This is a long post, so I’ll jump directly to the main topic. I’ve run a face to face comparison for 4 existing commenting systems: Disqus, IntenseDebate, JS-Kit and SezWho. The rest of the post presents the criteria I’ve used, the winners and references to specific features.
Please feel free to comment and correct me if I got anything wrong!
Criteria
- User related Features
- Comment threading
- Anonymous posts
- Bookmarkability
- Comment ranking and additional features (sort, most, filter, etc.)
- Rich format comments
- Owner related features:
- Spam filtering
- Comment moderation
- Search Engine Friendliness
- HTML/CSS customization
- Data access
- Widget (Javascript API)
- Programming API
- Data export
Evaluated products
Winners
After completing the evaluation of the mentioned criteria, I have decided that there should be 2 categories: Blogs and Custom sites. Even if there are no immediate visible differences, the existence of a programming API offers a lot more extensibility and freedom to site owners, while this feature might not be as important as features like additional comment ranking features (sorting, filtering, recommendations, etc.) for blog owners.
Drum roll… The winners are:
Blog
- Winner: IntenseDebate
- Runner-up: Disqus
Site
- Winner: Disqus
- Runner-up: IntenseDebate
User Features
| Disqus | IntenseDebate | JS-Kit | SezWho | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Comment Threading: | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Anonymous Comments: | Y | Y | Y | Y [7] |
| Bookmarkability | N | Y | N | Y |
| Comment ranking | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Comment ranking functionality | – [12] | Y | Y | Y |
| Rich format comments | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Owner Features
| Disqus | IntenseDebate | JS-Kit | SezWho | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spam filtering: | Custom + Akismet [1] | Custom [2] | Akismet | Akismet [3] |
| Comment Moderation: | Y (web + email) |
Y (web + email) |
Y (web + email) |
Y [4] |
| Search Engine Friendliness | Y [8] | N [9] | Y [10] | N [11] |
| HTML/CSS Customization | Y | Y | Y | Y |
Data access
| Disqus | IntenseDebate | JS-Kit | SezWho | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Widget (JS API): | Y | Y | Y | Y |
| Programming API: | Y | N [5] | N | N [6] |
| Data export | API | None | None | None |
Other Criteria
| Disqus | IntenseDebate | JS-Kit | SezWho | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Costs | Free | Free | Free for 25k pageviews + Commercial |
Free [13] |
| Documentation Support |
API docs Low Traffic Forum |
GetSatisfaction | Q&A Forum [14] | FAQ Page [15] |
Comment ranking functionality
Basically, once comments can be rated themselves, there is a lot of new functionality that can be offered by these services. I am thinking of: filtering the comment thread, sorting, most commented content, etc.
[12] I couldn’t find anything about Disqus support for additional functionality.
Spam Filtering
- [1] According to the following links, Disqus is employing a combination of custom filtering and Akismet integration
- [2] I couldn’t find any place in the IntenseDebate documentation detailing what solution is used, so I’ve concluded that some custom filtering is employed. Considering that IntenseDebate is now part of the WordPress universe, it might be possible to also integrate with Akismet.
- JS-Kit documentation is clear about this point: LINK
- [3] While some sources are mentioning the integration with Akismet for spam filtering, I couldn’t find this info in the SezWho documentation
Comment Moderation
All 3 Disqus, IntenseDebate and JS-Kit support advanced moderation features. But my advice would be to effectively test them if comment moderation is important for your site or blog.
[4] Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any info about SezWho’s support for comment moderation.
Search Engine Friendliness
This is probably the most debatable criterion used for evaluating the 4 services and unfortunately to cover it I will need a whole new post (which will come later on).
- [8] Disqus is offering a hosted page for each comment thread, so search engines can index the comments.
- [9] I’ve read about improvements implemented by IntenseDebate, but unfortunately these are not useful for the sites that do not use the IntenseDebate custom plugin
- [10] JS-Kit employs the same solution as Disqus.
- [11] No information available.
Disqus and JS-Kit approach to this problem is quite good (even if a bit complex) as with the help of some subdomain mapping you can instruct the search engines to see the comment thread content as site’s content.
Programming API
- [5] I am still investigating the possibility to access IntenseDebate data through a programming API (see thread)
- [6] Even if there are a couple of sources mentioning a SezWho API (see Mashable and CenterNetworks I couldn’t find any reference to it in SezWho’s documentation
Other notes
- [13] SezWho:
The basic SezWho rating, reputation and profile services are provided for free on the currently supported platforms. SezWho will be offering upgrades to premium products and services in the future, but basic SezWho integration for standard social media platforms will always be available as a free service.
- [14] JS-Kit Q&A Forum is unfortunately pretty unusable as there is no way to perform any searches. It has over 450 pages of comments, so even if I am pretty sure there is a lot of information in there, it is a pity that you cannot get to it. Search Engine Friendliness is a major and extremely important feature that you should consider while integrating a 3rd party commenting system.
- [15] SezWho FAQ Page contains minimal information and unfortunately I couldn’t find other sources.
More information
Here is a set of other features compared on RWW:
Disclaimer
SezWho documentation is pretty scarce, so I haven’t been able to find detailed information on the evaluated set of features.
mindstorms 
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Hey Alex,
Great post.
Jitendra from SezWho here.
You have mentioned Disqus, ID, JS-Kit which are all good products but SezWho is very different from all of them.
SezWho does not replace your existing comment system with another system which typically move your comments from your blog to a centralized place. Instead SezWho adds social features (profiles, ratings and reputations) to your blog without incurring any SEO issues typically associated with moving content like outside links, iframes embedding, losing page freshness benefits etc.
Since SezWho works with your native commenting system, we have no need for providing comment moderation, spam filtering etc. and instead focus on the best ratings, reputation and profile services for all forms of social conversations.
Thanks, Jitendra
About IntenseDebate:
You say that it uses only custom spam filter, probably you missed that option:
http://ub0.cc/59/C
You also say Data export: None
You missed that then: http://ub0.cc/86/06
Thanks Saxtus. Indeed, I might have missed these, but can you please be more specific where are those options available? Are those options in the IntenseDebate plugin or are they available on the IntenseDebate account?
They are at IDC account site.
On your dashboard http://intensedebate.com/userDash , click your blog name, it will take you to that blog’s dashboard.
Then for the spam filter go to Options (look at the end of the left column) and for the export function go to blog tools (you’re interested in XML export).
Thanks a lot Saxtus. I’ll definitely update the post to correct these parts.
I switched to JS-Kit after trying both Disqus and Intensedebate on my blog. The single and the most important reason is that JS-Kit synchronizes the comments with the blogger comments. This means if I decide to uninstall JS-Kit for some reason, the comments will remain intact in the blogger.
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‘Sez Who’ links now go to the JS-Kit site. Indeed, Jitendra’s name links to the JS-Kit site, so I checked, and I see that on March 6th, JS-Kit acquired Sez Who.
Article about the takeover is here on the JS-Kit blog
The site on which I am thinking of adding one of the available commenting systems. The question is still, which one in this fast-changing world.
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In this fast-changing world some things remain. One of them is staying away from uncertainty.
I am sticking with WordPress’s own threaded comments. I have a plug-in fso commenters can be notified of other comments. I got rid of comment-luv because I didn’t feel comfortable with the way it was performing (apologies to Andy Bailey) and life is good. It’s still a question of finding and making backlinks in this webweb world. Check out how it looks (classic and restrained) at distinctive ecards and an interesting blog at Quilcards –> Quillcards ecards
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