TL;DR: While Discord is popular for gaming and community chats, it lacks several features necessary for business use, such as enterprise security, task management, and professional image. Alternatives like Slack and Microsoft Teams are more suited for business environments.
Discord's Limitations for Business Use
Discord is primarily marketed towards gamers, which affects its perception in the professional world [1:3]. It lacks enterprise-level features such as single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, centralized organization management, and robust security and privacy guarantees
[1:2]. Additionally, Discord's search and logging capabilities are not as developed as those needed for business operations
[1:1].
Perception and Professionalism
The perception of Discord as a gaming platform can make it seem unprofessional for business communications. Many companies prefer platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which are designed with business needs in mind and have established reputations in the corporate world [4:1]
[4:2]. These platforms offer integrations with other business tools, enhancing productivity and collaboration
[4:4]
[4:6].
Task Management and Integration Challenges
For businesses that require task management and accountability, Discord falls short. It does not natively support task tracking or project management features, making it difficult to manage tasks and deadlines effectively [3:6]. Some users suggested integrating Discord with other tools like Notion or using bots to create tasks from chat messages, but these solutions may not be as seamless as dedicated business platforms
[3:4].
Marketing and Community Engagement
While Discord can be used for marketing and engaging with niche communities, its effectiveness depends on the target audience. It may work well for gaming-related products or influencer-driven campaigns but might not be suitable for broader business marketing strategies [2:2]. The platform's informal nature can limit its appeal for traditional business environments.
Alternatives and Recommendations
For businesses looking for a communication platform, Slack and Microsoft Teams are frequently recommended due to their professional features and integrations [4:3]
[4:7]. Rocket Chat is another option for those interested in open-source solutions with customizable security settings
[4:5]. Ultimately, the choice of platform should align with the company's specific needs and the professional image it wishes to maintain.
I’ve used teams, slack, a bunch of other messaging software for jobs, and it seems like the only reason people use these instead of discord is because “it’s more professional”. Which makes no sense because the software is identical. Take slack for example, it’s just a worse version of discord, and you have to make yet another account for it. Or teams, you might already have a microsoft account, but you still have to set up your profile and do all that stuff. It just seems so much easier to use Discord for all this.
Maybe this belongs on r/vent, but I do want to know why so many companies avoid discord like the plague
Discord is missing features that are important for use in big industries, such as enterprise single sign-on with multi-factor auth, centralized organization management, security and privacy guarantees, the ability to create hundreds of channels and security roles, and support for webinars, big meetings, and screen annotations, and so on. I'm also not sure about message retention and searching.
By all means, Discord is great for certain things. I would not recommend it for a big corporate chat service.
Discord is marketed by discord as a place for gamers. First gamers then early 2020s they marketed to everyone and recently they've gotten back INTO gamers releasing more gamer oriented features. Someone who's in a position to choose method of communication isn't particularly even in the know how of discord's existence unless by some chance he is, even then, discord doesn't have that good a reputation for work related stuff.
teams is heavily integrated into the 365 suite of programs ,which is highly beneficial for enterprises that already use it
"Gamer fame" maybe. Also, pretty wild bot ecosystem and too rapid updates (yep, that can be a minus).
Modern startups and IT companies actually do use Discord quite a lot. It's just that Zoom timed links and such are more convenient so far. And, for doing online work, Discord seriously lacks clear and available search/logging/history features. It does keep chat histories, but it's ultra hard find to find any old stuff nevertheless.
Wondering if it's worth investing some time into that platform. I have a second monitor I could keep discord up on throughout the day and spend a few minutes here and there chatting with potential customers/clients.
+1 to the question, watching for results! As a user, i have seen folks sharing about their products in the group. My hunch is, it might be working in some super specific niche cases. Like gaming, influencer driven products, community event based offers.
well I have a mass dm tool for marketing, against tos yeah but doesnt get the server banned. my discord is jakub_svoboda if yall wanna try it
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Sorry i am not from US, what is discord?
