[makewavesnotwar]

Funny that as Discord releases a light theme, Slack releases a dark theme.

But in seriousness, does Slack really have any value proposition over Discord beyond Screen Hero these days?

I switched my organization over to Discord based on the ability to create public channels for testers/customers to communicate with my team on the server without any role-based overhead (also because my target market is largely the Twitch/gamer crowd - most of whom already have Discord set up).

I understand that there are less integrations baked in, but most are easily worked around with webhooks.

[ilikehurdles]

I do not trust Discord on data privacy.

It's not just the target market being the gamer crowd, its focus on promoting gaming content is beyond distracting for a work setting.

Take its font-and-center features:

- The primary page with all the game and stream ads has zero value for productivity.

- Its voice chat is great but not nearly as valuable as a video meeting integration.

- I don't need or want to know what application or game you have open right now or what music you're listening to. I just want to know if you're available right now or if not, when you will be.

Integrations, emphasized. Adding a swath of app integrations was a "wow" factor when Slack first came on the scene, and I've had very little trouble introducing Slack at organizations with minimal IT resources because of this. Setting up and maintaining webhooks is "too much" for a lot of people who can otherwise manage a Slack org.

[giggles_giggles]

I don't see why Slack would be more trustworthy than Discord when it comes to data privacy, when we're talking about a company that failed to disclose a breach for 5 years.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/18/slack-password-breach/

If you care about your data, you have to be able to own it, and neither Slack nor Discord offers that option.

[jedieaston]

Discord doesn't have any integrations for Enterprise users, like SSO, retention policies, etc. Many large companies probably wouldn't be able to use it, not to mention we don't know what Discord is doing with the data (not that it is a bad chat tool, it's great, but only really useful for casual groups).

[yuft]

Do we know what Slack is doing with the data?

[grardb]

Maybe not for a small company, but I simply can't imagine it for a larger organization.

Even ignoring integrations/plugins/bots – of which Discord has almost nothing useful for product development – a huge issue with Discord is that you have no choice over which channels you are in. At Atlassian, we literally have hundreds of different Slack channels for various teams/products/whatever, and everyone has access to everything which isn't private. With Discord, that would get ugly really quickly.

In my eyes, that's the biggest reason I'd choose Slack over Discord. Legitimately, I think it's a better tool overall, but even for what I use Discord for, it's very annoying not to be able to leave a channel that you have no interest in. I can collapse/mute things, but it's still not super helpful when there are tons of them.

[Jowsey]

You could quote easily create a bot account that allows people to set their own custom role for specific channel access, though? There's API bindings for basically any language. Of course it's not as good as native access but if it's a big problem, creating a simple bot is a viable solution.

[bobakanoosh]

Just a sidenote - Discord has always had a light theme, they just revamped it recently. Sadly the light theme will never be usable until they change the color of rank names and such not. The majority of people use dark theme, so they make server icons and role colors that look good on dark theme, not light theme.

[whorleater]

Ignoring the feature set, is data retention policy not a consideration? For us, we paste customer log data for debugging purposes, and Discord's lack of a clear enterprise data retention policy means that we're not assured customer data isn't winding up where it shouldn't be.

Honestly I couldn't care about gifs/emojis/themes/threads/etc, but also the lack of SSO means it's a giant security issue. What if one of your devs loses their password, and you can't mandate 2 factor because Discord sign in is out of your control?

[joecot]

After Hipchat died, I tried to get my company to move to Discord instead of Slack. We ended up not doing so, because Discord's TOS does not allow commercial use, only personal use.

https://discordapp.com/terms

This is likely why there are few integrations developer use in Discord as well.

[83457]

Threaded conversations are nice