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Ask HN: Does anyone here use Discord as their work chat tool?

3 points by Poomba ↗ HN
Does anyone here use Discord for their workplace comms?

We are outgrowing Zulip as our team chat tool and are anti-Microsoft, so Teams is definitely out. Slack is the “default” choice but their pricing leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you want SSO, longer history of saved conversations, etc

Which leaves me to Discord. I know it seems like an unconventional choice but does anyone here use it in their workplace? And how do you find it?

9 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 32.8 ms ] thread
Zambyte
Can I ask what's wrong with Zulip? I have pretty minimal experience with it, but I've mostly heard positive things. I'm curious what your team has found limiting.

If you like the communication flow of Discord, Fluxer is also worth keeping on your radar. I would never trust my essential comms with Discord personally, and Fluxer is looking to be a great option.

Poomba
The web UI has become extremely slow. I am not sure if its that way for everyone or its because there are more people in our team using it. Many people dont like the UI too although that isnt my main concern
[dead] XR843
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Gurkunwar
Hello Poomba, our development team actually made this switch some time ago, and to be honest, we now prefer it to Slack. The pricing problem is entirely resolved by the free unlimited message history, and it's much easier to start a persistent voice channel than to set up Slack Huddles.

You will undoubtedly miss the strict threading because you are coming from Zulip. My main recommendation is to make the most of Discord's "Forum" channels. They are ideal for organizing feature discussions and bug reports without packing the main chat.

The only significant drawback we discovered is that Discord doesn't come with organized work tools because it was designed for communities. You can use paid cross-platform tools like DailyBot for standups and agile work, but they can sometimes feel a little heavy and Slack-first. We just wanted something simple that used Discord's built-in UI, so I made a custom bot for us called AsyncFlow (https://www.asyncflow.space) to handle our async standups and team polls for free.

Happy to answer any questions if you end up making the switch!

chistev
Why are you guys anti-microsoft? Honest question.
AznHisoka
There's loads of companies that use Discord, but they all seem to be blockchain/gaming companies [1]

I think Discord has the same problem that FB faced when it tried to launch their FB Workplace product. It has the perception of being "fun" and not serious/professional.

If I were you, I'd pay the $$$ for Slack. The ability to search past conversations has saved me hours of productivity and well worth it

[1] https://bloomberry.com/data/discord/

muzani
We considered it before in a past job when cost cutting. But nobody wants the boss to know when they're playing DOTA.

More seriously though, Slack was one of those tools that just held context of everything. All the engineering decisions and past error messages. Discord potentially could, but it doesn't seem to built for this use case.

Can it handle a thousand channels? It sounds ridiculous, but companies scale, and so do observation tools, customer service, and such.

I joined an elite gaming clan that operated on Slack once because it was easy to spin multiple channels per player and handle notifications. Discord potentially could, but channel management is a lot harder. Though that clan eventually moved over to Discord because nobody wants to pay $ per head.