Django Forum Apps Comparison

Yvan Seth's blog entry ​Django Forum Software from December 2007 lists a few well-known discussion forum applications for Django. This page continues on the same tracks and tries to gather a comparison of essential features in those applications.

Features currently evaluated

Feature	Description
demo	If the application has a public demo site, a link and login/password are given.
guest-post	Visitors can post messages without registration.
notify	An administrator can be notified by E-mail and/or SMS about new messages. Note that this feature should be trivial to add to most apps with signals and external code only.
pre-moderate	It's possible to hide new messages until they are approved by an administrator.
post-moderate	The app provides a user interface for removing messages.
comment	Any Django model instance can have a message thread attached to it.
forum	The app provides the concept of a forum inside which message threads are grouped.
title	Individual messages can have their own titles.
modify	Users can modify messages.
msg-history	When message are modified, everyone can see the change history.
private	Users can send private messages to other users.

Summary of major Django forum/discussion apps and their support for the above features

Application	Author(s)	License	demo	guest-post	notify	pre-moderate	post-moderate	comment	forum	title	modify	msg-history	private
contrib.comments	Django authors	?	?	yes	no?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
DjangoBB	Alexey Afinogenov, Maranchuk Sergey	BSD	Forum in use	no	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes
comment-utils	James Bennett	BSD	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
django-threadedcomments	Eric Florenzano	BSD	Here	yes	yes	yes	yes	yes	no	no	yes	no	no
django-forum	Ross Poulton	BSD	Soon	no	yes	no	yes *	no	yes	no	no	no	no
counterpoint	Collin Grady	MIT	no	no	no	no	yes	no	yes	?	yes	no	no
Django Forum	Jonathan Buchanan	?	?	no	no	no	yes	no	yes	no	?	?	?
snapboard	Bo Shi, JW Mayfield	BSD	Forum in use	no	no	no	yes	no	yes *	no	yes	yes	yes
MyghtyBoard	Piotr Malinski	GNU GPL	Forum in use	yes *	yes *	no	yes	not yet	yes	no	yes	no	no
Sphene	Herbert Poul	BSD	anonymous	yes, with CAPTCHA*	reg *	no*	kind of*	no	yes	yes	yes	no	no
Zyons(dead link)	Ian Holsman?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?	?
PyBB	Grigoriy Petukhov	BSD	Support forum	no	no	no	yes	no	yes	no	yes	no	no
Django-ForumBR	Italo Maia	Apache	Forum in use	no	yes	no	yes	no	yes	yes	yes	no	yes
django-simpleforum	James Pells	GNU GPL	no?	no	no	no	yes	no	yes	yes	no	no	no
django-mptt-comments	Øyvind Saltvik	BSD	no	yes	no	no	no	?	no	yes	no	no	no
Column headings and * symbols reveal verbose descriptions when the mouse pointer hovers over them.

This page was originally created by ​akaihola. There's a ​django-users thread about this page. I'll update information posted on that thread to this page.

Most of my conclusions about supported features are based on reading the code, not on actually testing the apps. Please make corrections in case I missed something.

Comments

​Jonathan Buchanan: django-discussion is not actively maintained or developed at this time (parts of it were extracted into ​Django MPTT) – ​django-threadedcomments looks like a more complete and feature-rich implementation of the type of functionality it provided, so I've removed discussion and put threadedcomments in its place.

To do

Ideas for making this page better:

• add column for supported Django versions/revisions/branches
• add "import" column, e.g.: import existing phpBB2 forum data

Links

• other resources for finding and evaluating re-usable apps
• similar comparison of content management apps