Online Learning Communities— Slack v/s Discord 🤔
By: Raj Kunkolienkar
Tags: Online Learning, Slack, Edtech, Education, Discord

Feature Breakdown

Discord : Multiple Servers & Channels

Multiple Hubs

A single user can live in multiple Workspaces (Slack) & Servers (Discord).

Both your DPs and name can be modified per the workspace in Slack. On Discord, your DP is global across servers in Discord while your nickname can be customised for the server.

Expect people walking in to your community to be a part of multiple hubs.

Channel Based Organisation

Both Discord and Slack allow you to conduct discussions across multiple channels. Take care to build up channels only as and when demand for them crops up.

Channel level notification settings helps one cut out on the noise and tune into relevant discussions. Channels can be both private and public, allowing for hierarchies and closed room discussions to peacefully coexist.

Discord allows you the flexibility to arrange channels and assign them to categories which are collapsible. This helps us organise channels under suitable headers, unlike Slack which forces an alphabetical arrangement.

Threading

Since Slack is out to try and replace e-mail, they have a neat threading feature implementation. Expect a smooth experience only once everyone sticks to using it as intended.

Discord is built for gaming, hence misses out on threading completely. That’s a bummer!

DMs & Group DMs

The ability to have 1:1 or private group conversations is critical for an active learning community. By default, both the platforms allow you to directly message (DMs) members of the hub.

The difference lies in the fact that DMs on Slack live inside workspaces — you’ll end up having different conversations with the same person in different workspaces. Note that you won’t be able to message people who you don’t share a workspace with.

On Discord, DMs live independent of servers. Users have a UID which you can use to DM them. Users do have a choice to block DMs from users who they aren’t friends with.

Bots & Integrations

Bots, integrations and automation can help post updates, conduct polls, connect individuals and services with the workplace. Slack and Discord allow API access and have their respective bot platforms.

Donut (Slack) helps you onboard and introduce members to each other.

Slack’s bot and automation ecosystem is rich. The ability for bots to inject custom buttons and logic flows right within the workspace gives it an edge over Discord’s ecosystem.

We’d recommend Slack based communities to sparingly use bots meant for team building and culture to drive up engagement in their community. Take care to not introduce tools just because they exist — do it to solve problems that your communities faces, or flows that they want to make happen.

As for Discord, the bots are restricted to using Discord’s markup language which is akin to Markdown. To overcome the lack of interactivity, developers usually often hook up actions to custom emoji reactions to a message — like assigning a role, giving access to specific channels. Note that even though Discord bots can create Group DMs, they can’t be added to them (unlike Slack bots).

Voice & Video

Both Slack and Discord have inbuilt video chat and voice calling features. Don’t be surprised to see these features being underutilized. Discord has a limit of 10 people on a video call, whereas Slack only allows 1:1 calls on the free tier.

A dedicated video conferencing platform such as Zoom.us would come handy if you are serious about non-chat based engagement for your community.

Discord also has voice channels, which are akin to text channels — you can tune in to a voice channel and chatter.

Invitations

You can natively invite people to your slack workspace using their E-Mail ID. If you are adventurous, you can use slackin to allow people to invite themselves to public Slacks.

In Discord, you can add new members by passing around an invite link (whose expiry you control). For public discord servers, this makes onboarding a breeze. For private Discords, this is less secure method than Slack’s mail ID tied invites.

Pricing

For online communities which seek to run at scale or are bootstrapped, the question of cost is rather critical. And this is where Discord steals the show over Slack.

Although the free tier is rather liberal, Slack charges $8 per active user per month in order to give you access to chats beyond the latest 10k chats, have 10+ bots on the workspace and have shared channels.

Discord is completely free! You have access to all the messages on your server, no question asked. The paid tier does give your server a few cosmetic and feature boosts, though these might not be relevant to running a learning community.