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There are several differences in the philosophy of Codidact vs. Stack Exchange that may contribute to people preferring CD over SE.

**For-profit vs non-profit**

Stack Exchange is a for-profit company. With that in mind, they have to worry about making a profit and monetizing their products; there's always that driving factor of the money driving what they do.

Codidact, on the other, is a non-profit venture, funded by donations and out of pocket expenses by the creators. (There's currently no actual organization that can accept donations, but we're working on setting up a non-profit or something similar.)

**Community focus vs knowledge base**

Stack's stated goal is to be a repository of information, which leads to strict policies reducing clutter.

Codidact's ultimate goal is to serve the _communities_ it hosts. This means that each community can set its own goals and visions, including how strict they want to be with comments etc. Being a repository of information is a secondary goal.

**Open-source vs closed-source**

Codidact is entirely open-source; this means that anyone can access the codebase and use it, for free, allowing anyone to set up their own Q&A instance however they want. Stack, on the other hand, is closed-source (excluding the data explorer), and people have to pay to set up a Q&A instance.

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Ultimately, most of the differences between Codidact and Stack come from Codidact explicitly focusing on serving the _community's needs_. This is where features such as Categories come from, and the upcoming Abilities change; both serve to address longstanding problems that arose with the Stack software. We can also include community-specific features for communities that need them, a la the Sefaria linker at Judaism Codidact.

There's the Codidact Arbitration & Review Panel, which will act as a supervisor and make sure that both moderators and staff members have a proper way to deal with conflicts that arise between them.

Yes, Stack is a much more advanced project, with over ten years in the game vs Codidact's year or so in development, and it shows. But I believe that Codidact has the ability to set itself apart as a viable alternative to Stack, and serve alongside Stack to meet the needs of various communities.  
Some communities will prefer Codidact, others Stack, some neither; and that's fine. Different communities have different needs.