Disqus made embedded comments normal, and its moderation tooling is still better than anything a drop-in widget offers. The trade has always been weight and ads: the free tier is ad-supported, the embed pulls in a large third-party bundle with tracking, and your readers need an account to take part. Ours is 5 KB, anonymous, and has no ad slot at all.
The default for 15 years — and the reason a lot of blogs now load a megabyte to show six comments. Everything below is checked against disqus.com itself — but pricing and limits move, so confirm anything that matters on their own page before deciding.
| FeedPulse | Disqus | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever, no ads, ever. There is no paid tier to remove anything from. | Free tier is ad-supported; removing the ads starts at a paid plan, priced per site |
| Signup | None for you, none for your readers — comments are anonymous by default. | Account required for you, and readers are pushed to register or sign in with a social account to comment |
| What you get | Threaded comments with markdown, optional moderation and themes. No voting, no digests. | A full comment platform — threading, voting, moderation queue, spam filtering, reactions, email digests |
| Required link back | A small FeedPulse credit you can keep or remove. No ads. | Disqus branding sits in the widget, and the free tier also shows ads to your readers |
| Cookies & privacy | No cookies, no third-party tracking, no IP stored. Nothing to disclose in a banner. | Third-party cookies and tracking by design; it's the classic reason a blog needs a consent banner it otherwise wouldn't |
| Customisation | Your own CSS, your own colours — it renders inline, not in an iframe you can't touch. | Themes via their dashboard; the iframe itself is theirs, so CSS control is limited |
| Where the data lives | Your threads, visible in your dashboard, exportable. | Stored on their side, with an export available from the admin panel |
| Removing it | Delete the snippet. Nothing left behind on the page. | Remove the embed; your threads stay in your Disqus account until you delete them there |
If you moderate a busy comment section, Disqus earns its place: the spam filter has fifteen years of signal behind it, the moderation queue is genuinely good, and reader accounts mean reputation carries across sites. A 5 KB anonymous widget is not that, and a high-traffic political blog should not pretend otherwise.
Pick Disqus when moderation workload is your real problem. Pick FeedPulse when you want conversation on a fast page without ads, cookies or forcing readers to register.
Pick Disqus when moderation workload is your real problem. Pick FeedPulse when you want conversation on a fast page without ads, cookies or forcing readers to register. If you moderate a busy comment section, Disqus earns its place: the spam filter has fifteen years of signal behind it, the moderation queue is genuinely good, and reader accounts mean reputation carries across sites. A 5 KB anonymous widget is not that, and a high-traffic political blog should not pretend otherwise.
That's the specific gap this fills. The FeedPulse comments widget is about 5 KB, sets no cookies, shows no ads on any tier, and lets people comment without creating an account. You keep optional moderation and markdown; you lose Disqus's voting, email digests and cross-site reader reputation.
Nothing, at any traffic level. There is no paid tier to upgrade to, no session cap and no card on file — the whole product is free, including every other widget and all the SEO tools.