Is Discourse or Substack more popular?

Substack is used by more websites in our catalog: 269 use Discourse and 463 use Substack.

Does Discourse or Substack have higher-authority sites?

Discourse sites have the higher median Ahrefs Domain Rating (Discourse: 48, Substack: 32).

Is Discourse or Substack growing faster?

Between 2026-06 and 2026-07, Discourse went from 0.04% to 0.03% of all tracked sites, while Substack went from 0.06% to 0.05%. Discourse is gaining ground faster in our index.

Can a site use both Discourse and Substack?

No. A site runs a single CMS / website platform, so Discourse and Substack are mutually exclusive.

Where does this Discourse vs Substack data come from?

Adoption is counted from Site Stats Database's own crawl; Domain Rating comes from Ahrefs and traffic from DataForSEO. Figures reflect the sites we track and refresh at least monthly.

Discourse vs Substack — Site Stats Database

Discourse vs Substack

A side-by-side comparison of two content management systems, based on the 515,058 CMS sites tracked by Site Stats Database.

Last updated July 1, 2026

Metric	Discourse	Substack
Websites	269	463
Market share	0.05%	0.09%
Share of top 10K sites	0.04%	0.02%
Share of top 100K sites

Rank	#69	#45

Median DR	48	32

Average DR	50	34

Median keywords	3,595	957

Median referring domains	1,086	435

Median domain age	13 yrs	8 yrs

Average domain age	15 yrs	10 yrs

Average monthly traffic	79,622	258,619

Combined monthly traffic	21,418,355	119,740,796

community.spiceworks.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)87
Total Keywords465,342
Referring Domains14,030
Domain Age28 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)2,262,143
Traffic Trend
TechnologyDiscourse
boards.straightdope.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)77
Total Keywords424,843
Referring Domains10,457
Domain Age30 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)1,665,970
Traffic Trend
Technology
talk.collegeconfidential.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)63
Total Keywords320,981
Referring Domains5,129
Domain Age25 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)1,188,111
Traffic Trend
Technology
devforum.roblox.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)90
Total Keywords53,918
Referring Domains13,212
Domain Age22 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)1,055,850
Traffic Trend
Technology
hungryonion.org
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)37
Total Keywords117,123
Referring Domains3,109
Domain Age10 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)927,939
Traffic Trend
Technology
community.cartalk.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)74
Total Keywords179,057
Referring Domains2,154
Domain Age31 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)690,215
Traffic Trend
Technology
growingfruit.org
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)35
Total Keywords81,071
Referring Domains1,453
Domain Age11 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)631,018
Traffic Trend
Technology
t-nation.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)72
Total Keywords165,670
Referring Domains12,051
Domain Age23 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)519,271
Traffic Trend
Technology
eyefi.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)52
Total Keywords21,811
Referring Domains2,398
Domain Age27 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)468,464
Traffic Trend
TechnologyDiscourse
elitefourum.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)51
Total Keywords42,741
Referring Domains1,332
Domain Age4 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)456,968
Traffic Trend
Technology

Website	Language	DR (Ahrefs)	Total Keywords	Referring Domains	Domain Age	Traffic (Jun 2026)	Traffic Trend	Technology
community.spiceworks.com	English	87	465,342	14,030	28 yrs	2,262,143		Discourse

cbsnews.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)92
Total Keywords5,029,881
Referring Domains486,461
Domain Age31 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)59,376,408
Traffic Trend
TechnologySubstack
substack.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)94
Total Keywords5,643,513
Referring Domains561,764
Domain Age16 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)51,156,090
Traffic Trend
Technology
thefp.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)76
Total Keywords39,018
Referring Domains17,521
Domain Age24 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)738,323
Traffic Trend
TechnologySubstack
azdesertswarm.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)51
Total Keywords11,126
Referring Domains6,455
Domain Age17 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)664,536
Traffic Trend
Technology
thebulwark.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)75
Total Keywords23,103
Referring Domains13,098
Domain Age15 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)259,028
Traffic Trend
Technology
brokenpalate.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)40
Total Keywords3,164
Referring Domains295
Domain Age5 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)214,374
Traffic Trend
Technology
r-bloggers.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)75
Total Keywords27,627
Referring Domains8,306
Domain Age16 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)212,820
Traffic Trend
Technology
donaldrobertson.name
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)45
Total Keywords1,679
Referring Domains874
Domain Age12 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)202,345
Traffic Trend
Technology
noahpinion.blog
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)73
Total Keywords10,103
Referring Domains5,453
Domain Age3 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)174,978
Traffic Trend
Technology
jonathanlack.com
LanguageEnglish
DR (Ahrefs)11
Total Keywords6,130
Referring Domains697
Domain Age14 yrs
Traffic (Jun 2026)174,145
Traffic Trend
Technology