Slack vs Discord vs Discourse: The best tool for your community - Orbit

Today’s existing tools will continue to be sufficient for some communities, and Discord and Slack’s robust bot APIs are capable of solving some community needs. But fundamentally, they are still based on chat, and chat simply isn’t the right core user experience for many other communities. Unique functionality and bespoke interfaces provide distinc... See more

When Discord sent out a 23 question survey to its community, they discovered that over 30% of Discord’s users weren’t using the product primarily for gaming. They were hosting book clubs, friends’ group chats, fan communities, and even companies. Discord had become the internet’s “third place.”

If you’re building a large-scale community with a global audience, forums are probably going to work better. They enable your audiences to have structured conversations and collaborate without requiring people to be online at the same time.

There's not much that Discord does that users strictly can't do elsewhere. On one hand, it's a lot like Slack, blending public channels with easy side-chats and plenty of ways to rope in the right people. It's also a bit like Reddit, full of ever-evolving conversations that you can either try to keep up with or just jump into when you log in. (In f... See more

Discord is all about lively community engagement. It bridges content gaps by giving an “always-on” chat where fans may get a chance to interact with creators, but critically, it allows members of the community to carry on a continuous, fun conversation with each other outside the context of a creator’s content. This is valuable for creators as it 1... See more

Discourse and Circle are being used for more curation beyond what Discord can do. Discourse for example allows for your posted content to be indexed by Google, so you get search value.