“What is the platform that I should be using to build a crypto community for my crypto project? A multidimensional platform where crypto communities can congregate and discuss my project” Well, these are the burning questions of every crypto initiative looking to build a dynamic community around their crypto project. The community backing for any crypto initiative is key; the stronger the support, the more you generate the positive sentiments in the space, consequently making the project more immune to price fluctuations and market downturns.
Community building for any crypto project has given tremendous results in the adoption and success rate of projects in their initial days. The hype needed to kickstart any critical events like ICOs, important announcements of projects, and future staking programs all start on these community platforms. Hence, the choice of the community platform becomes very critical.
While there is no silver bullet for choosing the best platform for your crypto project community building, we encourage you to consider these variables while making the decision. The key variables that need to be kept in mind are your intended community size, the niche, and the dominant mode of community engagement.
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Discord Vs Slack!
Our team at Blockwiz, has tested several community engagement platforms, analyzed them, and learned about their pros and cons. We will be using this knowledge to bring you all the ultimate battle of two top-rated community apps for building crypto community for your crypto project — Discord vs Slack! So without wasting much time, let’s dive straight into it!
Slack vs Discord: The Core Concept
While some of the functionality of both these apps might be similar, they try to position themselves as drastically different as a community hosting platform. Their target audience is drastically different from each other. Their brand positioning would look something like this—
- Slack – A business messaging app that centralizes all the internal communication
- Discord – A platform to host hyperactive communities like crypto or gaming
The core focus area of Slack has always been the business sector. It is the enterprise solution for informal, faster and efficient communication with their team. Slack has organized the online enterprise interaction with its complimenting features to aid the smooth functioning of the online workspace.
On the other hand, Discord is as informal as it could get, be it with its branding or its userbase. It was initially developed with the intention of getting the gaming community together on one platform. However, following some significant updates to the platform, many other communities are joining the platform. Currently, it houses the most number of gaming and crypto communities on its platform.
Slack vs Discord: The Pricing War
Pricing is the most unappealing aspect of Slack. This becomes the biggest roadblock for anyone planning to opt for Slack. Although it has a free plan, it comes with some huge compromises and limitations. One-on-one video calls, limited search features, absence of screen sharing features are some most frustrating limitations that one has to bear with the free plan. It becomes non-viable for anyone planning to build a community on Slack. The Standard plan costs $6.67/person and goes up from there, meaning you will continue paying more and more as your community grows.
Discord is more liberal in that sense. It is practically free, with little to no limitations on its functionality. The core experience of the platform is entirely free of cost. Discord offers two plans for some added features and extra perks—the Nitro and Nitro Classic plans. You can pay for these plans to get these features. While buying these plans is entirely optional, some of the highlights include an unlimited message archive, nine integrations, group video calls, and many more. The majority of these features are behind the paywall in Slack.
Slack vs Discord: User Interface Appeal
The user interface of both of these apps has quite a few similarities. The most evident similarity is the position of contacts and the conversation of both these apps, which are left and right, respectively. The interface of Slack looks comparatively less cluttered and more polished in comparison with Discord. Discord in this regard is slightly on the complicated side.
On the customization capability front, Slack has some very intuitive sidebar themes for its users to select from. If you are well versed with custom CSS, you can unlock the plethora of customization capabilities in Slack. Discord allows for only toggling between light and dark mode, and this is the most one can do with Discord.
Slack vs Discord: Community Conversations
The conversations and the various ways of it are also essential to consider before choosing the platform for your crypto community. These two platforms have some exciting ways flashed out for the team and community conversations. Say, for example, there are three ways to have a conversation on Slack that is through public conversation, private channels, and direct messages.
On the other hand, Discord has servers that have separate sub-channels for text and voice messages. The admins and the moderators in these servers have the ability to moderate the conversions to maintain the decorum within the community. The threaded conversation was one of the most demanded features in Discord, which was added in the recent update. While Discord certainly has enough ways for the conversions to take place, it certainly lacks the intuitiveness and the professional feel of Slack.
Discord vs Slack: App Integrations
Since Slack is solely focused on enterprise requirements, it has an outstanding integration capability. Slack can be integrated with more than 900 apps to increase the functionality of the existing setup to enhance the team’s productivity. Slack can efficiently integrate calendars, YouTube, task schedulers, Dropbox, Invision and many others that one needs at work.
Discord serves a different purpose as a community platform, and hence the integration capabilities here are limited. It doesn’t support many third-party apps and offers little support to the native apps. But Discord expands its functionality differently. Community built bots are the rage on Discord and in Discord servers. Most of them are available free and can be used to build and grow your crypto community. These robust bots play a pivotal role in automating various community processes, which otherwise would have been very difficult considering the size of the communities on Discord.
Discord vs Slack: File Sharing Capabilities
Since both platforms cater to groups of people, be it from the business arena or coming of age gaming or crypto community, a comprehensive file-sharing capability is indispensable. Hence both the file allows for file sharing capabilities. Discord allows the file to be shared within the range of 8MB, which could be increased up to 100MB post opting for the Nitro plan. Discord has a competitive age here in terms of file storage as it has an unlimited message and file history.
The allowed file size for sharing on Slack is one Gb. It is pretty high in comparison to Discord. But the tricky part is we can’t keep these files forever, as was the case with files shared in Discord. The maximum allowed file sharing per user is 5 GB for the free users. Users lose the history of files shared once they hit the limit of 5 Gb. However, there is a respite for its users in this regard as the shared file history could be preserved up to 20 Gb in various paid plans offered by them.
The Ultimate Recommendations
Having gone through the vital detrimental aspects of both the platforms and analyzed the pros and cons of both, now comes the moment you all are waiting for—the final verdict on the choice of platform for building and growing your crypto community. Based on the community engagement model and the platform’s influence on crypto marketing, Discord is the choice of platform for the experts of Blockwiz. It has grown to become the most pervasive platform for the crypto community lately.
The Underlying Rationale
Our seasoned crypto-community growth experts prefer Discord over Slack because Discord is the ultimate hang-out space for gaming, crypto, and various other communities. This platform is built specifically to bring together individuals with the same interest or hobbies to form a tribe, where they can vibe and interact and be themselves.
The complimenting platform features like the option to create servers, categorize various activities in Servers into sub-channels, admin role creation, community moderation, audio channels, and last but not least — community experience enhancement done with the integration of bots. These all valuable features are free and will remain this way in the future as well, as mentioned by the CEO of Discord. Discord is the ultimate platform with all the disruptive features for crypto community building.
