Discord is more like a ventrilo replacement for gamers. It was primarily voice chat in its early days. They've done a lot of work to make the chatroom space on par with any other chat application you'd use otherwise. They also now allow for direct screenshare and game streaming.
I wouldn't ever have considered Discord for Enterprise use at a serious company, but I guess it could do everything Slack can. For personal use it's more versatile for group stuff like gaming or group presentations (my friends have used it for music/video production meetings).
I (as a uni. student, so take it with a grain of salt) am involved in managing several large projects - overseeing 4 teams of around 10 people each. We decided to use Discord as the university did not want to pay Slack workspace licenses and it has been a frustrating experience to say the least.
Comparing to several experiences I have had with similar-sized teams and even a larger, albeit still small-ish, organization, there are many complaints to be had:
- No threads. This one is Discord's Achille's heel when compared to Slack. If you have even two or three simultaneous conversations around the same topic, you either a) are unable to understand what's going on past a certain point or b) need to take the conversation somewhere private, essentially losing one of the main components of the experience.
- No archiving channels. Seriously. I have categories in my Discord servers to archive stuff, and it just means that there is a dump of channels clobbering the interface for day-to-day operation. The Slack model where they are tucked away in a closet is much better.
- Integrations. Discord bots are cool for music but everything productive, from /gcal to Doodle/GitHub/Trello/Google Drive integration is better on Slack.
One thing I think is overrated is the search. Discord's sucks, and while Slack search works reasonably well, I do find it hard to remember relevant information to put in the search prompt. Essentially I think that you still need an external place to store persistent documentation and more durable information, be it VCS issues, wikis (Notion has been a product I started using recently and seems pretty cool), but even there threads help write the docs.
Where Slack falters is not-text. As ludicrous as this sounds, I have seen cases of teams using Slack for written communication and falling into Discord for voice channels and transient chat. I think this can be made better with good integration with some communication suite: Zoom? Google Meet? Anyhow, this is where MS Teams comes and eats their lunch. Worse at everything than everyone else, but at least it does it all.
Slack has a million enterprise focused features. If your company's Discord server has to go through eDiscovery for a lawsuit, for example, you are going to have a bad time.
