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Samir Shah auctioned the Disable Comments plugin on 5 August 2020. One condition: the winner had to donate the bid to charity and show him the receipt. WPDeveloper won, shipped version 2.0.0 on 28 November 2020, and announced the deal the next morning. Most “you could own this plugin” write-ups, including the one this page replaces, ran months after the auction had already closed. Six years on, the better question is whether the plugin is still worth installing, and whether you need it at all. So this page digs into its live directory data, its full vulnerability record and every one-star review it has collected.
Quick answer: WPDeveloper still owns and maintains it. Version 2.9.0 shipped on 1 September 2026, the plugin holds 1 million active installs, and it has recorded exactly one vulnerability in 15 years. If you run one site and just want comments off, WordPress core does that in two minutes with no plugin. Install Disable Comments when you need multisite control, WooCommerce review handling, REST and XML-RPC blocking, or bulk deletion of the comments you already have.
Last reviewed: September 2026. Install counts, ratings, version numbers and release dates verified against the WordPress.org plugin API on 1 September 2026.
The Evidence Behind This Page
We pulled every install count, rating and release date straight from the WordPress.org plugin API on 1 September 2026. None of it came from the plugins’ own marketing pages. That matters here, because two different plugins in the directory answer to the name “Disable Comments”, and neither vendor mentions the other.
The ownership timeline was rebuilt from two sources. First, the plugin’s own changelog.txt file in the WordPress.org repository, which carries dated entries back to 2020. Second, the publication timestamp on WPDeveloper’s announcement post. Vulnerability history came from the WPScan plugin record. The review analysis is a manual read of all 17 one-star reviews on WordPress.org, with their posting dates.
We excluded three groups. Any plugin under 5,000 active installs. Anything last updated before 1 January 2026. And anything that only filters spam instead of switching comments off. That last rule is why Akismet gets no section, despite sitting on 5 million sites, five times this plugin’s reach. Akismet and Antispam Bee moderate comments you have chosen to keep. This article is about not having them. One borderline case: Disable Everything (30,000 installs) switches comments off among many other WordPress features, which makes it a different product for a different problem.
Two things we can’t tell you. We didn’t run these plugins against a load test, so nothing here claims a speed number. And the donation figure WPDeveloper paid to Effective Altruism Funds has never been published, so you won’t find it invented here either.
The Auction Closed Before the News Spread
Shah launched Disable Comments in the WordPress.org directory on 27 May 2011. He kept it going for nine years, past the point where he had stopped doing WordPress work professionally. By 2020 the plugin had over a million installs and 220 five-star reviews out of 229 ratings. He could no longer keep up with core changes and newer PHP versions.
So he ran an unusual sale. He announced the terms publicly on 5 August 2020. The highest bidder would donate the amount to Effective Altruism Funds and hand over the receipt. Shah also reserved the right to pick a winner on grounds other than money. He wanted the plugin to land with someone who would maintain it.
Here’s where the dates get interesting. The plugin’s changelog file opens with a single line: “This will be maintained from August 19, 2020 – @asif2bd”. That handle belongs to M Asif Rahman, WPDeveloper’s founder. Two weeks after the auction went public, WPDeveloper was already committing code. Version 1.11.0 followed on 22 August 2020, then the full rewrite as 2.0.0 on 28 November 2020. WPDeveloper published its acquisition announcement on 29 November 2020 at 05:21 UTC, one day after Disable Comments 2.0.0 shipped.
WPDeveloper is a Bangladesh-based plugin company, best known for Essential Addons for Elementor, which passed two million installs. Its security record is mixed rather than clean. Essential Addons carried a reflected cross-site scripting flaw tracked as CVE-2025-24752, patched in version 6.0.15. Disable Comments itself has been a much quieter story, which the next section gets into.
Is Disable Comments Still Maintained in 2026?
Yes, and the release cadence is not the token kind. Six releases landed between December 2025 and today: 2.6.1, 2.6.2, 2.7.0, 2.7.1, 2.8.0 and 2.9.0. The most recent went out on 1 September 2026.
The directory listing backs that up. Version 2.9.0, 1+ million active installs, 34.5 million all-time downloads, a rating of 94 out of 100 across 280 reviews. It needs WordPress 5.0 or higher and PHP 7.0 or higher. That’s a low bar in 2026, so it runs on almost any host.
