodebb though (https://forum.qt.io/)

[LoudLemur]

@taowang There is also Flarum

https://flarum.org/

[marcusquinn]

I much prefer NodeBB, just feels faster and lighter.

That being said, I couldn't work out how to make a private forum with it, which I can see some use for, but Discourse seems to have more documented in that area.

So it might be that your decision will be based more on specific features you want.

But if it's UI/UX, then I'd say go NodeBB, and be very thankful how damn easy Cloudron makes it to have all these options!