Commentbox.io alternative: what changes when you outgrow 100 comments a month

Commentbox.io is the comment system people recommend in the same breath as Cusdis and GraphComment when someone asks for "something simple with no ads". The recommendation is deserved. Its homepage says "No ads. No Tracking. Just Comments." and means it, readers can post anonymously if you allow it, and page views are unlimited on every plan including the free one. The reason to read a Commentbox alternative post is the meter. Commentbox charges by comments, not traffic, so the free plan's 100 comments a month is a ceiling an active blog hits in the first week, and the price for moderation tools beyond the basics is a $20 a month add-on.

This post compares Commentbox with EchoThread on price, on how each meter behaves, on spam and moderation, and on what you give up either way. We build EchoThread, so treat our claims as claims and read both pricing pages yourself.

Commentbox pricing, as published

From commentbox.io, read on 3 September 2026:

Across the plans: "Choose from social or email login", "Optional anonymous posting", "Optional reply notifications", voting, flagging and pinning, and "Export your comments on demand, directly from the dashboard".

How a comment meter behaves

Every other hosted system in this category meters traffic: Disqus, Hyvor Talk, ReplyBox and GraphComment count page views or loads, and EchoThread counts page views on sites created from 1 October 2026. Commentbox is the exception, and the exception cuts both ways.

For a high-traffic site with a quiet comment section, Commentbox's free plan is the best deal in the category: 200,000 page views and forty comments a month is $0, with no ads and no tracking. For an active blog it is the reverse. 100 comments a month is three a day, and the overage is a flat $15 charge, so the first month you have a good post you pay $15 for the privilege; the second, you upgrade to Professional at $10. And because comments are the meter, the thing you are hoping for, more discussion, is the thing that raises the bill.

The other consequence is moderation. Basic moderation tools come with both plans; filters, thread locking, search and extra moderators are in Moderation Plus at $20 a month per 5,000 comments. A blog that needs to lock a thread twice a year pays $20 a month for the switch.

A worked example bill

Take an active blog: one site, 60,000 page views a month, about 300 comments a month, an owner who wants keyword filters and the ability to lock a thread.

If the same site is created on EchoThread after 1 October 2026, Hobby's 10,000 page-view allowance does not cover 60,000, so it belongs on Starter at $9; the allowance is soft, so crossing it means an email rather than a disabled widget. A site with 60,000 page views and twenty comments a month is a different story: Commentbox Personal is $0 and covers it, and EchoThread would be $9 on a new site. Know which of those two blogs you are.

Spam handling

Commentbox lists spam filtering tools with moderation done directly in the plugin, without describing the method. EchoThread uses a first-party machine-learning classifier, Siftfy, that scores every comment as it is posted, guest or signed in, and was trained for fluent AI-written spam rather than the link-stuffed kind. A high score alone sends a comment to your queue; auto-hiding also needs a corroborating signal such as a link or a promo pattern, a rule adopted after the model proved too confident about non-English comments. The incident and the fix are written up honestly, and preventing comment spam without a CAPTCHA covers why the score is a filter and not a wall.

Anonymous posting is where a spam filter earns its keep. Both products allow it; EchoThread scores every anonymous comment before it shows.

Where Commentbox wins

• Unlimited page views on the free plan. A quiet, busy site pays nothing at any traffic.
• Single sign-on and webhooks at $10. EchoThread's webhooks and public API are on Starter at $9, but shared-secret SSO is on Pro at $19, so if SSO is the feature you need, Commentbox is cheaper.
• Slack notifications built in; EchoThread offers webhooks you would wire to Slack yourself.
• Export from the dashboard on demand, which means you are never locked in.
• Simplicity. Two plans and one add-on, and the same promise on every one.

Where EchoThread wins

• Comments are unlimited on every plan, including the free one. The meter is page views on sites created from 1 October 2026, and comments never count.
• Moderation is included, not an add-on. Restricted words, per-commenter ban or trust, closing a thread, auto-closing old threads and a moderation queue are on Hobby.
• Guest comments with a spam score, switchable per site, and passkey, Google, GitHub, X and Facebook sign-in when you want accounts.
• Reactions, image uploads, link previews and threaded replies, and a reader interface that follows each visitor's language (English, Italian, Korean and Simplified Chinese today).
• Import from Disqus in one step, and export everything as JSON or CSV at any time.
• Five team seats on every plan, including Hobby; Commentbox's extra moderators are in the $20 add-on.

EchoThread's Hobby plan is free for your first site: unlimited comments, no ads, no reader tracking, and 10,000 page views a month on sites created from 1 October 2026 (a site created before that date keeps unmetered page views). Paid plans start at $9 a month for three sites and 100,000 page views; see pricing for the full ladder.

Switching from Commentbox

Commentbox exports your comments from the dashboard on demand, which makes this the easiest move in the category. Convert the export to EchoThread's JSON import shape: a list of threads, each with a page URL and title, each holding comments with author name, body, creation time and an optional parent for replies. Import it from the dashboard's Import page; approved comments stay approved. Then replace the Commentbox div and script with EchoThread's, keeping the page URL as the identifier so the imported threads line up with the pages they belong to:

<div id="echothread"
     data-api-key="YOUR_API_KEY"
     data-page-url="https://example.com/your-post/"
     data-identifier="your-post"
     data-page-title="Your post title"></div>
<script src="https://cdn.echothread.io/widget.js" async></script>

The div goes where the comments should appear and the script anywhere on the page. Platform-specific versions exist for Hugo, Eleventy, Jekyll, Astro and Ghost, WordPress sites use the plugin from the ad-free WordPress comment plugin post, and Publii users, who often arrive at Commentbox from the same forum threads that mention Cusdis, get an official plugin. If Cusdis is the other name on your shortlist, read the Cusdis alternative post first: the project was deprecated and archived in July 2026.

Prices were read from commentbox.io on 3 September 2026 and will change; their pricing section is the authority for your own numbers.