One thing is out of step. The listing says tested up to WordPress 7.0.4, while WordPress 7.1 “Mary Lou” has been out since 19 August 2026. Version 2.9.0 shipped 13 days after 7.1 and still declares 7.0.4. That header is a compatibility promise rather than a technical block, and the directory page carries no “untested” notice today. Themeisle’s alternative below already declares 7.1. An untouched “tested up to” line is still the first thing to check before you trust any plugin.
Security history is the strongest number here. WPScan lists one vulnerability in 15 years: a cross-site request forgery issue in version 1.0.3, fixed in 1.0.4 and published on 1 August 2014. That’s twelve years ago, under the previous owner, and nothing since. For a plugin sitting on a million sites, that record is unusually quiet. Want to check your own site’s exposure across every plugin you run? Start with testing your WordPress site security, which covers the scans that surface this class of problem.
Now the rating, because 94 out of 100 hides something. There are 17 one-star reviews. Thirteen were posted between roughly December 2020 and May 2021, right after 2.0.0 replaced the old interface. Five of those use the word “bloated” in the title. Others complain about admin notifications and an “alien UI”. The most recent one-star review is three years and two months old. So the plugin’s worst reviews describe a 2020 redesign, not the 2026 software. That isn’t a defence of the redesign, which people clearly hated. It’s a warning against reading a directory rating as though it were current.
What WPDeveloper Changed in Six Years
Shah’s plugin did one thing: it hid comments. The 2020 rewrite added an app-style settings screen, a setup wizard, and dashboard notices. The wizard lasted three days. Version 2.0.2 on 1 December 2020 removed it, which tells you how fast the review backlash landed.
What survived is more useful than the interface argument suggests. WP-CLI support arrived in 2.0.0, so a command like wp disable-comments settings –types=post configures a site without opening a browser. Anyone running a fleet of sites gets real value from that. The same release added switches for the REST API and XML-RPC. Both are routes spam bots use whether or not your theme renders a comment form.
Then there’s a bug fix that says a lot about how comment plugins actually fail. Disable Comments 2.8.0, released on 27 July 2026, made the plugin purge page caches when you save settings or delete comments. Before that, a cached page kept serving the comment form after comments had been switched off. On a host with server-level caching, or with Cloudflare in front of your site, that’s the exact symptom. People arrive at support forums convinced the plugin is broken.
WordPress 6.9 created a new problem in December 2025 by introducing Notes, block-level editorial comments in the post editor. Notes are technically a comment type. A blanket disable switched off your team’s editing workflow along with public commenting. Version 2.6.1 on 2 December 2025 added an “Enable Certain Comment Types” setting to keep Notes alive while everything else stays off. WordPress 7.1 extended Notes with suggestion mode and reactions, so this is no longer a corner case.
Version 2.9.0, out today, adds conditional rules that switch comments by taxonomy term, page template or post age rather than by post type alone. It also adds a dry-run preview before deletion, a blocked-attempt counter in Site Health, and settings export as JSON. Role-based exclusions have been in the plugin for years. They pair with custom user roles in WordPress when editors need comment access that subscribers don’t get.
Turning Comments Off Without a Plugin
Before you install anything, understand what core already does. For a lot of sites, this is the whole job.
- Step 1. Go to Settings > Discussion and untick “Allow people to post comments on new articles”. Save. This covers every post you publish next.
- Step 2. Go to Posts > All Posts. Tick the checkbox in the header row, choose Edit from Bulk actions, then click Apply.
- Step 3. In the bulk edit panel, set the Comments dropdown to Do not allow and click Update. Repeat for Pages, and for any custom post type with its own list screen.
- Step 4. Back in Settings > Discussion, untick “Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks)” to stop trackback spam.
The WordPress documentation is explicit that the Discussion setting is a default which “may be overridden for individual articles”. That’s the trap. Turning it off does nothing to the 400 posts you already published, which is why Step 2 exists.
There’s a softer option on the same screen: “Automatically close comments on articles older than [X] days”. It disables the form on older posts and leaves approved comments visible. For a news site that wants discussion for a fortnight and silence after, that single checkbox beats every plugin on this page.
So what does the native route not do? Three things. It leaves the Comments menu, the dashboard widget and the Discussion settings sitting in your admin, which matters on client sites. It leaves the comment endpoints in the REST API and XML-RPC answering requests. And it leaves existing comments in your database, still rendered by some themes after the form is gone. If none of those three bother you, close this tab and go untick a checkbox.
