OSQA vs. Askbot? [closed]

Question

I am going to choose a platform to develop a Q/A site. Two python-based platforms that I'm aware of, are OSQA and AskBot. I know that both are based on django (which I'm quite familiar with) and OSQA has a wider user-base. But that's pretty much that I know so far. So I would love to hear unbiased comparisons and reasons on why should I choose one instead of another (or whether there are still better options?). Thanks

Answer 1

Askbot is used by several well known software companies internally and there are some active public instances. For example, 1) answers.ros.org has about 1000 users, and 2) libreoffice support page.

Askbot has several hundred unit tests (415 as of this post) and is generally very stable. Critical bugs are fixed the same day.

Another thing is that askbot is an application, not necessarily a dedicated site (but can be), unlike osqa.

Askbot can be installed via "pip" or "easy_install", with all dependencies taken care of automatically.

You can also fork askbot on github and contribute. https://github.com/ASKBOT/askbot-devel/

Answer 2

OSQA does have a wider user base, and an active support community. In lots of ways, there's not a lot of choice between them - either way, you can run them off-the-shelf, or you can tweak them, as they're both open source. And to tweak either of them, you'll need to get your head around Django. If you don't know Django already, it may not be worth learning; some people (including me) think that it's a "yesterday's framework" - which means it will be around for years to come, but if you're starting afresh, there are other places you might want to start from, rather than Django.

OSQA does have a track record of lots of sites, some of which are quite busy. OK, not busy by Stack Overflow standards, but busy enough - LockerGnome.net has 17,000 questions; 42,000 answers; and 6,000 users. There are about 10 OSQA sites that have over 10,000 questions and 1,000 users - about ten times bigger than the biggest Askbot site. Then there are several dozen OSQA sites smaller than that q:10,000, u:1,000 threshold.

There are other options - you could try starting a site via Area51.StackExchange.com; and there's Q&A software available in PHP too. As far as I know, there isn't a node.js Q&A, but maybe there should be. Or, if you want to pay, and have a huge site in mind, there's QATO, which rents out as SAAS.