Slack vs Discord

[Krever]

One of the very first things we had to do when building this community was to decide on the chat tool for it. We went with Discord and I wanted to share the reasoning behind this decision.

Slack

Pros

• Good support for threads
• Simpler
• Closer to the primary audience of business professionals
• My personal preference

Cons

• 90 days of history in free plan
• Minimally harder to join

Discord

Pros

• Infinite history
• Easy to join
• Better moderation tooling
• More features in general (read-only channels, moderation, forums, cooldown period)
• Preferred by existing Scala communities and OSS in general

Cons

• Spam bots
• More friction around using threads

Notes:

Slack offers a discount for non-profits. But even with the discount, it would still cost a lot of money for even 1k of users. And to get a discount, you have to have legal status of a non-profit entity.

Final decision

In the end, even if Slack is more "business-y" and even if I really wanted to use it (because I like it as a tool), we decided to go with Discord. The arguments in favor of it and against Slack were simply too strong.