head to head · open source
Discourse vs paopao-ce
Discourse has 47,852 GitHub stars, 9,017 forks, 221 open issues and last shipped yesterday. paopao-ce has 4,502 stars, 656 forks, 16 open issues and last shipped 2 months ago. Discourse leads on adoption by 963% (47,852 vs 4,502 stars). Discourse is written in Ruby under GPL-2.0; paopao-ce is written in Go under MIT. Discourse has attracted 19% as many forks as stars, paopao-ce 15%. Discourse was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (forum), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| Discourse | paopao-ce | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 48K | ★ 4.5K |
| License | GPL-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | Go |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | 2026-08-03 |
| Forks | ⑂ 9.0K | ⑂ 656 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Discourse if
- You weight community size — 48K stars and counting
- You want the GPL-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick paopao-ce if
- You want the paopao-ce feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You evaluated both and paopao-ce fits your workflow better
About Discourse
Discourse is a free, open source community discussion platform, built in Ruby on Rails and licensed under GPL 2.0, for organisations and communities that want complete control over how and where their forum is run rather than renting a hosted service.
read the full Discourse overview →
About paopao-ce
PaoPao is an open source micro community platform that ships a complete social product in a single repository. The backend is written in Go and built on Gin, Cobra, GORM and Mir, while the web client uses Vue 3, Vite and Naive UI. An optional Tauri desktop client is packaged alongside the web application, so the same codebase covers server, browser and desktop delivery. The project is licensed under MIT and lives in the Go ecosystem, with topic tags covering bbs, forum, gin, go, naive, twitter, vue3 and zinc.
read the full paopao-ce overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Discourse or paopao-ce more popular?
Discourse has 47,852 GitHub stars and paopao-ce has 4,502. Discourse has the larger community by that measure.
Are Discourse and paopao-ce free?
Both are open source. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and paopao-ce under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Discourse and paopao-ce?
Discourse is written in Ruby and paopao-ce in Go. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, Discourse or paopao-ce?
Choose Discourse if you want the larger community (47,852 stars) or its GPL-2.0 licence terms. Choose paopao-ce if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.