Discourse in 2027: Building Together

In 2013, Jeff Atwood, Robin Ward, and Sam Saffron launched Discourse with one mission: to give people a place to communicate together. For thirteen years, we've built for that mission.

Every year, our team gathers in one place to look back at how far we've come and decide where to go next. This year, we met in Seville and spent the week on the next step in our mission: giving people a place to build together.

Where we came from

In Prague in 2025, we set out to make Discourse the definitive choice for tech companies building communities. Our goal was to evolve from a simple discussion platform with plugins into a complete, highly customizable community platform.

To get there, we moved fast. We launched a free plan so anyone can get started for free. We rebuilt categories so you can instantly deploy purpose-built spaces for feature requests, ideas, and support. We moved popular plugins into the core platform and dramatically simplified self-hosting. We added live voice and video for members, a full comment system for publishers, automated Workflows to save admins from repetitive tasks, and an MCP server so everyone can interact with their community directly through their favorite AI tools.

Today, some of the world's leading companies - including OpenAI, Cursor, and HubSpot - rely on Discourse to bring their customers, developers, and teams together.

But as we've watched these tech leaders succeed, we noticed something crucial: they do far more than just "run a community." They’re using Discourse to actively collaborate. Their members share what they've built, trade workflows, test new releases, and directly shape what the company builds next.

Looking ahead, we're expanding our mission: we want to equip every organization, in every industry, with the tools to move beyond discussing - and start building together.

Building together

When someone needs a quick fact today, they ask a chatbot and move on. But for the work a chatbot can't do, they still turn to each other: they brainstorm, debate, poke holes in each other's plans, bring newcomers up to speed, and share the joy of making something that works. They want feedback from someone who's been there, credit from peers they respect, and the trust that builds when the same group shows up in the same place week after week. They look for those things wherever they work with others, and they'll want them even more as they spend more of their day working with AI tools.

At the same time, teams now build with AI agents as well as with each other. Developers tag an agent on a ticket and review the code it writes. Product managers ask an agent to draft a spec, then rewrite the parts it got wrong. Teams already treat agents as working partners, and they'll want to bring those partners into the places where they collaborate.

Our MCP server lets them do that today. Anyone on Discourse can connect the AI tools they already use and ask an agent to pull context from years of past discussions, summarize a long debate before they jump in, draft a feature request from a thread, or translate a conversation so colleagues and customers who speak different languages can work together. Soon we expect to see someone pitch a wild idea, ask an agent to build a working prototype, and post it back to the thread. Others will test it, pick it apart, ask their own agents to try a different approach, and post those too. By the end of the week, a group has built something none of them could have built alone.

Teams on Discourse have always kept a record: every question, every argument, every decision, and the reasons behind it. Teams get far more out of an agent when they can point it at years of shared history instead of a blank prompt, and everyone in the thread can see what an agent contributed alongside everyone else's posts. The team decides what gets built, and agents help them get there faster.

We're optimists at Discourse, and we think we're all heading into a golden age of collaboration. Now that anyone can ask an agent to write code, draft a spec, or sort through a thousand replies, teams can spend more of their time on the work only humans can do together: deciding what's worth building, arguing it through, and making it better. More people will build more things than ever before, and they'll need a place to find each other and build those things together. We want Discourse to be that place for every organization, in every industry: where humans build together, with agents working right beside them.

What we believe

Two more beliefs shape how we'll pursue our mission.

You should own the place you build. Your Discourse holds your people's ideas, your customer relationships, and years of shared work. You should control all of it. We promised this year that Discourse will stay open source, and we'll keep that promise. You can run the code on our hosting or your own servers, meet your own data sovereignty rules, and take your conversations and your data wherever you choose.

Discourse should be built to last. We plan to stay about the size we are now. By staying small and independent, we keep our costs down and our pricing competitive. Large organizations can count on us to outlast market swings, and small teams can choose a platform built by a company much like theirs.

Where we're going

We see other products moving into each other's territory. Community platforms have added CRM features, chat apps now let people work on code, and support desks and CRMs have bolted on community features. We'll meet that by building Discourse as a set of blocks you can arrange around your own needs, with people working together at the center.

In 2027, we'll build out from that foundation. We'll keep improving Discourse's core, where people meet, talk openly, and work through ideas together. We'll connect Discourse more deeply with the tools you use to support customers, so everyone who works with a customer sees the same picture of them. We'll make Discourse a better place for teams to work together internally, especially new teams that want to own their tools and their data. We'll also give your developers sandboxes and test sites that stay in sync with production, so they and their agents can safely build customizations.

Throughout, we'll make it easier to bring agents into your workflow, and we'll use AI to help people find each other: find conversations worth joining, talk across languages, and spend less time on admin chores.

We left Seville proud of what we built this year and clear about what we want to build next. We'll share our work in progress on Meta as we go.

We'd love to hear what you're building with Discourse - and we thank you for building with us!