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

The easiest way to onboard your first community members is to create a Telegram or a Geneva group. Discord and Slack are also reasonable solutions but are more useful at a later stage when you need to create different channels around different subjects.

The more I see communities moving to real-time platforms like Discord and Slack, the more I miss classic forum experiences. Long-lived threads with bumping, a long tail of search ranking for niche topics, locking/combining threads, etc. Real-time communities breed FOMO.

While many communities have built atop various communication platforms and social networks, those platforms aren’t primarily focused on serving the needs of communities. For instance, while both Li and David use Slack for their communities, the platform is clearly designed for enterprises, which is apparent from its pricing model (starting at $7/me... See more

If you want to build a strong community, you need to create a place for members to get together regularly. Fortunately, these days we have numerous robust tools to facilitate conversation, but it’s important to select the tool that works best for your team and community.

On the other hand, a chat program like Slack works very well for interpersonal communication, which can build a sense of teamwork and friendship on a smaller scale. Asking “How was your weekend?” feels awkward on a forum post, but it’s completely natural on Slack.