Discord is an app designed to connect users with communities over voice, video, and text chat, via Discord servers, a gaming and game industry oriented app for growing communities around video games and allowing developers to communicate with their customer base; the app may yet also be used for business communications of other kinds.
$4.99
per month
Signal
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
Signal is an open source cross-platform messaging app featuring end-to-end encryption to keep conversations private and secure, boasting no ads, no affiliate marketers, and no creepy tracking in Signal. Users can focus on sharing the moments that matter.
The closest competitor we've found for Signal is Telegram. We do use Telegram with some clients and individuals who prefer it. Unfortunately, in this climate where there is no clear winner and a lot of diversity in applications, if you work with a lot of clients you're going to …
Discord works phenomenally if you want a chat platform that is free, quick to set up, and very flexible in the ways you can start using it. It doesn't require a complex set of logins for different servers and confusion about adding new members, or tough pricing right out of the gate. If you prefer to view full conversations all in one place without them "splintering" off into branches that are missed, Discord works great for this. All in all, Discord is great for startup companies or lean working companies, but it does not lend itself as well for larger, traditional "corporate" enterprises.
Signal is great for high-security applications where privacy is a concern, perhaps because of the sensitive nature of the materials being communicated. For instance, if you are sending sensitive information about a film that hasn't been released yet, and you want to make sure that paparazzi and fans don't get access to spoiler information, Signal is a great way to communicate.
One to many Communications to ensure that we can quickly get messages out when we have to.
Quick polling of questions and issues
The ability to gate channels so we can focus on folks that we know are stakeholders gives them an added feeling of belonging and that they have a say in the direction of projects.
Better volume balancing between members on a call.
More customizability of the notification sound for each server. It would be nice to set each of my important servers with a different notification sound.
More expansive note section when you view another user's profile. I'd like to be able to contain more information there in a more organized way.
It just works, and works well. Very rarely does anything go wrong, and I can't remember the last outage (sure there's been some but very rare and not something I even think about or worry about). Desktop clients, web access, mobile clients - the lot. Very happy with our easy it is to use.
There is plenty of online documentation and knowledge base articles. As well as having an open API to be able to tie it into other products makes it a really viable solution for any business. I have never had to contact support, any questions which I have need answered can be found in the documentation,
I've never contacted support but I see that they are on the ball for bug fixes, highly communicative in release notes, and continually releasing updates to Signal that address common user complaints. Given how responsive the development team is, and how they are continually improving Signal, I think their support is top notch.
I like Slack for more professional settings, but Discord is excellent for casual groups, especially when a few people do not have iPhones. They're very similar, but I think there are a lot of Discord features I don't take advantage of, mainly because there seems to be so much in the sidebar that overwhelms me a bit.
Signal is far and away better and more feature-rich. Skype is no longer the app it used to be before Microsoft acquired it, and WhatsApp, while trying to be much like Signal with claims, has too many features that lead to a sense of insecurity as it's too widely used and used for too many things.