Disable Comments by WPDeveloper: The Million-Install Default
Free. 1,000,000+ active installs. 94/100 from 280 reviews. Version 2.9.0, 1 September 2026.
Start with what a million installs buys you. Not quality on its own, but scrutiny. A CSRF flaw on this plugin gets found. The flip side is that WPDeveloper has to keep a million sites happy, and the 2020 backlash showed what happens when it forgets that.
What separates it from everything else here is how far its multisite support goes. Network-activate it and the settings move to Network Admin. From there you apply one configuration across every subsite, or configure them one at a time. Themeisle’s plugin (9,000 installs) and Simply Disable Comments (7,000) both list multisite compatibility. Neither documents per-subsite control from the network screen. On a 20-site network where three subsites keep their comments, that difference decides the job.
It also blocks comments at the API level, not just the theme level. The X-Pingback header is stripped, comment feeds redirect to their parent post, and outgoing pingbacks stop. The 2.9.0 blocked-attempt counter reports how many comment, trackback and REST attempts got turned away, in Site Health. Useful, or a vanity metric? Depends on whether you like seeing proof that a plugin is doing something.
Pros
- One vulnerability in 15 years on the WPScan record
- Per-subsite comment control from Network Admin
- WP-CLI commands for settings, deletion, export and import
- Keeps WordPress 6.9+ Notes working while public comments stay off
Cons
- Declares tested up to 7.0.4, one major version behind
- Interface is heavier than the job needs on one small site
- Vendor’s other products have a patchier security record
Pricing: Free on WordPress.org, with no pro tier listed and no paid unlock for anything described here. WPDeveloper sells other plugins and promotes them in the dashboard.
Best for: Multisite networks, WooCommerce stores, and anyone managing sites over WP-CLI. Skip if: you have one small site and want the smallest thing that works.
Verdict: Install this if you need network settings, API-level blocking or the delete tool, because nothing else free does all three. Running a single site with 30 posts and no store? You’re carrying an admin interface built for fleet management, and Simply Disable Comments does that job with less. If you already pay for a performance plugin, skip both and read the Perfmatters section.
Disable Comments by rbplugins: The Other Plugin With the Same Name
Free. 100,000 active installs. 76/100 from 24 reviews. Version 1.0.27, 27 May 2026.
Search the plugin directory for “disable comments” and one result is titled exactly that. It isn’t the famous one. This plugin, by rbplugins, runs on 100,000 sites, which is one tenth of the WPDeveloper plugin’s install base. Some of those installs are people who clicked the name they recognised.
It’s a simpler plugin, and simpler is a legitimate reason to choose something. But look at the rating gap first. 76 out of 100 across 24 reviews, against 94 out of 100 across 280. That’s an 18-point spread, and unlike the leader’s score it isn’t distorted by a five-year-old redesign row. Twenty-four reviews is also a thin sample. One unhappy person moves that number several points.
Maintenance is current but slower. The last release was 27 May 2026, three months before this page was updated. WPDeveloper shipped six releases in the same nine-month window. This plugin also declares tested up to 7.0.4, matching the leader’s gap rather than closing it.
Pros
- Lighter admin footprint than the 2.0-era interface
- Still actively updated, most recently 27 May 2026
- Free, with no upsell notices in the dashboard
Cons
- Rating of 76/100 is the lowest here
- Only 24 reviews, so the score is statistically shaky
- No documented multisite or WP-CLI support
Pricing: Free, no paid tier.
Best for: Sites already running it, where the plainer interface suits and deletion tools aren’t needed. Skip if: you’re comparing on merit rather than on name recognition.
Verdict: Choose this only if you already use it and like it. For a fresh install, Themeisle’s plugin holds a perfect 100/100 from 41 reviews and declares WordPress 7.1 compatibility. That makes it the better small-site pick on every number available. If you need network or CLI control, neither one qualifies and you’re back to WPDeveloper.
Disable Comments and Delete All Comments by Themeisle
Free. 9,000 active installs. 100/100 from 41 reviews. Version 1.3.3, 20 August 2026.
Picture a client site with 600 pages, a decade of accumulated spam, and a handover meeting on Friday. You want comments gone and the table cleaned in one pass, without adding a new menu to the admin. That’s this plugin’s scenario, and it’s the one it handles best.
