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by Kiro 3212 days ago
Many companies and open source communities have migrated from Slack to Discord. How is it different, aside from marketing and playful copy?
2 comments

Feature set.

Slack has a bazillion integrations with different services. Discord's integrations are mostly focused around game streaming. Slack lets you use a different email and identity for each team. Discord gives you a single unified identity that you use everywhere and doesn't even expose email. Slack has customizable data retention policies. I'm pretty sure Discord doesn't, but I don't actually know what limits it even places on message history. Discord lets you block people (which makes sense for a social group). Slack very intentionally doesn't support blocking or ignoring (because it's for business communications; if you're being harassed, that's an HR issue, employees should not be able to simply ignore each other).

And of course there's more, like SSO, user provisioning, custom user groups, guaranteed uptime, etc.

Don't get me wrong, Discord is great. But it's not really the right tool for companies. The only reason a company should use Discord instead of Slack (or Stride or whatever else) is because they're cheap and don't want to pay for their business communication tool.

marketing is it really. I am not sure if I could sell a tool where I am working when it states it is for gamers.

But maybe my marketing skills are just not up to the task.

I use both in a very similar way though.