Earlier this month, SezWho announced that they have been acquired by JS-Kit. I have previously written a post praising SezWho for the great work that they’ve been doing. I must admit that since then SezWho has been dropping the ball on development, allowing other competitors like Disqus and Intense Debate to shine. Nevertheless, I am quite sad to see them get devoured and rebranded into JS-Kit because they had such great potential.
What to do now?
Before JS-Kit supplied a clear upgrade path from SezWho, I’ve experimented with Disqus and Intense Debate. They both have comparable features, but here are a few different things that make me prefer each service over the other:
Disqus
Disqus comment system is definitely the faster of the two systems. I’m not sure if the reason is code optimization or just pure bandwidth, but it definitely felt faster than Intense Debate. Another thing I like about Disqus is that I never saw any orphaned comments (i.e. a comment that shows up in my WordPress admin, but doesn’t show up in the Disqus framework).
Intense Debate
Though performance is not as good as Disqus and I occasionally find orphaned comments, I still like Intense Debate for the extra bells and whistles it has.
- Community friendly profile pages
- Many comment thread display options
- Server side Akismet and proprietary Intense Debate spam filter
- Profanity filter
- More widgets
- Support for Intense Debate plugins
What did I choose?
As you can tell, I have chosen Intense Debate as my choice, but I am not completely happy with it yet. I feel that Intense Debate has more potential to grow especially since they are now part of Automattic. I will be satisfied as soon as they work out the performance and synchronization kinks and ship it with the standard WordPress installation.
What should you choose?
That really depends on what you need. If you don’t mind dealing with the occasional orphaned comment and decent performance then go with Intense Debate. If you absolutely have to have those things then go for Disqus.
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