IntenseDebate is owned by Automattic.

Automattic takes good care of their services. Akismet and PollDaddy are two great examples.

However, they have practically stopped caring about their IntenseDebate branch.

We have not seen any updates in the recent months. No blog post revealing what’s going on.

It is almost like the service is just on in a freeze state. You can use it. But nothing is changing in the background.

Frankly speaking, Disqus has totally demolished IntenseDebate in the recent months (years even).

The feature-set on Disqus is pretty awesome. The back end. The front end… It provides a much better user experience.

I am sticking with IntenseDebate for two reasons alone… It is backed by Automattic and it supports commenting even when JavaScript is disabled in the user’s browser.