Doing both jobs in one plugin is the point. Disabling and deleting usually means two plugins, or one plugin with a tools page you have to go hunting for. The rating reflects how well that lands: a perfect 100/100 across 41 reviews, with no one-star reviews at all. Set the 41-review sample against rbplugins’ 24, and Themeisle’s score is both higher and better supported.
It’s also the most current plugin in this comparison. Tested up to WordPress 7.1, updated on 20 August 2026, the day after 7.1 shipped. It requires PHP 7.4 rather than 7.0, which is the right call in 2026. That only matters if your host is running something ancient, and if it is, that’s a host conversation rather than a plugin problem.
The trade is reach. At 9,000 installs it has 0.9% of the user base of the WPDeveloper plugin. Fewer eyes means fewer bug reports and slower discovery of edge cases. Themeisle is a theme and plugin shop with a broad catalogue, not a single-product team.
Pros
- Perfect 100/100 rating across 41 reviews
- Tested against WordPress 7.1, unlike most rivals here
- Disable and bulk delete in the same plugin
- Requires PHP 7.4, so no legacy code paths
Cons
- Only 9,000 installs, a fraction of the leader’s exposure
- Multisite listed, but no per-subsite controls
- No WP-CLI commands
Pricing: Free on WordPress.org.
Best for: Single-site cleanups where old comments need deleting as well as disabling. Skip if: you run multisite or script your site setup from the command line.
Verdict: This is the pick for a single site in 2026, on rating, currency and scope. Choose the WPDeveloper plugin the moment you need network settings, WP-CLI, or WooCommerce reviews handled separately from ordinary comments. Don’t choose rbplugins over this one, because it scores 24 points lower on 24 reviews against 41.
Simply Disable Comments: The Answer to the 2.0 Complaints
Free. 7,000 active installs. 100/100 from 4 reviews. Version 0.3.2, 11 August 2026.
Where WPDeveloper answered a million installs with a settings app, HandyPlugins went the other way. This plugin does the disabling and stops. No dashboard notices, no upsells, no tools page. It’s the plugin those 13 angry reviewers of the 2.0 backlash were asking for, arriving two and a half years later in May 2023.
Read the rating carefully, though. 100 out of 100 sounds unbeatable until you see it rests on four reviews. Themeisle’s identical 100 rests on 41 reviews, and WPDeveloper’s 94 rests on 280. Four is not a sample. It’s an anecdote with a number attached.
Version numbering is the other flag. At 0.3.2 after three years, the developer is telling you this is still pre-1.0 software. HandyPlugins keeps it current, tested against WordPress 7.1 and updated on 11 August 2026. Seven thousand sites run it without visible drama. But it’s the youngest plugin here by more than five years, and the least battle-tested.
Pros
- No admin notices or upsells of any kind
- Tested up to WordPress 7.1
- Smallest footprint of any option on this page
Cons
- Rating rests on just four reviews
- Still numbered 0.3.2 after three years in the directory
- No deletion tool, no WP-CLI, minimal multisite UI
Pricing: Free on WordPress.org.
Best for: Developers who want comments off and nothing added to the admin. Skip if: you need to delete existing comments, or you want a rating backed by a real sample.
Verdict: Pick this when a clean admin matters more than tooling, which usually means your own sites rather than client work. If you also need old comments removed, Themeisle’s plugin does both jobs with ten times the review evidence. And if you’re comfortable in the shell, honestly, skip every plugin here and use core settings plus one bulk edit.
WP Comment Cleaner: For Sites Already Buried
Free. 20,000 active installs. 94/100 from 58 reviews. Version 7.1, 29 June 2026.
Take on a neglected site and you’ll meet a wp_comments table with tens of thousands of rows. Most of it is spam that was never approved. Disabling comments does nothing about that. Deletion is a separate job, and it’s this plugin’s whole reason to exist.
It has been in the directory since 23 August 2015, and its 58 reviews are the second-largest sample in this comparison, behind WPDeveloper’s 280. A 94/100 across 58 reviews tells you more than a 100/100 across four. It disables comments too, so on a rescue job it can be the only plugin you install.
Two things to watch. The version string reads 7.1, which is not a WordPress version and is easy to misread on a listing page. And its “tested up to” is 7.0.4, matching WPDeveloper’s gap. Deletion is permanent, so read the next section before you run anything.
Pros
- 58 reviews at 94/100, a well-supported score
- Built for bulk deletion first, disabling second
- In the directory since 2015, so the edge cases are known
Cons
- Declares tested up to 7.0.4, not 7.1
- Version 7.1 numbering invites confusion with WordPress versions
- Narrower than the leader once the cleanup is done
Pricing: Free on WordPress.org.
