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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

sth
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chapar
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3 Answers3

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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/

Community
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Evgeny
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    It would be good to disclose your relationship with the Askbot project here. –  Jun 14 '12 at 16:47
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    Of course, I've founded the project and am the lead developer. – Evgeny Jun 14 '12 at 17:00
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    -1 even if this is an important contribution: 1. question asked unbiased opinion, which is clearly not the case here. 2. there is a conflict of interests not mentioned in the answer itself which should be added. – Jorge Leitao May 10 '13 at 14:16
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    Also wanted to downvote but din't do that after a brief look on both systems. Looks like OSQA is more promising rather than askbot, but the last version of OSQA is beta3 1.0 published at 2011, when the latest askbot is 2013. I think this is quite major factor but only one note: even in such context askbot declares only Django 1.1.1-1.2.3 support what is quite strange when we have alreadt Django 1.6 in alpha stage and 1.5 stable version. – simplylizz May 30 '13 at 10:24
  • @simplylizz you're right, we should update info in the documentation. Askbot works with Django 1.4 in production and will work on 1.5, but there may be some issues (actually probably 1.3 is the minimum supported django version now). We'll bump the version dependency soon. Btw, out of curiosity - what made you think that OSQA is more promising than Askbot - I'd really like to know what you think. Thanks. – Evgeny Jun 01 '13 at 05:56
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    @Evgeny at least because the next answer. :) Just for information: I've tried to install askbot on localhost and it wasn't an easy (maybe if I'd used a sample config it was more or less simple, but I've tried it from scratch). Also have met a few bugs (i.e. you code doesn't work with setted USE_TZ), some of them was described early on your site, some of them - not. But at all I've installed the latest version and it works on the first glance. Maybe a good case would be to remove some of the features outside the core to the plugins/extra apps system, because now it looks quite huge. – simplylizz Jun 03 '13 at 12:03
  • Probably, right, some new features will be developed as addon apps, some others are hard to decouple - for example the "user groups". It's a good idea to decouple features that can easily be decoupled. We accept pull requests on github. Bug fixes are accepted often instantly, but feature work is best to discuss first. I'm not sure what to tell yet about the tz support, need to take a look at the docs. – Evgeny Jun 06 '13 at 13:43
  • Bitnami is currently considering askbot for it's forum stack : https://bitnami.com/stack/askbot. If this goes through it'll be easy to install to desktop, VM or Cloud using bitnami stack. – GuruM Sep 01 '14 at 08:16
  • The Fedora Project uses askbot for it's QnA site : https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/questions/ – GuruM Sep 01 '14 at 08:19
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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.

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    I'd be interested to know what Python framework you think someone should start with. Personally I'd say none of the contenders are well established enough to be a wise choice in preference over Django if you're looking for something to use over the next few years. – Stephen Paulger Jul 19 '12 at 16:12
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    I second StephenPaulger's comment. There are some other very promising Python web frameworks, Pyramid and Flask, for example, but Django is a totally legitimate choice. In the end, the tools really don't matter, it's how you wield them. – Jesse L Oct 19 '12 at 20:33
  • OSQA is available for easy install to desktop, VM or Cloud via Bitnami stack : https://bitnami.com/stack/osqa – GuruM Sep 01 '14 at 07:47
  • I've done over 100 projects with django (perhaps more, but it's a lot) and I've never, felt bad about using it for the web apps I've wanted to use it for. Yes it's batteries included, but that has never, ever caused a problem for me. I'm about to wrap an local application in a webserver to use an an rpc layer (rather than sending my own format over sockets) and for that I'm going to use something like flask or perhaps even smaller. Not sure, but in this case, using django would be the wrong thing. But for most public facing web apps, django's size has never caused me any pain. – Chris Barry Jan 28 '18 at 11:48
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I did a research on both. The numbers speak for themselves.

OSQA has 597 stars on Github. Last commit was 2 years ago. It supports only Dajngo 1.6. Most code has not been recently updated.

Askbot has 1,170 stars. Last commit was 2 months ago. It supports on Dajngo 1.8. A lot of code has been recently updated.

My personal experience was that I was able to test Askbot easily. Though modifying the source code seems to be hard.

Askbot seems to be more updated and maintained.

https://github.com/dzone/osqa

Wally
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