Makes me wonder how long before Discord rolls out their enterprise tier. There are tons of Gen Z and Millenials using Discord who are likely in positions where they can make those kinds of decisions for the company. And it's a great and intuitive product too.
As a moderate user of both, they seem almost indistinguishable to me. Slack probably has more integration with productivity tools and a better auditing/compliance story, but it’s not at all obvious to me that Discord couldn’t become a drop in replacement.
How would you rate mattermost and zulip compared to slack and discord? I've only used slack, mattermost and skype. Of those I prefer mattermost by a fair margin, but I'm still not sure I like it. It seems like the ui could be better. Something about the way both it and slack handle channels or groups feels clunky.
Zulip is very “channels first” and once you get used to it it works pretty well. I constantly run into issues uploading files > 10Mb to Zulip though, it just sits there “Waiting” forever. I have to put things like screencasts somewhere else. Otherwise it’s pretty good though
Guilded over discord in my opinion. More features like forums in a channel. Long term, I only see discord and their company culture turning it into twitch or other zealot infested dumps.
I'm surprised to not see more comments like this. I think chat clients are a product which is used so frequently that after adapting, users become blind to defficiencies. I consider myself pretty technically literate and have used probably a dozen chat clients over years. Discord is the only one where I couldn't understand how to do the basics straight after installing it. I don't use it much, and when I come back to it there's always an element of guesswork. (fwiw I'm not a fan of Slack's UX either)
Because on the flipside, there are users like me who found Discord far more intuitive than anything else. I don't think your 'technical literacy' overcomes a difference in expectations and culture when many others feel it works just fine. It's not the best UI, but it is acceptable given the status quo.
Neither you nor GP are articulating or giving examples. Start there and we can have a proper discussion, otherwise it'll be just another case of 'he-said-she-said'.
What chat software do you use? I find Discord to be among the best when it comes to UX. Not perfect (and it is still an Electron app) but when you have atrocities like MS Teams, it passes off as good.
In case you are wondering, I don't consider the UX for IRC "good" (in a forum with "hacker" in its name, of course IRC will come up). It is good because it is open, simple and lightweight, but when you want a history and image/file transfer, and most people do, it breaks down and you need ad-hoc solutions.
That’s surprising. In what way? I find it to be the most consistent and the most correct out of any chat software I’ve used, including IRC, Slack, Mattermost, and Microsoft Teams. They seem to just get a lot of stuff right.
The only thing that took me some time to adjust to was how overwhelming joining a new server can be. So many channels! Everything needs my attention! But after using it for a long time, I think this is actually a feature. I can mute channels and categories I’m uninterested in, but how many channels on Slack are never found due to poor discoverability?
We run both Slack and Discord at my work and the engineers vastly prefer Discord, for what it’s worth.
I think I could be considered as a high openness, hacker-ish type keen to try new things, and my avoidance of discord isn’t that it’s complicated (hard to use), it’s that it’s complicated (unnecessary busy). From the notifications being a lot of noise by default to threads being so much work to catch up on after the fact, it’s just heavy and dense and complicated.
Caveat: It seems much more geared towards users who commit significant brain-space to the subjects they join (for example: catching up on threads is easier if you’re paying attention to realtime notifications), whereas I have a lot of interests and really just want the gems whenever I “sit down” to work with a particular interest.
Nope, it's possible to control the notifications to a much better degree than any of the other options allows.
I could see Discord as made for power users where Slack and Teams would be aimed at casuals. But I do think that Discord does a pretty good job at being intuitive.
Discord seems like the best UX to me. Only things I can think of is some weird UX around new call features and search could be better compared to say gmail (although I generally have no problem finding things I want to find).
Discord is way better than Slack for B2C if you're reaching that demographic.
I'm running my start-up via Discord and it's grown to a 60,000-member community. Incredible engagement. Fantastic way to find customers and business use cases, too.
For "enterprise", we run a separate instance for staff with lots of useful Github, Clickup, and other integrations.
While I understand that approach EF going Discord-forward, it's one that's prevented me from joining many circles now as I've pledged to take my data privacy more seriously and proprietary apps aren't it. I hope you offer at least one alternative (but if you're not targeting open-source users or privacy advocates, there likely wouldn't be a difference).
One nice thing about IRC is it is sure to remain an alternative as services which purportedly lack alternatives build paywalls or become the center of scandals relating to mishandling user data.
Discord is just way more polished. Everything works reliably every time.
The voice channels are flawless, even when there's people on shitty internet connections.
The client is always responsive and snappy.
Their design of how the server/chat/voice/videos/users is laid out is is clearer, easier to see what's going on at a glance and it manages to do that while it fits more information on screen.
Their dark mode is much better.
Their code display/highlighting is better.
The user groups/roles which is more like tags is much better than others.
It's way easier to find where notifications come from.
I like that in Discord you can choose to spin off the conversation into a separate thread, or you can reply within the main chat and it quotes the comment you’re replying to (and the quote is clickable) in order to see context. You can’t do the latter in slack, and it’s easy to not realize that others have started a thread when it’s above the fold.
No, discord threads are siloed off into their own world. They're effectively more so temporary channels (and discord itself enforces the temporary nature - they get locked after disuse). Parent poster seems to like it, but for my use case I'd rather slack threads.
I wasn’t commenting about liking discord threads. My comment was focused on how you can “inline” reply in discord, while you can’t do that in slack (though someone mentioned that you can post your reply to the main channel in slack - a feature I’ve never noticed or seen used).
Yikes, here's hoping you mean "after a year" or something, because having to make a fake new thread just to comment on an existing locked thread would make me rage quit
Someone with the manage threads permission can unarchive it, but like the pinning thing that also comes with permission to delete it, so you can't just grant that to everyone in your server.
Then that squares with my mental model of discord being for the gaming community, because imagine one's surprise about coming in to work on a Monday to have something to add to a thread made on Friday but unable to contribute to it. Or, what's this "vacation" stuff I keep hearing about?
Roles and channel permissions. I can't assign a role to someone and grant them granular permissions in slack like I can discord. I'm either a guest, user, admin or owner.
Think of it as "tagging" users. Instead of a user fitting a single pre-defined category, you can add tags to a user.
To give an example, let's say you have both a Discord channel and a Slack channel with the same 10 people working on a project, 7 of which are software developers. To mention the developers, your Slack option is either @everyone (including 3 non-developers) or individually. On Discord you can create @developers and add only those seven, not bothering the other 3.
You can really go buckwild with that basic concept: only admin can tag @everyone, only @talkers can join a voice channel, only @projectmanagers can run some bot, only @collaborators can post to #project, @watchers can read #project but not post, while those that are neither @collaborators nor @watchers don't even see the channel... And in #otherproject you can have those same people in totally different groups and with different roles.
Way more customizable than by just having public/private channels and @everyone at your disposal, as Slack does.
Slack user groups are much less powerful than Discord roles. Slack user groups are _only_ a way of bulk notifying users. Discord roles control effectively both views of your server, and permissions (though why "Pin Messages" and "Delete Other User's Messages" are still combined into a single "Manage Messages" checkbox is a glaring flaw in that granularity).
And some other features like colours which are nice when you want mods to stand out for public servers, or teams for some sort of competitive event server.
Tagging users is also possible in slack. I don't know if permissions by tag is possible, but the basic concept of "@ these 7 people" has been there for a while.
