Discourse vs Zoom Pricing (2026)
How do these two stack up on price? Here's what each one costs, what you get, and where the value sits.
Pro
- Unlimited members & chat
- Unlimited public & private categories
- Unlimited tags
- Custom groups
- Email support
- Custom & community themes
- Custom domain
- API and Webhook access
- 15+ plugins
- 5 staff seats
Business
- Advanced reporting & analytics
- Automation
- Events
- Gamification
- SSO (Open ID & OAuth2)
- 20+ additional plugins
- 15 staff seats
- Priority support
- Migration services
Enterprise
- Expert design & development services
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Migration services
- GDPR & CCPA compliant hosting
- 50+ plugins
- Unlimited staff seats
Basic
- 40 minutes per meeting
- 100 participants per meeting
- Meeting summaries (for 3 hosted meetings per month)
- AI queries (20 per month)
- AI note-taking (3 uses per month)
- Instant messaging
- VoIP calling
- 1 personal booking page
- 3 editable whiteboards
- 5 two-minute clips
- Limited AI capabilities
- Connect Gmail/Outlook in Zoom
- Sync Google/Microsoft calendars
- Surface, manage, and complete tasks
- One place for your Zoom files
Pro
Popular- 30 hours per meeting
- 100 participants per meeting
- Unlimited AI note-taking
- Basic AI queries
- Agentic search
- Workflows in Zoom
- Group videos in channels (25 unique viewers)
- Zoom recordings, Clips, and uploads
- Unlimited AI document creation
- Unlimited clips
- Custom avatars (3 mins per month)
- Zoom Mail
- Zoom Calendar
- 10 GB per user
- Live Chat Support
Business
- 300 participants per meeting
- Unlimited booking pages
- Unlimited whiteboards
- SSO, managed domains
- Multi-region storage and media control
- Device management
- Information barriers and other policies
- Archival and data loss prevention APIs
Enterprise
- 1000 participants per meeting
- Full-featured PBX
- 500 attendees
- Rooms
- Workspace Reservation
- Visitor Management
- Translated captions
- Customer managed key
- Hybrid cloud
- Contact management network
Discourse vs Zoom FAQ
- Which one is cheaper?
- Zoom is the cheaper option, starting at $14/mo vs $100/mo for Discourse.
- Can I use either one for free?
- Both offer free plans, so you can try each without paying. Start with whichever fits your workflow better and upgrade when you hit the limits.
- How do they charge?
- Different approach here. Discourse uses flat-rate pricing, while Zoom goes with per-seat. That changes the math depending on your team size and usage.
- Which one is a better deal?
- Depends on what you need. Discourse: At $100 and $500 flat, Discourse sits mid-to-premium compared to lighter forum tools, but it undercuts enterprise community platforms that charge based on MAUs or seats. They're clearly going after teams that want forum ownership without the per-user pricing anxiety that plagues Slack-alikes. Zoom: Zoom sits in the mid-market sweet spot — not the cheapest (Google Meet is bundled free with Workspace, Teams with M365) but far from premium. At $14-18/seat they're competing on brand trust and reliability against Microsoft and Google, who are essentially giving away comparable functionality to existing customers.
Still deciding? See the best Discourse alternatives or the best Zoom alternatives, ranked with verified pricing.
Keep tabs on both.
We'll monitor pricing changes for Discourse and Zoom and let you know when something moves.