Understand that discourse has lots of plugins, while nodebb has ok amount.
as someone would like to start a bbs now. would like to learn discourse dev advices. Thank you.
(Yes. This question seem too general maybe, feel free to share anything.)
AI-generated summary
A developer, jsmith1, seeks advice on choosing between Discourse and NodeBB for building a new forum, noting Discourse’s richer plugin ecosystem and asking for developer perspectives. NateDhaliwal suggests basic Ruby knowledge helps with Discourse, and while setup can be tedious, it runs smoothly afterward. merefield praises Discourse’s extensibility, customization, and supportive community, sharing screenshots and expressing personal enthusiasm for developing on it, while acknowledging NodeBB’s strengths. jsmith1 acknowledges both platforms are open source and self-hostable, and while JavaScript (NodeBB) may offer better raw performance than Ruby (Discourse), real-world speed differences are negligible. He values Discourse’s abundant plugins and themes for faster setup. merefield counters that Ruby, though not the fastest, is enjoyable to code in and efficient enough—even running well on 1GB RAM—and suggests the best way to choose is to build a similar plugin on both platforms to compare developer experience firsthand. No definitive winner is declared; preference and hands-on testing are encouraged.
You probably won’t need to do too much. Some basic Ruby knowledge (which I lack) will probably help to gain an understanding of how Discourse works. I suppose the rest is just lots of tedious configuration when setting up, but once you get it working, things run more smoothly from there.
NodeBB better be good! 
(caveat: lazy take, not done a feature for feature comparison … but please go right ahead if it interests you and share your thoughts here …)
Developer take: I love programming on the Discourse platform 
CDCK place a huge emphasis on extensibility and customisation capability (taking into account people with different skill levels) and the community is fantastic 
Credit to both platforms for being open source 
As you points out both are open source, we can host it where fits our budget with expected performance.
In my knowledge, node/javaScript should performance better than ruby (in general, given that both run the same algorithm on the same hardware)
At the same time, all the NodeBB sites and all the Discourse sites that I visit provide good speed. (although NodeBB sites seems a bit faster without any insights of their servers).
On the other hand, Discourse sites give me the impression of a lot of plugins/themes available, which should set me up for a good start.
I asked Devs about the plugins situation to learn more ecosystem of Discourse, and how it is “better” than NodeBB to help me finalize my choice.
Ruby is a fantastic programming language, and quite similar to Javascript in some ways.
It is not the fastest language, but a pleasure to programme in (as is Javascript imho), and more than fast and frugal enough - note how you can run Discourse on 1GB.
I’m not sure there is a clear answer here.
Why don’t you write a similar plugin for both platforms to help you determine which one you prefer?