Originally published on my blog

You may have seen some Slack-Discord migrations recently (Laravel's new Discord channel is a great example) and wondered why are developers moving to a "gaming chat" and if you should too. Here are some things you need to know to know about Discord before making a decision:

First off, Discord is not "gamers-only". Yes, they've focused on gamers, but their platform is awesome for any kind of use (and they explicitly welcome developers).

Also, Discord is free. Yes, you can buy Discord Nitro to get exclusive perks (animated profile pictures, animated emoji, etc), but normal use it's free. That's right; no message limit, free calls, unlimited images, etc.

Talking about calls, Discord has been described as the best VOIP solution in the market and they even provide videochat and screen-sharing (only for groups now tho, they're working on server support for it).

And what about integrations? You're probably using Slack webhooks to get GitHub or Travis notifications and those platforms doesn't seem to provide Discord support, do they? Well, not explicitly, but if you append /slack to any Discord webhook it'll behave exactly like a Slack webhook, and you'll be able to use it anywhere.

So, who's using it? There are official Discord communities for Yarn, Vue, Laravel, GraphQL, Elixir, OBS, Vapor, Brave Browser, Rainmeter, Gentoo, Statamic and probably a lot more.

While Slack is more enterprise-focused and has a bigger app marketplace, I'd encourage you to try Discord. Maybe you'll like it better!

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