Disqus was one of the best commenting systems for WordPress websites.
But lately, the things have changed a lot and made us look for an Disqus alternative.
Disqus was caught injecting advertisements and affiliate links in the comments section of the site without site owners’ permissions and plans to charge owners a monthly fee to remove those ads.
Many users were left in surprise by this move from Disqus, and started looking for good alternatives to Disqus.
Apart from this, Disqus commenting system slows down your WordPress website speed by a significant extent.
In this mobile-first era, their comment system takes forever to load and the comment content may end up not being indexed by Google.
Hence, our hunt for good Disqus alternatives began.
In this guide, you'll learn
The best commenting system for WordPress – Thrive Comments
Thrive Comments is a plugin is from the team at Thrive Themes.
This comes as a WordPress plugin. So, if you are using WordPress for hosting your site, Thrive Comments is the best commenting system you can get your hands on.
This plugin replaces the WordPress default commenting system, with its own commenting system and comes baked in with tons of features.
Increase conversions
With this plugin you can choose what should happen immediately after the users leave comments on your blog. You can show them a message, offer them to optin, offer them related posts, offer them to share the post on social media, so on.
This unlocks the ability to you giving your visitors the ability to offer any lead magnets, incentives, coupons for your products in turn for their comment.
One more feature is what you can automatically link some keywords in comments to relevant resources. This saves you a lot of time from you manually linking keywords that needs explanation in the comments to relevant resources.
Increase engagement
Believe it or not, the reason why people don’t leave comments on blog posts, is because they need to fill out name, email, and other details before commenting.
With Thrive Comments you can allow users to leave comments on your blog posts with their social media accounts and as well as a guest visitor.
The Thrive Comments also comes with upvote and downvote functionality like that of Disqus, and you can also award badges to repeat commenters on your blog posts.
This is a great way to spark engagement by gamifying the whole commenting process.
You can customize the default labels being displayed in your comment section. Instead of a generic text like – “Leave a reply”, you can edit it to – “leave an insightful reply to get a free eBook, checklist or even a discount”.
Some of the great features of Thrive Comments that enables to track the engagement over the time are:
- Upvote/downvote stats
- Comment growth trend
- Comment word cloud – what terms user comment the most
Performance
And also, the comment system is very fast to load than that of Disqus.
There are various page speed optimization features built in this plugin like only load comments when user scroll down, load commenter avatars only when section enters viewport, load more button functionality and much more.
As Thrive Comments is a native WordPress plugin and not a 3rd party comment system like Disqus, the performance is really good and flawless.
By far, I found Thrive Comments to be the best alternative to Disqus.
Delegation and moderation
The worst part about commenting is moderating them. If you want to assign comment moderation to a virtual assistant, you may end up adding a bit of code or installing another plugin to let the VA get comment moderation rights without other privileges.
But with Thrive Comments, there are inbuilt features for you to assign moderation rights to specific roles, and also delegate replies to specific user on your WordPress site.
There are also plenty of keyboard shortcuts for you to approve, delete, spam, delegate, the WordPress comments.
These features are really helpful, if you’ve got tons of comments on your blog that needs moderation.
Also, as it’s a WordPress plugin, it integrates with other dozens of other plugins like Akismet, WP-SpamShield, reCaptcha and other plugins to further enhance its spam detection and other functionalities which is huge.
Pricing of Thrive Comments
The one site license costs you $39, 5 site license costs you $47 and finally the 15 site license costs you $97. I have a 5 site license.
All of these plans give you lifetime updates and 1 year of free support. The lifetime updates you get with all the Thrive products is a huge advantage. Because, with this, you need to not to renew it every year unless you want free support of the plugin.
Thrive Themes are doing a great job of keeping on adding more and more features. Everytime I receive an update from Thrive Themes on Facebook, it’s all about their new feature-set addition.
Wrap up
As it is a one time purchase, if you are seriously looking for a good Disqus alternative, go for it.
I’m using this plugin on some of my sites and I’m truly overwhelmed by the boost of engagement with this plugin in place.
And also, the ability to convert my commenters into leads effortlessly is awesome!
Unlike Disqus, you need not pay a monthly fee to remove the advertisements. Thrive Comments will not slow down your site by loading unnecessary third party ads and is lightweight for your site.
Hi,
Thanks for sharing this blog with us, your blog contains very important information for us, I appreciate your work and effort. I also think the same and I already used Disqus. this is a very amazing tool for comments and discussion.
Hi Sir, thanks for this informative article, this will definitely help me in the future. Thanks Once again.
The content is very accurate and defined in a very nice way
Keep on giving the relevant content to your readers i think i have to try this on my blog Thank you
Hi, you really share an interesting post and your content is also very useful to me as I get to learn a lot from your post. Thanks for sharing your knowledge and keep sharing more content like this!
This is useful article that will help many new conversation and experienced Internet marketers to boost their sites to generate more traffics! Thanks for sharing keep it up .
Hi. Akshay Hallur
Thanks for sharing those tools. its a very helpful article sir thanks for sharing this information
Just hear and seen to Disqus on many sites or Blogs but personally, I don’t like Disqus but let’s go with alternate hope this alternative will be more good to use.
thank you for your post sir