Recommended 3rd Party Comment Systems for Your WordPress Site

WordPress built-in comment system is believed to deliver adequate features for your comment section to work. Yet it seems dull and plain in the eyes of demanding bloggers who always prefer coloring outside the lines. And for those who depend mostly on blogging to gain traffic and user engagement, keeping your blog conversations out of the bland monotony is a must.

As a follow-up post for the last article about The pros and cons of Using 3rd party comment system for WordPress, this write-up is going to focus on presenting top 4 external comment systems up to now. This is our attempt to give you more insight on how these platforms work and later on you can decide which one to implement for your WordPress site.

Disqus

Disqus is unarguably one of the most popular comment system out there with around 1 billion unique visitors per month. Apart from WordPress, it is compatible with a wealth of other web platforms, such as Joomla, Drupal, Blogger, Tumblr and custom HTLM sites. Popular sites using Disqus include Bloomberg, Hongkiat, The Next Web, etc.

Disqus supports a long list of features, including but not limited to: threaded comments, rich media embed, real-time conversations, social login and sharing, moderation, analytics, spam filter and much more. You can see at its feature list for further details.

Disqus provides a user friendly admin dashboard where you will find it extremely easy to work on. You can add as many sites as you want to implement Disqus comment system on. As a site admin, you can add other people, with Disqus account, to become Moderators and help you moderate your community.

One of the great things about Disqus is its importing/exporting feature. Existing comments on your blog would be imported into the Disqus database after you install the plugin into your site. New comments are not only stored on Disqus but also synced back to your WordPress database. This saves you from losing comment data when you decide to stop using Disqus or switch to another system.

To start using Disqus for your WordPress site, you can download the Disqus Comment System plugin from WordPress.org then read through the Installation guide for step-by-step instructions. This free plugin is compatible with WordPress version 3.8.3 and later. For a better usage and customization of the plugin, check out Disqus developer documentation.

Download Disqus Comment System

LiveFyre

Here is another great comment system you can count on – LiveFyre. Though the community is not as large as Disqus but it supports a wide range of web platforms as Disqus with an incredible number of site users including Fox news, Mashable, Cnet, Yahoo, BBC, Unilever, etc.

LiveFyre offers most of the aforementioned features in Disqus, among which it excels best in real-time comment, social integration and rich media comment. Comments in Livefyre pop up instantly and there is a counter showing who is “listening” or following the conversation. Commenters can even know whether the other is typing the message or not. Mentioning or tagging other accounts on Facebook, Twitter or Livefyre is also allowed. Livefyre supports inserting audios, videos, images from Soundcloud, YouTube and Vimeo into comments.

This plugin is not fully responsive as Disqus, but supports mobile friendly interface.

To integrate this system into your WordPress site, just download and install the free Livefyre Comments 3 plugin from WordPress plugin directory. It has had over 111,000 downloads so far with detailed installation guide can be found at this tutorial. For more insight on how it works, check out LiveFyre features list and refer to LiveFyre developer documentation for further know-how on handling the plugin.

Download Livefyre Comments 3

Intense Debate

Created by the maker of WordPress – Automatic in 2006, Intense Debate comment system has gained its popularity since the debut with nearly 500,000 downloads up until today for the Intense Debate comments WordPress plugin only.

Intense Debate fully provides basic features as nested comments, email notification, spam filter, moderation, subscription, RSS option and other additions like social login, comment voting or auto sync comments to WordPress database.

However, this plugin has not been updated since 2012 and supports up to WordPress 3.4.2 only. This lack of upgrade has deterred most developers from choosing this plugin so far. The perk of using Intense Debate, however, is the freedom of customization. You can decide how your comment box look by simply adding some snippets of CSS codes into your Custom CSS page.

More info about Intense Debate comment plugin:

• Installation
• Feature list
• Developer documentation

Download Intense Debate

Facebook comment

Facebook comment – the name speaks for itself already. The comment system requires users to log into their Facebook/AOL/Microsoft or Yahoo account to comment to your blog. This solution is being used by popular site as Techcrunch and Civil Beat.

Because users are required to use their social accounts, it leads to less spam and no anonymous accounts. Comments via Facebook comment will appear on users’ Facebook timeline and this increase the exposure for your blog.

One of the disadvantage is that if your users are not on Facebook then it will be a failure since this plugin does not support other social accounts like Twitter or Google Plus.

You can download Facebook plugin and integrate Facebook comment box into your WordPress site. This has been downloaded over 1,600,000 times and compatible with the latest version of WordPress 3.9.1. Check out the Comment box settings and plugin info page for more.

Download Facebook comment

Should you have any suggestion for the collection above, feel free to comment.