Best for: A one-off cleanup of a site with thousands of existing comments. Skip if: your site is new and has nothing to delete.
Verdict: Use it for the cleanup, then decide whether to keep it. If the site is also a WooCommerce store, the WPDeveloper plugin’s dry-run preview is safer. It shows which comments a delete would take before it takes them. For a plain blog with 40,000 spam rows and no store, this does the job, and its review record beats everything here except the leader.
Perfmatters: The Paid Option, If You Already Own It
USD 29.95 per year for one site. Renewal is USD 25.46 after the automatic discount. 30-day money-back guarantee.
Nobody should buy Perfmatters to disable comments. It’s a performance plugin, and disabling comments is one toggle among dozens. But if you already own it, or you’re weighing it up for other reasons, that toggle removes a plugin from your install list.
Pricing on Perfmatters’ own page is USD 29.95 for one site, USD 59.95 for three, and USD 124.95 for unlimited sites. That works out to USD 19.98 per site at the three-site tier. The unlimited licence costs 4.17 times the single. Renewals carry an automatic 15% discount, which brings the single-site renewal to USD 25.46. A 30-day refund window applies.
The toggle does more than its name suggests. Perfmatters removes comment support from every post type, strips the X-Pingback header, kills comment feeds, hides the Discussion page and drops the comment reply script. What it won’t do is work per post type. Its own documentation says the setting is global, all or nothing across the site, which every free plugin here beats.
Pros
- Comment disabling plus script removal in one place
- 15% automatic renewal discount, so the price drops
- Removes a single-purpose plugin from the install list
Cons
- USD 29.95 a year for something five free plugins do
- Global only, no per-post-type control
- Annual licence, so the cost repeats every year
Pricing: USD 29.95 (1 site), USD 59.95 (3 sites), USD 124.95 (unlimited), all per year, verified on the vendor’s pricing page on 1 September 2026.
Best for: Sites already running Perfmatters for speed. Skip if: comments are the only reason you’re looking at it.
Verdict: Buy Perfmatters for its caching and script control, then treat the comments toggle as a bonus. If comments are your only problem, Themeisle’s free plugin does that job for USD 0 and you keep the USD 29.95. And if you need comments off on posts but reviews left on for products, Perfmatters can’t do it at all. That’s a job for Disable Comments 2.9.0.
Should You Delete the Comments You Already Have?
Disabling and deleting are different decisions, and people conflate them constantly. Disabling closes the door. Deleting empties the room.
The very first question in the plugin’s own FAQ is about comment forms that keep appearing after you’ve disabled everything. That tells you how common this one is. The same FAQ tells you to delete existing comments before you apply the disable setting. Some themes keep displaying old comments even after the form is gone. If that happens to you, the theme isn’t checking comment status properly (a fifteen-year-old mistake that themes still ship with). Version 2.9.0 added a conflict scanner that diagnoses exactly this.
Before you delete anything, take a database backup. This is irreversible, there is no undo, and a comment table is not something you can reconstruct. Our walkthrough on how to back up your WordPress site covers the offsite options. Those are the ones that matter when the mistake is yours rather than the host’s.
Then use a preview. The dry-run added in 2.9.0 lists every comment a delete would match: author, date, post and an excerpt. You can download them as CSV first. That release also fixed CSV escaping, so a comment can’t run as a formula when the file opens in a spreadsheet. Formula injection is a real attack on anyone exporting user-submitted text.
One caution for stores. WooCommerce product reviews are stored as comments on the product post type, so a blanket disable takes your reviews with it. Version 2.9.0 made reviews a separate setting for the first time. You can close reviews while other product comments stay open, or keep reviews and kill everything else. If reviews carry your conversion rate, get this right before you touch anything.
How to Choose Your Method
Budget USD 0, one small site: Use core. Settings > Discussion, then one bulk edit, and you’re done in two minutes with nothing installed. Skip every plugin on this page. The only reason to add one is a leftover Comments menu that bothers a client.
Multisite, 10 or more subsites: Disable Comments by WPDeveloper, network-activated. It’s the only one here that lets you configure individual subsites from Network Admin, so it’s one screen instead of ten. Themeisle and HandyPlugins both run on multisite, but neither gives you that per-subsite control.
