Is Discord better than Slack? Discord: Is Discord better than Slack? In short, Discord is a great option for online gaming communities, while Slack is better for businesses that want instant messaging functionality for team members looking for team chat apps. I’m not a gamer. To tell you the truth, the most advanced game I ever played was Mario back in the 90s. However, I’m here today, talking about Discord and comparing it with Slack, the biggest team chat app there is. As luck would have it, some of my coworkers are gamers and heavy Discord users. They helped me out and shared some expert opinions about Discord for this comparison. As for Slack, I’ve become a bit of an expert in it, since I’ve written a number of reviews on this app. Primarily, the Slack alternatives, Slack vs. Flock, Slack vs. Skype, and other articles you can find on the Chanty blog. Speaking of which – we are Chanty and we are building the next best team chat app. With so many team communication tools, we started a comparison marathon where we actually use different apps within our team. We analyze them, learn about their pros and cons and use all this knowledge to create something better than the rest. If you want to give Chanty a try, sign up and give it a go – we would love your feedback. For those who are in a hurry, here’s a short Slack vs. Discord comparison table: Slack Discord Target audience Business Business, Gaming Primary feature Text communication Voice communication Pricing Freemium Pro $7.25 user/month Business+ $12.50 user/month Free plan Nitro Classic plan $4.99 user/monthNitro plan $9.99 user/month Message history limit 90 days of message history in Free plan Unlimited Integrations Limit of 10 integrations in Free plan2400+ integrations in paid plans Unlimited API integrations Video conferencing For no more than 2 users in Free plan For up to 50 users in Paid plans Up to 25 users Screen sharing Yes (in paid plans) Yes Interface color options 20+ theme options Either light or dark theme Storage limit Files stored for 90 days in Free plan, 10GB – 1TB in Paid plans Unlimited File upload limit 1GB 8MB/file in Free plan 100MB/file in Nitro plan Limit for channel members You may receive a limitation system notification starting at 8,5K members The default online concurrent user limit is 5,000 but it can be raised Conversation threads Yes No Voice-only channels Yes Yes Push to talk No Yes Slack vs Discord concept At their core, Discord and Slack are very similar. Both are team chat apps with a similar interface. Both apps have team communication organized in channels. The biggest difference between the two is their target audience, and of course, their specific features. Here is how both tools position themselves: Discord – Your place to talk and hang out Slack – Where work happens Slack primarily focuses on the business sector. Discord was initially focused on the gaming industry; however, in light of their recent updates and developments, there are now numerous business teams on Discord. To this day, Discord has become a synonym for gaming. In fact, they even have a website with a list of Discord servers (teams) where you can look for groups that match your interests. The majority of servers are about gaming, but you will see all sorts of different communities. Essentially, there is a server about everything. Ariana Grande fans, Android app enthusiasts, Girl Scouts and many others – all have a place on Discord, making it more of a social network than a team chat app. The first thing to mention is that Discord is focused on voice chat. The main reason is that gamers need high-quality, lag-free voice chat to communicate with each other when playing different games. Discord fits the bill perfectly, providing reliable voice communication all around. This is how Discord users think that Discord and Slack are different: I like to describe it (Discord) as a ‘real time Reddit’ because of the way that you join many specific servers (subreddits) and join ongoing conversations (posts). Slack is not like this a lot because it focuses on building a service that is curated for businesses and internal communications so in turn, Slack comes off more like a conference call or a corporate chat room. – Noah Weidner, Discord user Slack vs Discord pricing If you’re looking for one major reason why people are looking for Slack alternatives, it’s the price of the app. This is the biggest roadblock for people who try Slack and I can see why this happens. Slack’s pricing starts from $7.25 per user per month for those who want to get rid of the limitations such as the limit of recent 90 days of messaging history and 10 integrations. If you also want more features, such as 99.99% uptime, guest access and 24/7 priority customer care, you will have to pay even more – $12.5 per user per month. Discord is free and it has very few limitations. Unlike the free plan in Slack, you will keep your team’s message history. If you like Discord so much that you want to pay for it, there is Nitro and Nitro Classic plans, which gives you a few perks. These include 100MB of space, the use of a GIF avatar, higher quality of screen sharing, animated emojis and a profile badge that says how long you’ve been supporting Discord. The discord character limit is 2000. Slack vs Discord interface Discord’s user interface is pretty similar to the one in Slack. Your contacts are on the left and conversations are on the right. However, Slack’s interface seems better because all of the channels, DMs and apps are clearly visible on the right. On the other hand, Discord is slightly more complicated. You have to find channels and direct messages under different menus. In Discord, you can choose a dark theme color as well as light mode. On the other hand, Slack only allows you to customize the sidebar with the contacts and apps and you can choose one of the 21 available colors. If you know your way with code, you can even customize the entire Slack scheme using custom CSS and changing the CSS file of the desktop app. Overall, there are lots of customization options in Slack, and it’s no longer just a communication app. In fact, it gets more cumbersome with each year. For example, it took me more than five minutes to find where you customize Slack’s color options. On the other hand, I found it immediately in Discord. Discord seems more intuitive when it comes to setting up the app. If you’re looking for an app that is truly intuitive and easy to use, I strongly recommend checking out Chanty. If you’re a gamer, I’m not sure it will meet all of your needs, but it will definitely help you with work. As mentioned before, servers in Discord are teams in Slack. There are a lot of people saying that switching teams in Slack is more difficult than switching servers in Discord. In my own testing, I’ve found that this is not true. When you set up a Discord account, you can join and leave servers as you please. You don’t have to go through the whole onboarding process with each team you join, which is the case with Slack. On the other hand, once you do go through the onboarding process for each new team, switching teams in Slack is super easy, just like switching servers in Discord. There are text tricks in Discord. Discord uses Markdown, a system for text formatting. All you need to do is to add some characters before and after the text that you want to stand out.