Facebook Discord Face Off
I can’t tell you the number of community softwares that I looked at to find the perfect place for my members to connect with one another. Kajabi, Karta, Circle, Mighty Network, Hivebrite, Thinkific, none of them felt right to me, not to mention that the cost would then increase to my members. And while I am in a lot of Facebook groups- quite frankly- I didn’t want to manage one. You can’t easily find a post from the past, it’s hard to find what you are looking for, and I don’t exactly feel connected afterwards. More like a virtual cork board- which is great in and of itself but I wanted connection. Enter outside of the box thinking…Discord is well known amongst gamers. It is similar to Facebook but offers so so so much more and is easier to navigate in my opinion. So we will be judging the overall winner in the following categories: accessibility, organization, cost, visually appealing, features
Accessibility:
Facebook (FB) is easy to access, many of us are already on there personally and that means information will be presented more news station style. Discord is a separate platform and if you aren’t a gamer you probably aren’t on it yet and therefore need to download another app and create a new account. It is going more mainstream-so I think that won’t be the case for long. It is free like FB so that makes it financially accessible. Unlike FB, Discord has audio channels for people to connect with each other and you can do video unfortunately the video doesn’t have closed captioning.
Organization:
This is where Discord wins IMO. It’s so hard to go back and find that specific post you didn’t think you’d need or you wanted to return back for only to have FB refresh. I suppose there are disorganized Discord server, but I was very intentional about organization when I set up the server. I have the forum set up by article so people can locate it easily as well as channels specific to topic and purpose.
Cost:
Tie. Both are free. Much like many other memberships-people may pay for a membership that includes either a private FB group or a private Discord server but the software itself is free, which helps me to keep membership rates reasonable. Discord does offer membership payments but overall the software can be free to use.
Visual Appeal:
FB wins this one unless you prefer the look of race care beds as my friend Justen DeBowles calls it. While I love the organization of it, it certainly looks like a coding text book at minimum.
Features:
Discord wins this one, you can do activities with peers like watch YouTube, play games while on a voice channel. You can do video or voice only on a voice channel. You can send messages to your friends the same way you can on FB messenger.
Summary:
You can probably see that I prefer Discord, however I do use FB a lot, it’s easy to scroll through and everything pops up in one feed, Discord doesn’t have that but I still think it’s the best place for a community to interact.
