Discourse vs Salesforce Community vs Slack

Hey! I’m looking into Slack, Discourse, and Salesforce Community. I know you may all be a bit biased (I’m asking this in a Discourse forum after all), but wondering why you chose Discourse vs Salesforce Community or Slack?

Does Discourse have a chat feature? Or is it more of a forum? I’m looking for something that does both, but starting to think we may need Slack + Discourse.

Appreciate the help!

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Discourse is a discussion platform, not chat. Slack is great for ephemera, Discourse is where you would store discussion with any long-term value.

Chat integration is an option if you want to use a chat platform plus Discourse.

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Thanks! I think I’ll probably just need to create a category for those who just want to have a chat (maybe call it Small Talk or something).

We have super engaged users who want to talk to one another (someone even set up a Facebook group, which we don’t moderate). But I want a space for them to share their projects.

What about Discourse vs Salesforce Community?

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I have another thing to ask. Is it fairly difficult to integrate SF with Discourse? I worry aboutt us having yet another database to manage.

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At the moment integration is limited to a couple howto guides (or a custom built plugin):

That aside, we are working on an official plugin to improve integration… it’s not quite ready; we’re still working out some of the specifics.

What would an ideal Discourse + Salesforce integration be able to accomplish in your case?

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Salesforce Community is really, really bad. It’s “Groups” feature is a bad clone of FB and it’s community Q&A offering isn’t much better. I’ve used some stinkers of community software in my time and it’s by far the worst. Hell I’d even use FB groups in preference.

Discourse on the other hand is well designed, by people who really care about getting online communities right. It works brilliantly on mobile devices and bigger screens. It’s admin backend is a delight to use and has pretty much everything you could ask for in a logical, well laid out fashion. I use it happily with my hobbiest hat on and I hope at some point to use it in my professional life as well.

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