

Discord offers individual members the option to pay for an enhanced experience with a Nitro plan and unlock extra features. Many of its strengths and offerings build off of this foundation, offering a very consumer-friendly product: Discordĭiscord first gained popularity as a communication platform for gamers, primarily focused on real-time conversations whether through text, audio, or video. In this next section, we’ll dive into more details on each channel, including what it is, its strengths, and its trade offs. Using the above evaluation framework, we can see how Discord, Slack, and Discourse are positioned. Read on for more detail on defining our evaluation framework and how Slack, Discord, and Discourse compare. Slack is a chat platform with robust threading functionality to nurture relationships between members who tend to be more visible than anonymous.ĭiscord is a real-time conversation platform, including extensive audio and video functionality, to cultivate relationships between members who tend to favor their anonymity.ĭiscourse is a discussion platform that hosts a library of content created by the community that is indexable and discoverable by search engines. To ground us in the same definitions, here’s how you can think about each of these channels: It also offers different ways to recognize and award members who are active or top contributors to the community.

This content is indexable to make it easier to find in search engine results. Discourse allows you to host a library of discussion posts and other content created by the community. If neither of those are what you’re looking for, or your community has too many members where real-time chat becomes unwieldy, you should consider Discourse. If you already have a Slack for your community and are interested in migrating your members to Discord, check out best practices for moving your community from Slack to Discord. However, if you need moderation functionality and audio / video calls and don’t mind the anonymous nature of your members, then you should consider Discord.If you really need 3rd party integrations and accessing message history is less important (or you can afford the paid plans), then you should consider Slack.When it comes to Slack vs Discord, think about it this way: Discord enables your community to communicate in multiple ways, whether through text, audio, or video. Slack is more focused on text-based chatting and organizing conversations into threads. While both Slack and Discord facilitate conversations between members, they have taken slightly different approaches. We’ll use our evaluation framework to identify the tradeoffs between these channels AND help you decide which one is best for your community. Discord debate, and also including Discourse in the mix, given these are three of the most popular options on the market today.
