Waterhole

Waterhole is a Laravel-powered, source-available platform for building branded online communities. Designed for brands, creators, and teams, it brings audience engagement into one self-hosted space under an organization’s own brand and domain. Members can join public or private discussions, suggest and vote on ideas, ask questions, find peer support, and publish long-form content, reviews, or blog posts.

The platform includes configurable channels, answer marking, reactions, taxonomies, user groups, content filters, and prompts to guide contributions. Community managers can moderate users and discussions, choose post layouts, enable OAuth2 single sign-on, and use search, notifications, and customizable analytics dashboards. Waterhole is also an extensible Laravel package, installable via Composer, with tools for developers to customize the interface and add features using Laravel components and services.

Because it is self-hosted, customers retain control of their server, code, and data. Waterhole emphasizes a fast, accessible experience, including support for slow connections and users with JavaScript disabled.