We’re here to weigh in on the Slack vs. Discord debate, and also including Discourse in the mix, given these are three of the most popular options on the market today. We’ll use our evaluation framework to identify the tradeoffs between these channels AND help you decide which one is best for your community.
While both Slack and Discord facilitate conversations between members, they have taken slightly different approaches. Slack is more focused on text-based chatting and organizing conversations into threads. Discord enables your community to communicate in multiple ways, whether through text, audio, or video.
When it comes to Slack vs Discord, think about it this way:
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.
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. Discourse allows you to host a library of discussion posts and other content created by the community. This content is indexable to make it easier to find in search engine results. It also offers different ways to recognize and award members who are active or top contributors to the community.
To ground us in the same definitions, here’s how you can think about each of these channels:
Slack is a chat platform with robust threading functionality to nurture relationships between members who tend to be more visible than anonymous.
Discord is a real-time conversation platform, including extensive audio and video functionality, to cultivate relationships between members who tend to favor their anonymity.
Discourse is a discussion platform that hosts a library of content created by the community that is indexable and discoverable by search engines.
Read on for more detail on defining our evaluation framework and how Slack, Discord, and Discourse compare.
Using the above evaluation framework, we can see how Discord, Slack, and Discourse are positioned. In this next section, we’ll dive into more details on each channel, including what it is, its strengths, and its trade offs.
Discord first gained popularity as a communication platform for gamers, primarily focused on real-time conversations whether through text, audio, or video.
Many of its strengths and offerings build off of this foundation, offering a very consumer-friendly product:
Given its gamer-focused roots, some of the trade offs in the Discord app are around profiles, integrations, user interface, and analytics:
Slack has its roots as a business communication platform, primarily focused on text-based chatting and collaboration between colleagues.
Many of its strengths and offerings build off of this foundation, including:
Given its emphasis first and foremost on communications between business teams, additional features and functionality are unlocked with paid plans:
Discourse is an open source discussion platform built to reimagine what a modern internet discussion forum should be in the age of smartphones and social media. It’s often used by communities as a library of commonly asked questions and answers.
Many of its strengths and offerings build off of this foundation, including:
Given its focus on discussions specifically (and less so real-time conversations), there are some product trade offs in the user experience:
There are many different factors you could take into consideration when it comes to evaluating community channels. To help you organize your thinking, we recommend evaluating community channels based on two key questions:
You’re looking for a space for your members to connect with one another through common interests, knowledge sharing, and a celebration of others’ work, contributions, and achievements. You want to facilitate conversations and to give members a more casual, ephemeral way to connect everyday.
You want to broadcast in a one-to-many fashion to ensure your voice has the broadest reach possible. You also want the ability to amplify others’ messages and content that aligns with your company values or mission.
You want a space to help troubleshoot customer problems and resolve support tickets. Instead of a feed to scroll through, you want to offer technical resources and how-to guides in a searchable database that can also be permalinked.
An additional factor to think about is what we broadly call engagement dynamics, or how members will (or are expected to) interact with each other within the community.
The mechanics of some channels, including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Slack, are such that the information in your profile is quite public. This helps enable everyone to get a sense of who they're engaging with.
Others, such as Discord, Reddit, and Discourse, allow for and often have anonymous usernames, typically in honor of data privacy. Where you fall on this spectrum will dictate the short list of channels you can choose from.
Different channels use different messaging approaches. Synchronous messaging enables live conversations with a defined beginning and end (think Slack and Discord conversations).
Asynchronous messaging, on the other hand, lends itself to more open-ended conversations and does not require all participants to interact at the same time (think Discourse).
Depending on what kind of messaging you want will impact which community channel is best for your needs.
With these factors taken into consideration, the channel you select will serve you well not only today, but in the future as well.
In this post we used our evaluation framework of community goals and engagement dynamics to highlight key differences between Slack, Discord, and Discourse.
Slack should be your preferred channel if:
Discord is best if you want to:
Discourse is the channel to select if your online community is so large that chatting in real-time is difficult to manage, and so instead you can host a library of content that is indexable and discoverable by search engines.
For further guidance on seeding your community and to connect with other community builders and DevRel leaders, join our Slack community, Uncommon.
If you’re interested in learning more about how community growth platforms can magnify the impact of your community tools to better activate your community, check out Common Room.
You can get started for free or request a demo to see the platform in action.
June 15th, 2023
2:00PM - 2:45PM UTC
Tyler Hannan
Senior Director of Developer Advocacy, ClickHouse