Hi,
I work for an online services company as senior manager. The industry is gaming. Here's a list of problems that I'd love to PLEASE get a solution to or even an opinion about:
1. In gaming, everyone uses Discord. We're working via Discord for 6+ years but it has fundamental flaws because it's a glorified chat room, and it's not made for work. Even if we have our own support chat software on our website, we are forced to sometimes still use Discord for customers who are too lazy to use our website chat. We even had to create a specific website chat integration with a Discord bot, so when a customer gets a chat message on our website, he is notified on his own Discord. It's unavoidable, our customers love that damn program because they are gamers and Discord is made for gamers. Therefore, the backbone of our operations, management decisions and documentation is on Discord to try to keep things together.
2. we have a Discord server, very well organised with channels / categories of channels. For example, in the ""requests-for-league-of-legends"" channel, a support operator may write "customer X is looking to buy this service, he needs an answer by tonight".
3. Through project management tools (example: Notion) it could be written in a table that "John" is dealing with League of Legends requests. We even have a RACI matrix clarifying that John is the responsible for it and there's another manager who is accountable for monitoring John's work.
3.1 John will then react with an emoji to the discord message in the server and try to generate the sale by messaging the customer through our website chat / sending him an email / logging on one of our shared Discord company accounts to message the customer and let him buy the product.
Will John succeed? Who knows. It needs to be manually checked on our Admin Panel if that customer ended up buying or not. And if John has a KPI system getting a commission out of these requests, he needs to track it MANUALLY on a Google Spreadsheet that he presents to us at the end of the month. The accountable person will do this check, but it's VERY clunky.
4. 90% of our work and directives happen through DISCORD MESSAGES. If I have to ask a support manager to ''check if customer X is happy" or "check if the new instagram reels are ready and let's put 50€ of budget there", I literally send him a chat message. When the request is more complex, I may say ''create yourself a task on our Project management tool for this" (Notion, for example) or I will go and create the task for him in the shared project.
As you can imagine, John's sale report will be a chat message telling me "Hey this is the google sheet (url) with my July sales"
5. Seeing as Discord servers have terrible notifications, we also have DISCORD GROUP CONFERENCES (capped at 10 people). Therefore we may have a Discord conversation named "LoL Sales Management" with the operators working in that department where we brainstorm or give directions. This conversation has literally no connection to the Discord server, or to our admin panel, or to our project management tools. It's like a whatsapp group. We use it because notifications are clearer and easier to see, but every single operator has got like 100+ group conferences for various topics. It's very handy as we can reply through the phone, Discord is very responsive and it feels great to use it, but in the grand scheme of things I feel like this KILLS our operators every single day.
6. Discord is super reluctant to AI. Can't integrate anything. Can't automate anything. N8N agent to do something? Forget it.
7. We have a Wiki where we post guides, videos, etc, on how every task should be completed. This is relatively okay, but it's yet another app to use and it creates bloat.
I could go more in detail but I think you get the picture. I think this is a disaster, and we heave heavy performance issues with 30-40% of operators who forget about tasks, don't respect deadlines, and similar. While I think there could be other factors for their lack of productivity, it's undeniable that the company structure does not work due to these tech limitations.
We have a lot of very motivated and talented managers that do their best to keep assignments and systems all together BUT I feel like Discord is killing us.
We'd like to transition to something completely new that has:
a) chat rooms (we are too used to chatting so we need to have something that has a chat). Not a sort of ''forum'' please, or an inbox that looks like an email exchange.
b) possibility to write " !task: marketing budget change " in chat with an operator and a task will be created for him (so he can check all of his tasks, have a kanban board, etc)
c) tasks management with reports to measure productivity
d) channels / servers to distinguish topics in the clearest way possible
e) generous pricing, we are not looking to spend 2000$ per month on this (we have around 40-50 operators)
e) AI knowledgebase. Personally, I have 40+ people spamming me everyday with tons of questions and inputs. Half of those could be automated with an AI replying for me or pointing them to the right documentation.
This would be a great start already. Connecting this tool to our sales database to manage successful sales / purchases would come next (remember the John example for that League of Legends sale), we don't need to fix all of our problems in one week.
I thank you ahead of time if you decide to dedicate a few mins to giving some suggestions.
I'm so curious what your company actually does, because it sounds a lot like selling account boosts, which would be pretty funny to see such a thing so...corporatized.
