Originally published on my blog
You may have seen some Slack-Discord migrations recently (Laravel's new Discord channel is a great example) and wondered why are developers moving to a "gaming chat" and if you should too. Here are some things you need to know to know about Discord before making a decision:
First off, Discord is not "gamers-only". Yes, they've focused on gamers, but their platform is awesome for any kind of use (and they explicitly welcome developers).
Also, Discord is free. Yes, you can buy Discord Nitro to get exclusive perks (animated profile pictures, animated emoji, etc), but normal use it's free. That's right; no message limit, free calls, unlimited images, etc.
Talking about calls, Discord has been described as the best VOIP solution in the market and they even provide videochat and screen-sharing (only for groups now tho, they're working on server support for it).
And what about integrations? You're probably using Slack webhooks to get GitHub or Travis notifications and those platforms doesn't seem to provide Discord support, do they? Well, not explicitly, but if you append /slack to any Discord webhook it'll behave exactly like a Slack webhook, and you'll be able to use it anywhere.
So, who's using it? There are official Discord communities for Yarn, Vue, Laravel, GraphQL, Elixir, OBS, Vapor, Brave Browser, Rainmeter, Gentoo, Statamic and probably a lot more.
While Slack is more enterprise-focused and has a bigger app marketplace, I'd encourage you to try Discord. Maybe you'll like it better!
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Top comments (3)
I'm on both Discord and Slack a lot—I just use them for really different things. As a professional, I tend to prefer to use Slack because it can be compartmentalized, identity-wise and I can choose an appropriate icon for each space. I can also log out of or turn notifications off of an individual slack workspace if I'm off the clock and want to relax.
Discord I tend to use for personal things, fun projects, or non-work discussion groups; I still have groups where I talk about code, but not in a way connected to my professional work, and where I'm interested in being in most of the channels on a server. If an office used Discord, I think I'd feel weird about it—I think Discord feels like it's more for friends!
Yeah, I tried Discord. Having to be in all channels in workplace/server (or whatever they call it) is a complete showstopper for me. Having to hack around it using bots and permissions system does not make the problem go away in my opinion. For small or very focused communities it might be ok, but even though my current company is relatively small, we have dozens of channels and I can't imagine having to be in all of them.
My issue with Discord is you are automatically added to all channels. This is just bad. Yes there is ways to hide those channels but I have to do this will all the machines I have discord on.