WooCommerce store that keeps reviews: Disable Comments 2.9.0, using the separate reviews setting. A blanket disable on any other plugin here takes your reviews down with your blog comments. Both live in the same comments table. If you don’t sell anything, this reason disappears and Themeisle’s plugin is lighter.
Inherited site, 20,000+ existing comments: WP Comment Cleaner or Themeisle, both of which delete as well as disable. Back up first, delete second, disable third, in that order. Simply Disable Comments can’t help here at all, since it has no deletion tool.
Already paying for a speed plugin: Use the toggle you own. Perfmatters at USD 29.95 a year already includes comment disabling plus script removal. Adding a free plugin for the same job means one more thing to update. If you’re not already paying, don’t start for this.
Comments now, silence later: Nobody needs a plugin for this. Settings > Discussion, tick “Automatically close comments on articles older than”, and enter 14 or 30. Old approved comments stay visible, new ones stop. It’s the least-used checkbox in WordPress and it solves a surprising number of cases.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who owns the Disable Comments plugin now?
WPDeveloper, the Bangladesh-based company behind Essential Addons for Elementor, has owned it since 2020. Samir Shah built it in 2011 and auctioned it for charity, with the winner donating to Effective Altruism Funds. WPDeveloper announced the acquisition on 29 November 2020. It still ships releases, most recently version 2.9.0 on 1 September 2026.
Is the Disable Comments plugin safe to use in 2026?
On the evidence, yes. WPScan records one vulnerability across the plugin’s 15 years, a CSRF issue fixed in version 1.0.4 back in 2014. Nothing has been recorded since, including throughout WPDeveloper’s ownership. Its sibling plugin Essential Addons has a patchier record, so keep automatic updates on, as you should for anything running on a million sites.
How do I disable comments on all existing WordPress posts?
Changing Settings > Discussion only affects future posts. For existing ones, go to Posts > All Posts and select them with the header checkbox. Choose Edit from Bulk actions, set Comments to “Do not allow”, then click Update. Repeat for Pages. A plugin does the same job in one setting, which is the main reason to install one.
Does disabling comments delete the comments I already have?
No. Disabling hides the form and blocks new submissions, but every existing comment stays in your database. Some themes keep rendering those old comments even with the form gone. If you want them gone for good, use a deletion tool and take a backup first, because nothing here can be undone.
Can I disable comments in WordPress without a plugin?
Yes, and for most single sites it’s the better answer. Untick “Allow people to post comments on new articles” in Settings > Discussion, then bulk edit existing posts to “Do not allow”. What you don’t get: the admin menus disappearing, the REST API and XML-RPC comment routes blocked, or bulk deletion of old comments.
Will disabling comments break WooCommerce product reviews?
It will, unless you’re careful. Reviews are stored as comments on the product post type, so switching comments off site-wide switches reviews off too. Disable Comments 2.9.0 added a separate WooCommerce reviews setting in September 2026. That lets you keep reviews while everything else stays closed.
Why do comments still show up after I disabled them?
Two usual causes. Your theme isn’t checking comment status correctly, which the 2.9.0 conflict scanner now diagnoses. Or a cached copy of the page is still being served. Version 2.8.0 fixed cache purging on 27 July 2026, so update the plugin and clear your cache before assuming anything is broken.
Final Verdict
The plugin survived its handover, which is not the usual ending. Disable Comments was auctioned to charity in August 2020 and rewritten within four months. It’s still on a million sites, with one vulnerability in 15 years and a release shipped today. The rating on its directory page is dragged down by a redesign row from December 2020. Nobody has posted a one-star review in over three years.
Choose Disable Comments by WPDeveloper for multisite, WooCommerce reviews or WP-CLI work. Choose Themeisle’s plugin for a single site, where its 100/100 across 41 reviews and WordPress 7.1 testing make it the better bet. Choose Simply Disable Comments if a clean admin screen matters more than tooling. Choose WP Comment Cleaner for a rescue job on a site drowning in old spam. Choose Perfmatters only if you were buying it anyway. And if you run one small site with no store and no network, choose no plugin at all. Two minutes in Settings > Discussion does the job.
Comments are one piece of a bigger maintenance picture. Auditing what else loads on every page? Start with our guide to how many plugins you should install, which covers the autoloaded-options limit that slows real sites down. And if the site sells anything, remember that product reviews are comments too. Check that your WordPress ecommerce hosting setup handles them the way you expect before you switch anything off.