Slack vs Discord - the ULTIMATE showdown

slack versus Discord which is the right platform for you and your community well in this video I'm going to walk through six key areas to help you make the right choice for you now let's start out with familiarity when building any kind of community you ideally want to use a platform that's fairly well known to your target audience now this is where slack and Discord are really quite different slack is very well known in the business world it's used by a variety of different types of businesses and different users inside of those businesses but Discord is a little bit more specialist it's very well known by Gamers and Developers and Technical people but outside of that it's a little bit less known now this kind of delineation is not hard and fast you need to make the right choice for your specific audience but let me give you a set of sample audiences and which platform I would use for those Target audiences for executives I go slack for gamers I go Discord for technical developers I go Discord for marketers I go slack and for general consumers frankly I would not go with either of these because general consumers are probably going to be better off in in a forum or a Facebook group or something like that now let's move on to Simplicity how easy to use is slack versus Discord and this is another area where the two platforms really differ quite a bit as a general rule for most users that I've ever seen slack is pretty straightforward to use got a bunch of channels you can go and type into those channels you can use emojis you can add videos you can add links it's pretty straightforward to use but Discord on the other hand is a whole different deal there's a lot more in Discord when it comes to flexibility and functionality you've got all these different different pains with you know lists of users and channels and people are often you know dumping tons of emojis in there and there's multiple pop-ups and screens appear when you use Discord so as a general rule I would say that slack is a lot easier to use for most users than Discord now again this is going to depend a little bit on your audience right if you're focusing on a technical audience or a more sophisticated audience then the fact that Discord is a little bit more complicated to use maybe isn't that big of a deal now let's move on to setup and administration how easy or complicated ated is it to set up slack versus Discord which is which now the good news is that setting up slack and Discord is pretty simple you just go and register an account you spin up a workspace and boom you're Off to the Races where it gets a little bit different is when it comes down to integration in inside of a business and also any security features that you might require now when it comes to integration inside of a business both slack and Discord have the usual things that most companies are looking for they have two Factor authentication the traffic is encrypted the single sign on etc etc but where there is a big difference is when it comes to key security features slack is much further ahead than Discord in that slack can be used and configured for hippoc compliance s so 2 and three uh CSA EU uh us privacy Shield whereas Discord it's kind of behind the times when it comes to this stuff and frankly just researching this in the first place I found it much more complicated to get concrete answers on Discord versus slack so if you're going to need those security features you are definitely going to want to go slack now if you want to build an amazing Community around your product or service you want to build consistent growth and engagement you should totally check out my community leadership core accelerator so we provide Hands-On coaching training and accountability it's all tailored directly to your company and it helps you to deliver really clear consistent results every single quarter with way less stress and anxiety if you're interested in this check out the link in the video description down there where you can book a call with us and we'll listen to what you want to achieve what some of the challenges you're having and we'll provide you some really concrete next steps inside of that call now let's talk about audio and video features now let me be frank with you 90% of your community members 90% of the time are probably going to be just chatting to each other with text and both slack and Discord are excellent at this I suppose it's to be expected but both slack and Discord have dedicated audio and video features that you might want to consider now slack is way simpler when it comes to this sure you can add pictures and you can upload videos and you can upload Audio Two uh conversations and two discussions and it does have have audio calls and video calls and it works generally pretty fine most of the time but frankly in most of the slack workspaces that I've ever worked in people don't tend to use those audio and video features but Discord has a whole other feature called Discord stages which slack doesn't have an equivalent to which is way you can run online events right within your Discord Community now the Discord stages feature is great however I've heard from some members of my community leadership core accelerator as well as other folks that it's a little bit wonky at times so my recommendation when it comes to audio in video is you don't do any of it inside inside of slack and Discord and instead use separate platforms for this now if you want to run interactive engaging community events where your members are going to be you know talking with their mic and have their video cameras on then I frankly I'd go zoom zoom is just the best platform for that but if you want to run a on to many event such as a webinar or a workshop where you're going to be primarily broadcasting outwards and people are just watching and maybe interacting with with text chat then I'd go webinar Jam both zoom and webinar Jam tools that I use myself I love them they do a great job so go check those out so now let's talk about Integrations because your slack or your Discord are not living in an isolated environment you're going to be using a whole bunch of other tools that you might want to integrate with your communities this might be Google Docs or sheets it could be coder or notion it could be Zoom it could be rewatch it could be any number of different types of platforms now when it comes to the Simplicity of setting up an integration with another platform and just the sheer range of options when it comes to integrating with other platform forms slack wins the day here there's thousands of Integrations out there and it's super easy to get up and running Discord on the other hand bit of a pain in the backside because you generally have to use Bots for this it's a little bit more complicated and it's a little bit fincker to get set up and running why are you making this so difficult but frankly I wouldn't worry too much about this Integrations question if you choose slack or Discord and it integrates with the tools and services that you're using then great but if not there are tools like zapia that you can use which is basically a massive Library of tools that you might use in the world like Google and Cloud flare and convert kid and whatever else and you can pretty much glue them together in any in any way you can think of so if the integration story with slack or Discord isn't right for you then just go zapier all right so let's dig into our final area here which is pricing H we have to pay now the good news here is that both slack and Discord have free plans and you can actually do an awful lot with both of those free plans now in terms of how much you can do with both of those free plans you can definitely do a lot more with Discord but the free plan on slack is comprehensive enough where you can build a really pretty significant sustainable Community without spending a penny but how does the pricing work here well with slack it's basically per use of pricing that you pay every month right so you pay it's about $7 a month uh as I record this video right now and there are a set of features that are available like you get expanded and improved analytics you can see uh uh history that goes beyond 3 months and there's a bunch of other perks that you get as well now Disco doesn't really have per user pricing instead they've got some programs available called Nitro basic and Nitro that you can think of are kind of like upgrades to the overall Discord server now is it worth paying for slack and is it worth paying for Discord it really depends on what your needs are but I can tell you one thing for sure that if you're going to pay for slack it's going to be a lot more expensive than paying for Discord so now we've been through all of those six areas so what's my overall conclusion here and my overall set of recommendations well put simply it really depends a lot on who your specific audience is and what you want to accomplish but I will break it down like this if you want a simple reliable chat platform that's good for general purpose audiences the kind of folks that we just going to be generally working in businesses then slack is a great solution for you however if you want to Hot Rod your community if you want to do a lot more with Bots and you want a lot more in terms of features and you want to address very specific audiences such as Gamers developers Engineers technical people then Discord is a great solution now to illustrate this point between Slack for kind of General business users and Discord for more technical users a good example of this are my members in my community leadership core accelerator I would say that the vast majority of my members who are focused on technical engineering developer audiences vast majority of them are using Discord however my members that are focused on kind of higher level executive or marketing or general user audiences they tend to use slack as well so that's it hopefully this video was useful in guiding your thinking when it comes to slack versus Discord but remember it really does depend on your specific audience and what you want to achieve if you've got any questions about this be sure to get them down into the comments and let me know where you settled did you decide on slack did you decide on Discord who is your audience why did you make that decision would love to check it out see you [Music] [Applause] [Music] soon he

Channel: Jono Bacon

Views: 1,387

Keywords: dev rel, devrel, developer relations, community, community management, comunity, communityengagement, community engagement, jono bacon, open source, opensource, slack vs discord, slack or discord, discord vs slack, discord or slack, discord vs slack for business, slack vs discord vs teams, slack vs teams comparison, slack vs microsoft teams, slack microsoft teams comparison, slack for business, discord server, is slack good for business, discord chat

Id: QHHyP5VHwhE

Length: 9min 6sec (546 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 11 2024