[Django]-OSQA vs. Askbot?

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/

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.

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