Choosing forum software today: Discourse or a Django solution like Misago?

I came across this earlier discussion about the Django Forum software choice:

At the time, the decision was to use Discourse instead of a Django-based solution, mainly for practical reasons like time and maintenance effort.

I’m currently evaluating options for a new forum and considering Misago. So I’d be interested in an updated perspective:

If you were making the decision today, would you still choose Discourse? Or would a Django-based option like Misago be a reasonable choice now?

Thanks in advance for any insights!

One thing to keep in mind here is that the DSF is not running the Discourse instance - we’re using the hosted version. (Unless something was changed that I’m not aware of.)

From what I can see, there is no hosted Misago provider.

So what you’re looking at is an “apples to oranges” comparison. The DSF definitely doesn’t have staff to manage a forum, so I don’t see where Misago would be any kind of viable option. (I’m going to guess that I’m probably still the most active staff member here, and I know that I don’t have any desire to manage it from a systems perspective.)

Hi, I am Misago’s creator.

Honest answer is that you should go with the software you like the most and that meets your needs the best.

Discourse is a business - they have a team of developers constantly working on it.

Misago is an hobby project developed because I run a few forums myself and I am not happy with existing OS forum software + I am Python dev and would like a forum in a tech stack I am personally familiar with.

Its granted that Discourse will be more polished and featured option than Misago. But at the same time, Misago aims to have a more vanilla forum experience to the users - this big switch didn’t happen yet but its coming sometime this year.

If you are a business and dont want to bother with technicalities of your community software, Discourse will be a better option, at least for now.

If you are a hacker, hobbyist who wants to fiddle in Django, and/or preffer a forum software closer to, say, XenForo or Invision Community, but also open source and free, even if it means odd quirks, lack of polish and some missing features, I would go for Misago.

Thanks to both of you — I really appreciate your input. This gives me a much clearer picture.