Slack sounds like your best option, but I think realistically, there isn't a 1-stop solution that meets all your needs. It sounds like what you need is a CRM solution AND a communication solution
You got it more or less right about the industry :) Do you have any opinions on Clickup?
I've used it before, but honestly wasn't that impressed. While it had a lot of features, I found most of the overall experience to be pretty clunky, and the company's focus seemed to be more on pushing out as many "features" as possible without a lot of thought put into user interface/experience. If I remember correctly, it also doesn't have any of the chat functions you're looking for
Trying to run everything through Discord is like herding cats with a walkie-talkie. If you want tasks, chats with efficient tools for planning something like Timestripe might actually be that very tool you're seeking
Do you think good integration of Discord and Notion would help you? Including things like automatically reporting tickets from Discord into Notion among other things
Discord just isn’t made to handle task tracking and accountability at this level. No wonder it’s all falling through the cracks.
You really need to get requests and updates out of chats and into a proper task management system with clear owners, statuses and deadlines. Something like Teamhood (or similar) could help a lot, it still lets people comment on tasks but adds Kanban boards, checklists and automations so you’re not piecing things together with spreadsheets and DMs.
If you have to stick with chat for now, at least look into bots that turn chat requests into tasks automatically. But honestly, I’d try to move your main workflow off Discord ASAP, it’s just not built for this.
Hi u/Jahnle 👋 — first off, I want to say how incredibly clear and thoughtful your breakdown is. You’ve outlined a very real and common pain for growing teams in high-speed, chat-heavy industries — especially gaming.
We built BTM – Better Tasks Management to solve exactly this type of problem:
Here’s how BtM could help you transform your operations:
✅ Chat-Driven Tasking
Type something like !task Improve sales dashboard — and it’ll create a task, assign it, log it, and notify the assignee.
💬 Real-Time Communication
Built-in channels for projects, teams, and topics — just like Discord — but with structured threading and action tracking.
🧠 AI-Powered Knowledgebase
Operators can ask, “How do I handle a failed transaction?” → and get an AI-powered answer or link to the right SOP or video.
📊 Kanban Boards + Reports
Every user sees their assigned tasks, status, deadlines — and your managers get auto-generated reports with no manual effort.
📂 Department Channels with Purpose
Just like your Discord server layout — but with connected actions. No more “react with emoji” and hope it’s done.
🔄 Integrations & Automation
Our system supports integrations (sales panel, webhook-based notifications, etc.) so John’s deal won’t get lost in a Google Sheet ever again.
🧩 Customizable and Scalable
Need something unique to your gaming ops workflow? We custom-build features for free for early teams.
We’re currently onboarding early partners, and because your use case is exactly why we built BtM, we’d love to:
If you’re open to a quick chat or a walk-through, just email us at 📩 contact@techCreator.co with the subject: “Gaming Ops Rescue”
Or feel free to DM me — we can work together to rebuild your ops around something that actually scales with your team.
Was thinking of using hiring platforms to manage employees for my startup but the monthly costs are quite high, is discord considered unprofessional?
I would definitely not want to communicate with colleagues on a professional level on discord. Of course, for outside of work events, it is a lockdown.
I would suggest finding a different platform, maybe Microsoft teams if it comes with an Office subscription.
Another vote for MS Teams. An amazing all in one package.
We like teams. They keep improving it too.
I suppose it depends on how you use it. Discord is almost exactly like Slack and both have free versions. If you're worried about professionalism, just use Slack. It was designed for business and was the obvious inspiration for Discord.
Agreed here. I don't really like either, but these days if you're an independent contractor, you've got to use what the clients use, which is everything.
That being said, I know Slack promotes itself for work and Discord promotes itself for gamers, so it really is mostly just about that image. Slack was originally just a normal IRC server that the company used to communicate internally for game development. But over time, they bolted on more and more custom plug-ins for file sharing and other integrations. Then when their game venture flopped, out of desperation they basically turned to market the only true proprietary and fully functional product they had that was ready to go, which was Slack. By design, all of its integrations were literally an afterthought to the IRC core, which can be easily seen. When you look at something like Microsoft Teams, however, more thought was put into the original design of communication and integrations. Slack's success is really just a testament to good marketing, nothing else, and the founders themselves have even publicly stated this in their interviews.
