Revisiting Disqus vs. IntenseDebate - I choose neither

A while ago I wrote a post comparing two different systems for managing blog comments. Disqus and IntenseDebate are the two big players in this field, which is why my earlier post only considered those two as options. My conclusion was that IntenseDebate was better, but only slightly.

Well, I recently changed my mind. Now I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't use Disqus or IntenseDebate. In my opinion, you're generally better off using the native commenting system such as the built-in Wordpress comment system (or a homemade system in my case). Let's take a look at the pros and cons.
 

What's better about Disqus/IntenseDebate?

Despite my newfound opposition to both of these products, they do offer some great advantages which I want to mention. First, both of them offer tons of features that you won't find in native commenting. They have all kinds of bells and whistles such as reputation points, Twitter reactions, and much more.

Also, both systems are widely used (Disqus especially) so by using them on your blog, you're creating a more consistent experience for your readers. If someone already has a Disqus account, that means they can easily comment on your blog.
 

Why I still wouldn't use Disqus or IntenseDebate

Despite all the great features, I can't recommend either of these products. I've used Disqus on three different blogs, and IntenseDebate on one. I ran into major bugs with both of them. The problems with Disqus were much more severe (which is why I originally picked IntenseDebate for this blog), but comments are just too important to accept any problems at all.  Commenting on a blog is incredibly basic, and easy to implement (I built a commenting system for a friend's blog from scratch last night and it's working fine). There's just no reason to accept a buggy commenting system.

I should say that both companies responded to my bug reports promptly and they were very nice, but neither could solve my problems. Nice customer service is great, but it's meaningless if nothing is resolved.

Another issue I have with both Disqus and IntenseDebate is how much longer pages take to load. Because they aren't built directly into the blogging software (they're hosted on an external server), the comments sections have to load after the rest of the page. By using a built-in comment system, you can significantly speed up page loads.

And then there's the SEO aspect. Because third-party comment systems don't load with the original page, that must mean that search engines can't crawl the comments. This isn't a big deal because comments rarely contain keywords that show up in searches, but I've seen it happen before. Why not let search engines index all that great user generated content?

Customization is another concern. When the commenting system is installed directly into your blogging software, that generally means that you can make changes to the code. Disqus and IntenseDebate both offer tons of customization options, but if you want something unique, you're out of luck.

To wrap things up, I just want to point out that comments are incredibly important to most blogs, but they don't need to be very sophisticated. All the bells and whistles offered by Disqus and IntenseDebate are cool, but completely unnecessary. If I have to choose between an awesome system that occasionally doesn't work and a clunky system that is rock solid, I'm going clunky every time.

Note: You may notice that we're still using IntenseDebate on this blog. That's just because I haven't gotten around to switching us to my homemade commenting system yet, but I've started using my own system for new blogs that I set up. I plan on updating this blog eventually.

This article was written by...

Tyler King

Co-founder and CEO of Less Annoying CRM

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