Best WordPress Comment Plugin | WordPress Comment Plugins Review

In this article, I will be sharing my experience with various WordPress comment plugins I tested for my website. This personal experience will definitely be helpful to others in choosing right comment plugin for their website.

1. Default WordPress Comment Form

WordPress installation comes up with its own default comment form. It is default in the sense that if we deactivate all WordPress comments plugins, then WordPress falls to it.

Benefits

1. It allows anonymous commenting. A visitor has to provide an email id but it is not published.

Drawbacks

1. No feature to allow comment subscriptions, notification for reply to comments, sorting of comments etc.
2. No captcha to prevent spam comments.

2. Jetpack Comment Form

WordPress default commenting system lack a number of features. Due to this, one has to use a comment plugin. Jetpack plugin by WordPress has support for comment and it is slightly advanced  than the inbuilt WordPress comment system.

Benefits

1. It allows for comment subscriptions and new post subscriptions – a major enhancement from default comment form.

Drawbacks

1. The look of comment form still is of default comment form.
2. Many modern features like sorting, upvoting-downvoting, captcha etc are not there.
3. When I tested this plugin for comments, I found that a comment subscriber was not receiving the notification for reply to comments.

Jetpack is not a just comment plugin and we require it for functions other than commenting. If one enables a different comment plugin, then overlap between it and Jetpack happens over the comment form. In order to avoid that, one has to disable commenting from Jetpack using settings shown in the snapshot below.

3. Disqus

Disqus is the most popular WordPress comment plugin for WordPress if one goes by number of active installations. However it has a few very important drawbacks.

Drawbacks

1. It requires creation of account on Disqus platform.
2. It may insert ads in between comments on your website.

Thus it is not suitable for those who do not like to create a third party account for comments.

4. wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz is the best free WordPress comment plugin available for WordPress. It is an alternative to the most popular plugin Disqus.   Its benefits are as follows:-

Benefits

1. No need for login creation.
2. Lazy loading of comments to speed up page loading.
3. Anonymous commenting is possible for a visitor.
4. Nice design with a number of features like captcha, subscriptions for comments, upvoting-downvoting, sorting of comments etc.

I will recommend this plugin to be used for WordPress. However a user may encounter an error “Blocked as suspected bot”. Please refer my post “How to fix “Blocked as suspected bot” to solve this error.

5. Replyable – Subscribe to Comments & Reply by email

Drawbacks

The plugin suffers from certain drawbacks which are as follows:-

1. wpDiscuz plugin is well ahead in terms of functionality.
2. Promotion by Replyable by mention of its name in various notifications received by comment subscribers.
3. Earlier plugins from Postmatic like Epoch, Postmatic Social Commenting etc have not been updated for a number of years.

That was all I had for comment plugins. I recommend using wpDiscuz plugin for commenting. You can also visit my page “Essential WordPress Plugins List for a Website” to find a complete list of plugins which will enable you to build a secure, SEO friendly and functioning website quickly.

Happy blogging!