Commento allows you to foster discussion on your website – if you have a blog, you can embed Commento if you want your readers to add comments. It's fast and bloat-free, has a modern interface, and is reasonably secure. Unlike most alternatives, Commento is lightweight and privacy-focused; I'll never sell your data, show ads, embed third-party tracking scripts, or inject affiliate links.
**I don't want to install and manage Commento on a server.**
You can use [Commento.io](https://commento.io), the cloud version of Commento, where I do the server hosting, updates, and security and performance tuning for you. To make the hosted service self-sustainable, it is not free. You may choose the plan that best matches your financial situation and needs – all plans have all features.
Commento comes with a lot of useful features out-of-the-box: rich text support, upvotes and downvotes, automatic spam detection, moderation tools, sticky comments, thread locking, OAuth login, email notifications, and more!
**How is Commento different from Disqus, Facebook Comments, and the rest?**
Most other products in this space do not respect your privacy; showing adverts is their primary business model and that nearly always comes at the users' cost. There is no free lunch. Commento is also orders of magnitude lighter than alternatives – while Disqus and Facebook take megabytes of download to load, Commento is just 11 kB.
Yes. Commento is made [freely available](https://gitlab.com/commento/commento) under the [MIT license](https://gitlab.com/commento/commento/blob/master/LICENSE). And it will always stay that way.
**Disqus has a free plan. Why is the [cloud version](https://commento.io) not free of cost?**
When I say Commento is free, I mean [free as in freedom](https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html). The cloud version is not offered free of cost because servers cost money and offering the service for free would not be sustainable. Unlike most alternatives, Commento does not operate on adverts and shady tactics; you're the customer, not the product.
**I have nothing to hide. Why should I care about my privacy?**
The thing about privacy is that once you give up control over your information, you can't get it back. You may be fine with having your personal information sold to unknown third-parties today, but when your insurance company uses this information against you tomorrow, you'll regret it. And you'll have no recourse to correct this. Read [this Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_to_hide_argument) for more information.
<div><pstyle="margin: 0px 0px"><b>As a blog owner, why should I worry about my readers' privacy?</b><br>
Good question. For starters, your readers value their privacy. Not caring about them is disrespectful and you will end up alienating your audience; they won't come back. But even if you ignore this, you have bigger questions to answer:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>Legality</b>: Did you know that Disqus still isn't GDPR-compliant (according to their <ahref="https://help.disqus.com/terms-and-policies/privacy-faq"title="At the time of writing (28 December 2018)"rel="nofollow">privacy policy</a>)?</li>
<li><b>Security</b>: What happens when a random third-party script is injected into your website?</li>
<li><b>Performance</b>: Did you know that half a second increase in page load time results in a 20% decrease in engagement and site traffic?</li>
<li><b>Ownership</b>: Who owns the content when your readers create comments?</li>
**Who's behind this? Are you an evil corporation?**
My name is <ahref="https://adtac.in">Adhityaa</a>, and I created the project. As someone who's still a student, I promise you I'm neither evil nor a corporation. But I'm not the only one – dozens of people have contributed to the project and Commento would not exist without these wonderful people.
**Okay, how do I get started?**
Glad you asked! You have two options – self-hosting Commento on your own server or using the [cloud version](https://commento.io). Start [from here](https://docs.commento.io/getting-started/) to decide which option is right for you and proceed from there.
Commento is possible only because of its community. If this is your first contribution to Commento, please go through the [documentation](https://docs.commento.io/contributing/) before you begin.
Help will always be given to those who ask for it. We use IRC for chat to collaborate with other developers. You're invited to [hang out with us](https://irc.commento.io) in the `#commento-dev` channel on freenode if you want to contribute to Commento!
