I know it's tempting to compare Slack and Discord, but they really are different applications for different use cases. Discord makes a terrible Slack. Slack makes an okay Discord.

They're different because of branding only.

Feature-wise they're 90% interchangeable.

Microsoft can slap a white theme on Discord and rename it to something stupid like "Agile Teams" and have a ready-made Slack alternative.

The permissions models for the two are wildly different because of the different use cases. Discord has a lot more by way of moderating and exposing different defined subsets of your server to different admin defined user groups. Slack has opt in on a per channel basis per user and unlike discord channels, any user can just create one rather than being these things admins have to set out and organise ahead of time. Slack has pinning as a "anyone can pin" default, the thinking being users pin stuff for theirs or others future reference, discord ties it to same permission as deleting other user's messages, thinking pinning is a moderator activity for making announcements.

Server admins control users on slack on the other hand. Your server admin can deactivate your entire account, DMs are tied to a server and your server admin can read them. It's a business tool, the expectation is employers have access to your business communications. The same on discord would be a massive privacy violation. But now as a business, how do you ensure that users aren't sharing passwords in chat, that your departed employee doesnt have a ton of company secrets in their dms etc

The whole channel model is radically different, with Discord having terrible defaults (for any use case imho, but definitely for companies). Discord and Slack are superficially similar, but it breaks down once you get down into the details. Discord is built around having a larger 'untrusted' community, whereas Slack is built for employees at a company who are trusted that little bit more.

You cannot leave a channel in Discord, and by default it will notify you of every message sent in every channel on the server. The best you can do is mute a channel and select 'Hide muted channels'.

Discord has far superior voice comms - in both quality and features (Voice Channels are great), and then there's the whole "roles" system.

IMO you vastly overestimate the corporate use case.

In my experience in places where Slack was settled on as a corporate messaging solution the three questions asked (in order of importance) were

  * "Does it support custom animated emoji"?
  * "Does it have website and document previews"?
  * "Can I send my notifications to it"?

(It's silly but that's how it is.)

I still think Discord doesn't make sense or is very good in a corporate setting.

Out of the box it doesn't, but it's 99% of the way there.

> They're different because of branding only.

Their UX and APIs are incredibly different and their server management and moderation tools aren't even comparable between them.

The 90% interchangeable is only in feature checkboxes for the client application.