Talkyard compared with ...

Here's how Talkyard compares with other discussion software.

StackOverflow for Teams

Unlike StackOverflow, Talkyard works not only for Questions & Answers, but also for gathering ideas and feedback. And for open-ended discussions, like at HackerNews and Reddit — maybe you and your co-workers want to have open-ended discussions about news articles or meeting notes.

In Talkyard, you can create user groups for your different teams, and give each team their own category, and have them get notified only about things that concern them (new posts in their category). There's an access permission system, in case some teams need to talk in private.

StackOverflow for Teams is a less risky choice than Talkyard, since it's backed by a 300+ people company. They integrate with Slack and there's enterprise login, e.g. ActiveDirectory and SAML.

StackOverflow is for your intranet and co-workers. But Talkyard works also for open communities, e.g. your customers, or your users and contributors, or a non-profits loosely connected volunteers.

StackOverflow is expensive for schools, since each student costs money. Whilst Talkyard is free (open source), and has affordable hosting: adding more students costs nothing (because of Talkyard's goals about how it wans to affect society).

Discourse

in Talkard's Question-Answers topics, you find the discussion about each answer, directly below the answer. The good answers surface to the top, so when people start reading, they directly find them.

At the same time, Discourse's flat layout is often preferable — namely for getting things done and solving problems together, step by step. Then, the most recent replies and status updates, matters more, than the "best" replies in the whole topic. (Talkard is going to support flat layout, like Discourse, some time later — already does, a little bit, via "progress notes".)

Talkyard should be better for discussing news. Because people bring up different "sub topics" related to the news. Then, grouping these sub topics into sub threads, makes the discussion simple to read: each sub topic stays together in one piece. — Talkyard helps you find the interesting "sub discussions"; they surface to the top of the page.

Talkyard has embedded blog comments that works like Disqus and shows the more interesting comments first. Whilst Discourse shows a flat list of the earliest comments. Talkyard has Slack like chat channels with people's online statuses.

Discourse can be used as a mailing list, there're Trello board features, polls, spoilers, a theme builder with color pickers, and many other features and plugins.

Discourse is a less risky choice; it's a relatively large company with many resources and people.

Slack

Slack is a better chat than Talkyard. However, in Slack, questions and answers scroll up and away, and your new team members or students won't easily find them. They'll repeat the same questions, resulting in them losing time (need to wait for an answer), and increasing the support load on your co-workers and support staff. — Talkyard instead help people directly find the answers, no need to repeat the same questions.

Talkyard has groups, categories, a permission system, and notifications that can be quickly configured for everyone in a group at once.

Slack has a mobile app with notifications. Talkyard doesn't. Only a mobiile friendly web app, with email notifications, as of now. Later there'll be a PWA mobile app with real mobile app notifications.

It'd be good if there was an integration between Talkyard and Slack (and other chats, like Zulip, Mattermost, etc). Slack, for real time collaboration, and Talkyard for Questions & Answers and structured discussions that are important to remember long term.

Facebook Groups

Facebook is good because "everyone" is on Facebook so they don't need to sign up for anything new.

Facebook lures people away from you — it tries to make them leave you and play Facebook games instead, or look at Facebook ads and go to a store and by things. To me, Facebook is the perfect tool for making me forget what I was about to do, and start looking at cute pet videos instead.

Talkyard instead is at your website and directs traffic to you (when your forum appear in search engine results). And tries to give you the information you need, so you can continue working.

In Facebook, old posts disappear: they scroll down and away in the news feed. Talkyard on the other hand, works like a knowledge base, and automatically finds and suggests the things you are looking for.

At Facebook, people typically won't see your posts and notifications. Facebook shows people's vacation pics and kittens instead, and "drowns" your notifications in status updates about someone changing his/her profile photo or someone somewhere having a birthday. — Talkyard lets you configure notifications the way you want.

Disqus

Disqus shows ads and tracks people and is closed source. Talkyard doesn't have ads or tracking, and is open source. Disqus has many many features that Talkyard lacks, whilst Talkyard has a few features that Disqus lacks, e.g. directly find the most recent comments so you won't need to scan the whole discussion from top to bottom.

Talkyard is lightweight in comparison to Disqus. Disqus loads many times more javascript and CSS than Talkyard.

With Talkyard, you can add your own Javascript plugins e.g. MathJax, or Prism.js for syntax highlighting (but not with Disqus, right?). Talkyard can be used as a discussion forum; Disqus is for blog comments only.

Quora

Quora is a single Question-Answes website, one place for everyone and everything. Talkyard, instead, is decentralized: each organization has its own Talkyard forum at their own website, which they own and decide how it works and how to use. Quora shows ads and is closed source; Talkyard has no ads, and is open source.