Yeah slack is the way to go.
I would prefer Slack for businesses. Easy to navigate and user-friendly.
I would recommend Rocket Chat! It's open source and you can host it on your own server for maximum data security.
Slack!
Hello everyone, isn't there a discord server where you can hang out, discuss ideas, give feedback ...
That is every discord server. Including the last dozen foisted on this forum. Which, by the way allows all the above.
This is like repeatedly Texting people to engage in a phone call.
What's the great big business idea ... going door-to-door selling "No Soliciting" signs?
There should be
There is just use the little search bar and search for Discord.
There's some dork every week that tries to start one and each and every one has failed. I think like 70+ people come up on that search, but it never gains traction because why the hell would it. You're already on Reddit, if I wanted live chat I'd do that, but any business owner that makes any sort of money doesn't have time to bullshit on a live chat for a few hours a day.
Hello, as the title states I’m looking to see if there’s any active discord servers out there for entrepreneurs/ small business owners. All help is appreciated!
I’ve thought about joining or starting one as well but to your point, all the ones I saw were filled with bots or inactive.
If I made one but charged $1/mo do you think that would be useful to help vet out bots and others? Or maybe have an application process?
Why are you seeking them out?
To market and sell something?
To foster healthy relationships and learn and grow?
Something else?
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I don't believe there are. All the ones I've found have been in-active, filled with MLMs or small etsy shop like servers.
Considering layoffs and the overall industry turmoil, I thought it would be great to see if there's (1) an active Discord server and/or (2) a want or need for one. I feel like it would be great for us like-minded folks to connect and share our stories in real-time.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? I'd be open to getting one set up if there's interest.
There’s like 50 of them in slack already.. what problem does discord solve?
Overall discord is a better UX than slack.
It’s more anonymous for people to share and learn. There’s no pretentiousness as with the slack forums (hi I’m from google/ meta). You can do things you wouldn’t do with your real identity attached like anonymous take home exercise reviews.
Sometimes you want to ask questions without feeling judged. Discord is more of a community than a async forum.
https://discord.com/invite/Ffskqnu6 this one got 2k+ people in it.
Here's one I just joined. I think I saw someone post about it on here.
This is yours?
No but I was invited through this subreddit
I just joined this one and now I’m having to justify my existence.
Why do we need this?
Always start with why.
The fact that a “customer” asked , doesn’t that signal user need? Our pm sense is to figure out why.
So I'm looking to implement Discord for our medium size yacht club. I want to progress the club to Discord to replace FB Groups, email, etc. I see it being useful for coordinating events, regular meetings with remote attendance, notifications for upcoming work parties, crew looking for boat, etc.
I'm thinking we are going to want to maintain some sort of tiered permission where there may be club moderators, club execs, regular members, member guests, and public facing portions.
So far, I've created two categories of channels, public and members.
I'm thinking we need some sort of membership vetting, so I was thinking of creating a channel or role that dumps users into who want to be verified to gain full access.
Public channels would be for things like crew looking for a boat for a race. etc. Perhaps membership questions, or just general boat talk.
Anyone else doing this? If so, what has been a success or failure?
I have experience in running a Discord server (in a different field). There are a lot of cool features that can benefit the community (more organized threads, different structured, polls, events, video, automations and bots etc etc).
But on the flip side:
In summary: Discord is very powerful, and great for ‘always online’ communities. But if you implement it I would expect some pushback from more traditional members who are used to the existing system and “don’t see anything wrong with it”.
Thanks for the feedback. Do you have any recommendations for visibility on the club server? My initial go at it will likely be, Community Server, not published on the search engine. Invite only. Invites can be generated by any already invited user. All new users are vetted manually, perhaps using a special automatic role placement on first login.
But I agree, it doesn't just look "gamey" it is the primary comms for online game collab. I don't play games, but I have 10+ servers Im on. I think discord's beyond gaming. I have servers for everything to small groups of local friends, to motorcycle meet ups.
Does discord not push out at least Email notifications on un-read messages? I get them for some of my groups. Sure, if they already using FB all the time, it's going to be open and ready to receive real time messages. Discord has mobile apps, if adding this app on the users phone the only thing to make this on par with FB, then maybe that's as good as it gets.
