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I prefer Slack over Discord at work, and my coworkers at Val Town should too.

At first I didn't want to rock the boat. The team has been in Discord for over three years, and I only joined last month. But it kept bugging me, so I started my own list of Slack things I like and Discord things I dislike. I thought my preference could be explained away by familiarity with Slack and relative inexperience with Discord, and that a sensible list of pros and cons would help me embrace Discord and move on. But it turns out, not only is Slack better—Discord is worse.

There's a critical mass of Slack features that I dearly miss.

1. DMs within workspace
2. DM yourself
3. Scheduled sends
4. Remind me later
5. Video uploads
6. Send thread reply in channel
7. Thread reply notifications
8. Status per workspace

In Slack you can DM coworkers within your company's workspace. In Discord, your DMs live outside of your company's server, mixed in with all your Discord "friends." If you want to DM a new coworker, you can't! Until they accept your friend request.

You can DM yourself in Slack. I do this often to draft messages, pin handy links and files, and test stuff (Slack bots, custom emojis, etc).

In Slack you can schedule a message to be sent later, at a time of your choosing. Maybe you don't want to notify your coworker on the west coast at 5am PT. Or maybe you want to send out an agenda right when a meeting starts, while you'll be screen sharing. Or maybe you want to pretend you're working later than you are by scheduling a message to be sent at 10:45pm (only for it to backfire because your boss replies right away and your status is "Away").

In Slack you can set reminders for messages. This is very helpful when I want to read and reply to a message on the go—say, on my phone on a Sunday—while reminding myself to take action once I'm back at my desk on Monday at 9am. Or to remind myself to reply to a message in a few hours, after I complete more pressing work.

Major footgun in Discord: I record a video with MacOS Screenshot (e.g. bug repro, feature demo), I drag 'n' drop the recording in Discord, and poof—it's over Discord's upload limit (unless I upgrade my server), and that in-memory file I dragged never saved to disk. I've lost my recording. As a workaround I now use a third party tool and send a link to my recording. Slack can handle video uploads as you'd expect.

When replying in a Slack thread, you can select the checkbox to "Also send to #channel." This comes in handy when summarizing a long thread for the benefit of others in the channel not following along, or when updating the channel with new/corrected information.

Speaking of threads, if you haven't sent a message in a thread but still want to follow along, you can opt to "Get notified about new replies." This is helpful, for example, if you want to tune into a firefighting thread without adding noise (your own message).

In Slack you can set your status within your company's workspace to let coworkers know that you're in a meeting, on an airplane, eating lunch, walking your dog, on vacation, at the dentist, biking to work, or whatever. On Discord your status is global, so your friends from your board game server will see that you're flying to nyc (for better or worse). I've found status quite helpful for healthy and honest remote teams (and toxic for unhealthy teams where "shaking the mouse" optics/gamification emerges).

For starters, Discord is worse than Slack just by flipping the coin over—it's missing all those Slack features I like. Slack's pros become Discord's cons. But it's also worse in its own ways.

Its interface is so busy. Like an arcade, not an office. It doesn't feel like work. Do I mute my friend/community servers? You can't hide the server sidebar (which you can do on Slack), so I'm constantly lured by unread dots in other servers. Will power is finite, and every day I'm spending some of my budget fending off Discord distraction. You also can't open threads in new windows (which you can in Slack), so you always see three sidebars—servers and channels on left, members on right—while reading and replying to messages.

I won't linger any longer on what I think makes Discord worse because it's subjective stuff and petty preferences in some cases—like how I don't like Discord's emojis. And there are a few concessions I'll make to Discord.

In making my pros and cons list, I found two Discord features I quite like and think Slack should consider adopting.

1. Replies
2. Recent threads in sidebar

In a channel or thread, Discord allows you to reply directly to a message. This is helpful because it indicates what you're responding to when concurrent conversations are happening. In most cases I'm in the thread camp—that if a conversation topic will go beyond a few short messages you should create a thread—so I see replies as an added layer of clarity, whether within threads or in a channel.

Discord also shows recent threads you've participated in under their channel in the sidebar. This is a helpful way to find recent conversations, especially when an ongoing thread has been buried by subsequent conversation in the channel.

At this point I have conviction that Slack is better than Discord, on the balance. But there are open ends I'm not so sure about that should weigh on any pros 'n' cons discussion (and many more open ends and blind spots I haven't recorded here, I'm sure).

Which API is better to work with for automations/devtools? I've created a handful of Slack bots and found the ecosystem sprawling yet capable. I have less experience with Discord bots, but the ones I've set up have been easy enough. This is important because Slack agents are an emerging pattern. When Steve reported a typo on Kernel's website in our shared Slack channel, Raf asked Cursor bot to fix it right there, and it responded with a PR link and preview URL!

Claude recently launched their Slack agent (much like Cursor's). We helped one of our Teams customers build a Slack agent with Val Town that answers business intelligence questions and plots charts. We have our own Slack and Discord bots for weekly user growth, GitHub stargazers, webmentions, changelog, and more. Answering this question—which API is better for bots and automations—would of course produce a sublist of pros and cons, another blog post of its own. One hope for this blog post is that it nudges someone else to write that one.

Is it better to have your user community on a different platform or the same one? There's also the question of switching costs if we migrate. I'm particularly sensitive to history/search. I use Discord and Slack search all the time when I vaguely remember having discussed something with a coworker but can't remember where (if I come up empty handed, then it's onto GitHub, Sentry, email, and down the line). Forking our team chat history from Discord over to Slack is a switching cost, but we'd stick around Discord for the user community anyway, so we'll have both apps open every workday.

Are Slack huddles the same, better, or worse than Discord voice channels? When we're not in the office together, we use Discord voice channels for video/audio chats. I find the UI/UX a little strange: clicking the channel joins it (often accidentally, in my case); to move the channel from your sidebar to main window you turn on your camera (at least that's how I've been doing it); there's always a square among the participants nudging you to play games that I close every time (which I now realize makes me sound like the fun police—I promise I like games). This may reveal my lack of dexterity with Discord more than anything, but for what it's worth I remember Slack huddles being far more intuitive last I used them. We've had some "technical difficulties" with Discord voice channel audio, but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt, chalking those up as my-machine problems. Speaking of which...

Which desktop and mobile apps are faster and more reliable? I'm mostly staying away from this topic at risk of being nerd sniped and because any anecdotes I have to share are just that—anecdotal (works on my machine etc). But...I've found the Discord mobile app to be buggy (e.g. missing notifications) and I've found the Slack desktop app to be buggy (e.g. UI out of whack when AI banners were added to threads a few months ago). Discord's desktop app takes forever to boot up (on my machine), but I've long heard people dunk on Slack's Electron desktop app, so maybe we're talking tomaytoes and tomahtoes.

I don't love Slack. I just like it better than Discord, for work. This blog post started as a private pros 'n' cons list for my own edification, became what you've just read, and now becomes a call for public critique to point out what I've missed or to get my coworkers onboard. So, should we leave Discord for Slack?