I’ve assembled a list of the top open source Q&A platforms that are currently available. The list contains only projects which are in active development and have a working demo site. There are a few similar blog posts out there but they’re quite outdated. Most of the projects listed below are inspired by Stack Overflow which is in fact the most popular community for questions and answers related to programming. Please, bear in mind that the list is not ordered in any way.
Discourse -
Website: Discourse website
Language: Ruby, Rails
Database: PostgreSQL
License: GPL 2
Commercial support: Yes
Demo: https://try.discourse.org
Scoold -
Website: Scoold website
Language: Java, Spring
Database: Any (database agnostic)
License: Apache 2.0
Commercial support: Yes
Demo: https://demo.scoold.com
Askbot -
Website: Askbot website
Language: Python, Django
Database: MySQL, PostgreSQL
License: GPL 3
Commercial support: Yes
Demo: https://askbot.org/en/questions
Vanilla -
Website: Vanilla forums website
Language: PHP
Database: MySQL
License: GPL 2
Commercial support: Yes
Demo: https://open.vanillaforums.com
Question2Answer -
Website: Q2A website
Language: PHP
Database: MySQL
License: GPL 2
Commercial support: Yes
Demo: https://www.question2answer.org/qa/
About the author
Founder & Indie Hacker