I was going to only have a Forum channel for a For-Sale channel. From there, we can see if it's viable to make more. But yea, I think it's a weakness in the Discord UI. Perhaps by design. Forum posts are for forums. I'm only on one server that uses the feature.
Community server: definitely. Invite only: completely up to you. Manual vetting: also up to you, it adds work, but the automatic vetting puts people off. Push email messages: you can set it up of course, but most people will end up 'unsubscribing' in my experience.
Two channels is a good start. Forum channels are nice for separating discussions, but I would also think about adding a general text channel as a catch-all (some people like to natter).
Hope it goes well and you get buy-in from your club members - I think this will be the most difficult part. Good luck!
Used it with a prior club I was a part of. It was a wild time. I liked it because I felt like it made everyone closer but if you weren’t liked by members that ran it you could get booted.
Wouldn’t work with my current club as the membership seems to skew older and not as social.
Our club is pretty social, lots of members, beer can race every week, 6 months out of the year. Sure, there's a lot of older folks not interested. I didn't really think about who would be unliked, but that might need to be considered. Related to that, I do need to make sure we onboard our office manager who's typically on the front line of club comms. Also, I should see who's the mod on the FB groups.
The one thing the internet is good at, amplifying rudeness and stupidity. Real Time chat's bound to make it worse, or at least, faster at finding the bottom of the barrel.
How large was the club that was using Discord? What were the typical conversations about?
You can do any d@mn fool thing you like, but I think you're making a major mistake. Discord is one of many IM/chat applications which are fine for informal interaction but work best when you're logged in all or most of the time. IM/chat applications including Discord are very poor at structured communication.
Coordinating events requires a lot of structure so balls don't get dropped. Email, bulletin boards, and social media like Facebook are pretty good for this. Everyone sees everything, new people can read in pretty easily.
Discord can work for regular meetings with remote attendance. The video teleconference is disconnected from everything else but if you work hard you can make it work. I'd coordinate including agenda development and dissemination by email and then use something like Whatsapp, WebEx, or Zoom for the meeting with minutes and action items disseminated day-of by email.
In my opinion notifications should be push and not pull. That means email and text. Text is probably best with a link to a web page with more detail. The downside of text is that for most people that means small screens and Chiclet keyboards. That leads to email AND text.
Boats looking for crew and crew looking for boats are a pretty good fit for Facebook or Reddit or an in-house phpBB or vBulletin bulletin board. You can make Discord work but you'll find most people will move off to other communication vectors rather quickly. In my experience, many boats that race regularly already have their own Facebook groups so crew connections moving from a club group to a boat group is really easy - you're already in the app.
It seems you like Discord and want to make it work. Engineers call that a solution looking for a problem.
Email for communication of record with text for notifications. Social media like Facebook or Reddit for less formal communication. Social media--since you already will have it--for chatting. You can use Discord, the question is if you should.
What is your tech support approach? Training? FMEA?
Your ageism is not becoming. I'll remind you that boomers and Gen X invented all these tools. Granted, some of us have not kept up. That is on them. At our next meeting we may take all your toys away for not working and playing well with others.
You still remember that discord used to be for gamers to defeat teamspeak. now days is now used business , school , art , etc I dont really understand why they change that
Pretty much what the other user said, they need to capitalise on these genres before other potential rivals come up and do it first.
Title. I'm very active on Discord, but I mainly use it to hang with friends or join miscellaneous groups. Was wondering if there are any active small business discord groups where I can chat and network with fellow owners/founders.
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I'm trying to start one you can check my profile.
Plenty, they’re bloated with wantrepreneurs
Here's a smaller one I'm in: https://discord.gg/EXRHCu6s4p
discord for business use
Key Considerations for Using Discord for Business:
Communication Features:
Integration Capabilities:
User Management:
Community Engagement:
Security and Privacy:
Recommendation: If your team values real-time communication and collaboration, Discord can be an effective tool for business use. However, consider your team's specific needs and whether Discord's features align with your workflow. For more formal business environments, you might also explore dedicated platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams, which offer additional business-oriented features.
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