[killyp]

Serious question...

What are the benefits of using Slack over Discord? I know Slack has been around longer, looks more professional and has more tie-ins with work flow management tools but those seem like small advantages compared to how feature rich Discord is. Just genuinely curious as I prefer Discord for communicating with my coworkers about non-sensitive information but it doesn't seem to get any love outside of video game and internet communities.

[hombre_fatal]

One thing I can't help but notice is that Discord and its API are pretty unreliable. My bot and users regularly encounter unavailability errors. But mainly my bot.

It makes me wish I could pay a monthly fee to get better service, but in reality I'm sharing the same freely-distributed resources as any spammy Discord server. For example, I've been in Discord servers incessantly spammed by its users counting to the number 1,000,000, messages scrolling by like access logs during a DDoS. And I'm sitting there chuckling, "my server is in the same bucket as these people?"

At least Slack lets you pay them for an uptime SLA. I don't think I'd use Discord for a serious venture.

That said, surely your niche plays a large role in which one you pick. I'm somewhat in the gaming niche and Discord was a no-brainer. Gamers/teens are already on a dozen other Discord servers. Meanwhile, all of the Slack groups I'm a part of are professional.

[Macha]

> At least Slack lets you pay them for an uptime SLA.

The paid SLA is 99.99%, which is 1hr/yr downtime, but they've definitely missed that on our instance at least. The only thing I can really say that Discord is worse at is that discord has had a couple of total login server failures, but an individual server blipping out for an hour or three seems about equally common on both in my experience.

[zackkitzmiller]

https://slack.com/security

These compliance certifications.

[LinuxBender]

I am not a fan of either Slack or Discord, but I would guess it is the feature requests that companies have made to Slack around it's API's, data retention policies, access controls, chat logging and monitoring and such that make people lean towards it. Discord could probably implement the same features if they wished to go that direction.

[Thaxll]

Discord is an amateur product for enterprise. You can't even use SSO / AD to log into it.

[paulcole]

>Slack has been around longer, looks more professional and has more tie-ins with work flow management tools

Others (like myself) see these as much bigger advantages.

[killyp]

The tie-ins with work flow management tools I get (even though most of this can be set up in Discord as well) but I think the look and tenure of the application is not really that big of a deal. If you want professional looking from a company that has been around forever then pick Microsoft Teams, otherwise pick the best one. And I have a hard time seeing Slack as better than Discord.

[paulcole]

Just because you don't care how something looks doesn't mean that's true for everyone.

Fashion and style matter to lots of people. If 2 things are roughly equivalent, the one that's cool and looks neat is going to be the one chosen by the people who do care about those things.

[crescentfresh]

Is that what Discord is (a Slack competing product)?? I've never found the time to look up Discord but I hear it referenced a lot.

On the other hand I use Slack daily.

[crowbahr]

Discord isn't really a Slack competing product as much as it's a Teamspeak and Mumble competing product... or at least at the start.

Initially it was just easy to use VOIP with rich text chat channels. Now they've added in video calls and a video game store meaning they're more gunning for Steam and even less for Slack.

I do not see them as being Slack competing. They're too casually focused to be a threat in an enterprise environment.

[killyp]

I completely forgot they added the video game store. That would kill them as a consideration for any kind of corporate environment.

[_asummers]

If they were targeting themselves to that space, that would be an administrator toggle without question.

[xnyan]

Default Windows 10 comes with preinstalled video games, much less a store. Discord already has subscriptions, at some point I see them selling a version with enterprise features.

[Navarr]

I don't think anyone considers Discord a competing product. It targets a different market/userbase than Slack.

Slack is very much setup for business use and integrations.

Discord has a bot API, but it's mostly focused around realtime chat for communities (like a community-focused Skype).

They're very similar, but serve different purposes and different markets

[killyp]

I wouldn't say they compete directly as one is obviously targeted at corporate and the other is targeted at gamers. But they are extremely similar and even the UI, while themed completely different, is extremely similar.

[bytematic]

Essentially the exact same app but with voice channels for talking to people alongside the text channels.

[brynjolf]

Discord has a worse TOS that implies spying on you and has large Chinese investors. That combined with less certification means it is hard to use Discord in an enterprise environment.

[adamnemecek]

One big difference is that with Slack you log into single workspaces, with discord you log into all your groups at once.

This is big for enterprise.

[mcintyre1994]

Discord search at least on mobile is completely unusable for anything serious - you can click a result to jump to that point in the chat, but you can't scroll from there - it just shows a few messages before and after. Compare to Slack which can jump to any point in the chat and scroll as much as you need from there.

[jliptzin]

Kind of funny to me that two business communication/productivity apps would be named Slack and Discord.

[egypturnash]

Every time I load Discord I feel like it takes pains to remind me that it is not a safe space for me. It is a safe space for Gamerz, who have a marked tendency to behave like unsupervised teenage boys.

[amiga-workbench]

You get the skip the edgy loading screens.

[fargo]

Slack offers Enterprise sales

[1290cc]

Thats what so many miss in a tech company IPO.

Slack has built a business model off commodity tech that was around for decades. It has happy customers who continue to spend money with them and a plan to continue growing their revenue with more happy customers.

Personally I just see it as a refresh of yammer or a business focused discord but at the end of the day someone in procurement is signing checks for Slack.

[ousta]

slack is a marketed IIRC manager.

[andrewmcwatters]

Enterprise IRC that people actually want to use and will pay for. B2B is incredibly lucrative if you cater to large organizations' risk needs.

That being said, I'm sure the valuation is overinflated. The ARR ranges I've read don't justify it.

If you're feeling bold and want to speculate, I'd probably short it.