Speaker 1: In this video, I'm going to compare Discord to Slack and make a recommendation on which platform you should use based on your audience, your goals, your budget, and the features and functionality that you need. At the end of the video, I'll make some general recommendations and throw in some tips to help you supercharge your online community regardless of which one you choose. Let's get into it. Slack and Discord are both chat and collaboration tools used to build online communities, enable remote workforce collaboration, and connect people digitally across the globe. While these platforms have a lot in common, they have some subtle differences that you should be aware of before deciding where to host your online community. Let's start with your audience. When selecting an online community tool, it's important to consider your audience so that way you reduce friction and select a tool that your audience is capable of quickly learning how to use and engaging with. You want to make sure that the second your user logs into your online community, that they're able to quickly navigate the tool and get value from the resources and information that you provide. Slack caters to a corporate community because of its roots as an enterprise communication platform. So many people that work in the Fortune 500 or even startups have Slack already installed because they use it at work in their day jobs. This can make Slack a little bit easier to adopt for people that don't come from that gamer culture and exist only in a corporate environment. Discord, on the other hand, you may find is not installed on a lot of people's laptops or mobile devices unless they engage in a Discord community already. This shouldn't be a deal breaker because Discord is a relatively easy platform to use, but some people have resistance to installing new applications and learning to use new platforms. And if that's the type of community audience that you're going to be catering to, it's a consideration that you should keep in mind. Another aspect of your audience is anonymity. Anonymity. Anonymity. Anonymity. Anonymity. Because of Discord's roots in gaming culture and less so being a corporate communication tool, a lot of people that use Discord will sign up with pseudonyms. People might show up with names like Jumbo Turtle or Forest Grump or Taco Tuesday 789. This could pose challenges if you need to know the actual identity behind the people using your online communication platform. You can mitigate this by using a tool like Common Room, which includes a Discord verification bot that would allow you to require users to authenticate themselves before being able to access certain pieces of content and certain channels within your Discord community. You can make this identity verification pretty seamless by incentivizing users to go through the verification process before they can access popular resources and people in your community. Identity verification leads to less trolling, a more safe space in your community, and it provides benefits to the community management team because they can collect more detailed demographics and identity information allowing them to run analytics and better cater to the sort of users that are inside of their Discord channel. I'll dig deeper into pricing here in a second. Now let's talk about your goals. Defining your goals will help you understand and make a decision on which platform to host your online community. Good questions to ask yourself are, am I hosting a product-centric community or am I hosting a community of practice where people are sharing advice but it's not necessarily tied to a specific business? You may also want to use one of these as a corporate communication tool or to create a way for a small community of friends to stay in touch online. Based on which use case you have for an online community tool like this, there's some important things that you should know. One is that Slack tends to support more third-party integrations. This is why it tends to be a better choice for corporate communications that may require integration with applications like your email, your calendar. But if you're not doing corporate communication and you're hosting an online community, you may want certain features that Discord offers. For example, advanced moderation functionality and user classification features so you can provide granular permission sets to people in your online community and moderate their actions based on those permissions that you define. It also appears that Discord has really been leaning into community lately. They started as a simple chat platform but now they support audio communication, things like watch parties, and they even recently launched a forum functionality in the event that your chat room becomes too noisy and you need to transition it to a forum structure where there's less noise and back and forth. And since I'm on the topic of advanced features like voice communication and moderation, let's talk about budget. Cost is one of the biggest differences between these two tools. Both Discord and Slack have a free tier. However, Discord provides you pretty much all of their advanced features within that free tier. Discord does have an optional payment option called Discord Nitro. But what's unique about Nitro is the cost of it is picked up by community members, so users, and don't funnel back to your community managers hosting the server. Discord also includes history for all of your communications in that free tier as well. So with Discord you get pretty much all the features available with no need to pay and the option to have some fun perks with the Discord Nitro membership option that some of your users could choose to purchase. Slack, on the other hand, has a free tier but it comes with limitations. For example, the free tier doesn't support data retention for longer than 90 days. They also