# Online Community Platforms

> A landscape look at the online community software market through six very different players - AnswerHub, ToucanTech, Invision Community, Salesforce, Khoros and Discourse. They range from developer Q&A engines to alumni CRMs to open-source forums to enterprise customer-community suites, but they all sell the same promise: a place your audience talks to each other, and to you. The real dividing line is ownership - who holds the data, the graph and the pricing power when the forum you built becomes the forum you depend on.

## Achievements

- Discourse is the most widely deployed open-source community platform, self-hostable and fully customizable, with data ownership as its core pitch.
- Khoros consolidated Lithium and Spredfast into one of the largest enterprise community and social-engagement vendors.
- Salesforce Experience Cloud ties communities directly to CRM data, letting enterprises stand up branded portals connected to their customer records.
- Invision Community sustained a self-hosted forum business for two decades across the rise and fall of the classic message board.
- ToucanTech serves over 1,000 schools, universities and nonprofits with an all-in-one alumni, CRM and fundraising platform.
- AnswerHub built a durable niche in developer Q&A and knowledge sharing for engineering-led companies.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — The market has hardened into two camps: own-your-data open source led by Discourse, and enterprise seat-and-module suites led by Khoros and Salesforce, with niche players like ToucanTech and AnswerHub owning verticals.
- **2024-01** — Head-to-head comparisons increasingly frame the choice around data ownership and lock-in rather than raw features, with Discourse leaning on open source and Khoros/Salesforce on enterprise integration.

## Links

- Website: https://www.discourse.org/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/discourse-org/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/discourse
- GitHub: https://github.com/discourse/discourse

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Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-08-09