Forem is the open-source community platform that powers DEV Community. See its self-hosting options, features, funding history, and top alternatives.
Forem is the open-source community platform originally built to power DEV Community (dev.to). Founded by Ben Halpern, Jess Lee, and Peter Frank, the underlying software began in 2016-2017 as 'The Practical Dev' before becoming DEV, and the company rebranded from 'the DEV Team' to 'the Forem Team' in October 2020 as the software was generalized for any community, not just developers.
Headquartered in New York and backed by an $11.5 million Series A led by Mayfield, Forem now operates DEV (800,000+ registered users, roughly 7 million monthly unique visitors), CodeNewbie, and the standalone open-source Forem platform.
Forem is a blogging-forward social network supporting Markdown articles with Liquid tag embeds (CodePen, GitHub Gists, YouTube), comments, reactions, badges, and multi-subforum support so one deployment can host several distinct branded communities.
Operational tooling includes Gemini-backed AI moderation (comment quality assessment, spam labeling, article enhancement suggestions, personalized digest emails), a Blazer analytics suite, Flipper feature flags for A/B testing, and Sidekiq background job dashboards.
The Forem software itself is completely free and open source, distributed via the forem/forem GitHub repository with an official self-hosting toolkit (forem/selfhost) for deployment on DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, or bare metal.
There is currently no active first-party managed hosting tier; self-hosted Forem instances come with no SLA, no managed upgrade path, and no enterprise support contract from the Forem team, unlike the previously offered Forem Cloud enterprise option.
Yes, the Forem software is free and open source. Organizations self-host it on their own infrastructure (DigitalOcean, AWS, Google Cloud, or bare metal) using the official forem/selfhost toolkit, at no licensing cost.
Forem is the open-source software that was originally built to power DEV Community (dev.to). The company behind DEV, originally Dev Community Inc., rebranded to the Forem Team in October 2020 as it generalized the platform for any community, not just developers.
Forem (originally Dev Community Inc.) was founded by Ben Halpern, Jess Lee, and Peter Frank, and is headquartered in New York, New York. The company raised an $11.5 million Series A led by Mayfield.
Forem previously offered a paid enterprise hosting tier known as Forem Cloud, but there is no current evidence of it being actively offered. Today, self-hosting via the official forem/selfhost toolkit is the primary deployment path, with no SLA or managed support included.
Forem includes Gemini-backed AI tools for comment quality assessment, article enhancement suggestions, spam labeling, and generating personalized email digest summaries for community members.
Forem is a fully open-source, self-hostable platform proven at the scale of DEV Community, while Discourse offers both open-source and commercially hosted options, and Circle and Mighty Networks are fully hosted, commercial community-as-a-service products without a self-hosting option.