put certain voice chat features behind a paywall unlike Discord. And if you need these features, the paid plans for Slack start at eight dollars per user per month, which can get expensive pretty quickly if you're building a community that will have hundreds or thousands of users. That price point means that if you're going to use Slack for an online community, you generally either need to keep it at the free tier or have some ROI value of your community so that way you can justify that $8 per user per month or more price tag. Now Common Room can help with this in two ways. One, Common Room can help you get around that 90 day retention period by storing some of the messages sent in your Slack communities for longer, even on the free tier of Slack. Common Room can also be used to generate analytics about your Slack or Discord community so that you can prove the business ROI if you're building a community that's part of a product, service, or some type of online business. And finally, let's talk about features. I mentioned Slack has a background in enterprise communication, which means it supports a large number of third party integrations and automations. This can be really important if you need to integrate your communication platform with outside tools. Discord, on the other hand, doesn't have as many supportive third party integrations, but it does support automation via webhooks, as does Slack. Discord also generally has more free tier features, which can sometimes make up for the lack of third party plugins, apps and automations, especially if that's not very important to your use case. Certain paid Slack plans also come with advanced analytics about your community where Discord doesn't have that native analytics functionality. Luckily, even if you choose the free tier of Slack, or you choose Discord, you can get those analytics with a tool like Common Room. I want to double click on automation for both of these platforms as well. I mentioned that Slack supports more native applications and plugins than Discord today, but both have a very flexible, intuitive and easy to use way to do customized automations. Common Room supports some common workflows that you might want to introduce, like welcoming a community member or running surveys in Slack or Discord. But if you need some sort of advanced automation, you could also leverage Slack or Discord's webhook functionality with Common Room or other common third party tools like Zapier to write advanced automated workflows and functionality into either tool without having to write any complicated code in a simple and intuitive user interface. Final thing on features and functionalities would be threading capabilities. Slack and Discord both have slightly different ways in which they manage threads within their applications. I would say Slack generally has the edge here, especially for really noisy channels, because the way that they do threads is very well organized and often will not clutter up your page. Slack has a nice little sidebar where you can be in a channel but also have a thread up on the side in this kind of unified user experience. Discord does support threads, but I would say that threading capability is slightly less advanced than what Slack has today. So if that's important to you, I would encourage you to install both applications, start up a thread so you can understand the differences in more detail. Discord has also been leaning into community lately with discoverability features left less hurdles for people to launch in forums like I mentioned. By the way, if you're building an online community on either platform, I'm going to include some resources in the description that are great guides to help you supercharge your Slack and Discord communities with techniques and recommendations that we've collected working with thousands of online communities. So in summary, you should use Slack if you need well organized threading capabilities. If you don't mind losing your user message data after 90 days on the free tier, you have budget for some of the more advanced features and if you need a large ecosystem of pre-built automations, applications, and bots. Discord on the other hand may be better if you need to support communications over text, video, and audio in a single platform. If you need advanced moderation and forum capabilities all in one. If you don't want to have to pay for premium features and are okay using a tool like common room for advanced analytics and automations. And if you don't necessarily mind that your users are anonymous, but as I mentioned before, there are ways to get around this by requiring your users to go through a verification process whenever they join your server. And regardless of which platform that you choose to host your community on, you should at least consider using a free community management tool like common room. And once you've scaled to the point where you need automations, analytics, and your community sprawls beyond your Slack or Discord out into the wider internet on channels like Reddit, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, Stack Overflow, and more, a tool like common room can make it much easier to understand, cater to, and scale your community regardless of where they go or decide to hang out on the internet or in the physical world. The last thing I'll mention is if you already have a Slack community and you're leaning towards Discord, and you'd like some help migrating that Slack community to a Discord server, I'll also include a resource in the description with some best practices for how to migrate your community from one platform to another while keeping your members engaged and not losing that critical community audience that you've already built. Thank you for watching. Be sure to subscribe to the common room channel and like the video for more content like this. Hope to see you again real soon.