How does Answer compare to Discourse? When would you use one over the other?

Discourse is better for creating an open platform for sharing knowledge and discussions, while Apache Answer is more suitable for building a collaborative platform that focuses on problem-solving and knowledge management. The choice should be based on the team's specific needs and usage habits.

User Perspective

1. Discourse:

   • User-friendly interface, easy navigation and use
   • Provides rich social features such as private messaging, mentions, user trust levels, and group discussions
   • Supports various content formats including text, images, videos, polls, and calendars
   • Easy creation and management of topics and categories
   • Rich plugins for extending functionality

2. Apache Answer:

   • Simple and clear interface, focused on presenting problems and answers
   • Supports tagging and marking, helping to organize and categorize problems
   • Encourages user participation through voting and marking solutions, improving credibility and discoverability of answers
   • Open content management permissions, allowing trusted users to update and improve content
   • Invites specific users to answer relevant questions for faster problem resolution

Maintenance Perspective

1. Discourse:

   • Requires more administrator configuration and maintenance work, including setting permissions, topic management, and plugin management
   • Provides rich community management tools such as user trust levels and reporting systems
   • Based on a series of technologies such as Ruby, PostgreSQL, and Redis, with high server resource usage
   • Initially released in 2014, with a high level of maturity

2. Apache Answer:

   • Relatively less management and maintenance work, with most functions and configurations preset
   • Provides flexible team management tools such as member management and content review
   • Based on Go, SQLite/MySQL/PostgreSQL, can be deployed with minimal server resource usage
   • Initially released in 2021, the community is less mature compared to Discourse

I think discourse is a great tool when you have discussions(hence the name) that can open-ended

and answer is great for creating your own Stackexchange where users post questions and usually seek quick answers (hence the name)