As a blog owner, i remember how difficult it was to me to decide whether i should use an open source solution for the commenting system of my blog. After a while, i decided to move on with Disqus as for a starter, it's a quite good solution, however as you progress with your blog, you will notice that in many ways, it's not the best solution at all. For a lot of people, because of the privacy and others, like me, for the pricing. Disqus offers a free plan up to some point, but once your blog reaches a significant amount of views, you will have to move to the pro plan, which in some way, it's a lot considering that you can achieve the same if you decide to move to a self hosted open source solution (yeah, we will stop using disqus once we reach the 50K daily views that they offer for the pro plan [USD $9]).
In this top, we will share with you 7 open source solutions of commenting systems for blogs and static pages that you can self-host on your server.
7. HashOver
HashOver is a free and open source PHP comment system designed to allow completely anonymous comments and easy theming. HashOver is intended as a replacement for proprietary services like Disqus. HashOver adds a "comment section" to any website by placing a few simple lines of JavaScript or PHP to the source code of any webpage. HashOver is a self-hosted system. Comments can be stored in either flat-file formats like XML or JSON or SQL databases. HashOver is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License.
6. Schnack
Schnack is an open source commenting system written in JavaScript.
- Tiny! It takes only ~8 KB!!! to embed Schnack.
- Open source and self-hosted.
- Ad-free and Tracking-free. Schnack will not disturb your users.
- It's simple to moderate, with a minimal and slick UI to allow/reject comments or trust/block users.
- webpush protocol to notify the site owner about new comments awaiting for moderation.
- Third party providers for authentication like Github, Twitter, Google and Facebook. Users are not required to register a new account on your system and you don't need to manage a user management system.
5. Valine
Valine is a fast, simple & powerful comment system.
- Emoji ð
- High speed.
- Safe by default.
- No server-side implementation.
- Support for full markdown syntax.
- Simple and lightweight
- Article reading statistics
v1.2.0+
4. Commentics
Commentics is a free, advanced PHP comment script with many features. Professionally written and with open source code, its main aims are to be integrable, customizable and secure. It is designed to be integrated into existing pages. Fresh and relevant content not only helps in retaining visitors but also in keeping search engines interested. For the reasons below, Commentics is an ideal choice for this. Use it on your articles or even as a standalone comments page.
3. Commento
Half a second increase in page load time results in a 20% decrease in site traffic. Commento is lighter and faster than alternatives, at just 11 KB of JavaScript and CSS.
Commento has not, does not, and will not gather your personal information to sell to advertisers, third-party trackers, or other organisations. With Commento's advanced moderation tools, automatic spam filtering, and Akismet integration, you and your readers will never see any spam.
2. Remark42
Remark42 is a self-hosted, lightweight, and simple (yet functional) commenting system, which doesn't spy on users. It can be embedded into blogs, articles or any other place where readers add comments.
- Social login via Google, Twitter, Facebook, GitHub and Yandex
- Login via email
- Optional anonymous access
- Multi-level nested comments with both tree and plain presentations
- Markdown support with friendly formatter toolbar
- Privacy-focused
- Import from Disqus
- Moderator can remove comments and block users
- Voting, pinning and verification system
- Sortable comments
- Images upload with drag-and-drop and clipboard
- List of recent comments from all posts
- Export comments to json and automatic backups
- RSS for all comments, each post and replies
- Telegram notifications
- No external databases, everything embedded in a single data file
- Fully dockerized and can be deployed in a single command
- Self-contained executable can be deployed directly to Linux, Windows and MacOS
- Clean, lightweight and customizable UI with white and dark themes
- Multi-site mode from a single instance
- Integration with automatic SSL
1. Isso
Isso (Ich schrei sonst) is a lightweight commenting server written in Python and JavaScript. It aims to be a drop-in replacement for Disqus. Isso is a lightweight commenting server similar to Disqus. It allows anonymous comments, maintains identity and is simple to administrate. It uses JavaScript and cross-origin ressource sharing for easy integration into (static) websites.
If you know another awesome open source commenting system solution, please share it with the community in the comment box.
