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Can you use Discord for business?

Why Discord works for business purposes—and why it doesn't

By Justin Pot · April 29, 2025
The Discord logo, which is a stylized gaming controller with the grips curled down, forming a smile. The logo can also be interpreted as a face.

Discord is similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams, but you wouldn't know that looking at the home page. The gamepad and colorful characters quickly make it clear that Discord is branded as a way for people to hang out—and not as a productivity tool.

I don't like being told what to do by branding, though, so I couldn't help but wonder: could you use Discord for work?

My definitive answer: maybe. Let's go over the pros and cons and explore some possible business uses.

Discord is easy to set up and basically free

A Discord server being used for business

Discord is really easy to set up. In a couple of minutes, you can sign up for an account, create a new server, invite your team members, and start conversing. Every server on Discord supports multiple text and audio channels, allowing you to split conversations down by team or project. You can also send direct messages (DMs). Basically, this is a chat app. Everything should feel familiar if you've used other chat apps.

But there's one big difference: Discord is essentially free. Individual users can pay $3-$10/month for Nitro, but that only really offers cosmetic upgrades like animated avatars and higher-quality screen sharing. The free version of Discord is more or less the full version. Slack, by way of contrast, only lets non-paying customers see the last 90 days of messages.

So that's Discord's biggest advantage: it's easy to set up and free to use. This means there's not any risk in trying it out.

Persistent audio is perfect for co-working

Discord started as an audio chat app for gamers. The idea is that you could quickly start a server, click into a voice channel, and leave Discord running in the background as you play. Being able to talk to other players out loud makes coordinating a lot easier. It also makes it feel more like you're playing together.

But it's not just gamers who can benefit from this kind of always-on audio. Your team could decide to leave this feature on while working, as a way to remotely co-work. Just click any voice channel in the sidebar to enable the audio—you'll immediately be able to hear everyone else who enabled audio. That means you can quickly ask coworkers for help when you need it, or just have the occasional side conversation. It's easy to turn a channel off when you need to focus or to start a new channel when you want to work with a smaller group. (Just try to remember when you've left audio on, especially if you wear a wireless headset, because people really can hear everything. Everything.)

Discord doesn't stop at audio: just like Slack or Teams, there are also video calls and screen sharing. You can start a video call in a group DM, or you can just head to an audio channel and enable video. In my experience, the video quality is pretty good, meaning Discord could also be an alternative for apps like Zoom or Google Meet.

Other things to think about

There are a few reasons Discord might not be the ideal app for work. Here's a quick roundup.

  • DMs are universal, not per-server. Direct messages are Discord-wide, as opposed to being contained in your company's server. This might make it hard to separate work from play. It also means that employees who quit will still have access to DMs with their team members.

  • Limited file uploads. File uploads are limited to 10 MB in the free version of Discord and 50 or 500 MB in the paid versions, meaning you can't use it to upload larger files. You can work around this by linking to files on other services.

  • The branding and documentation are very casual and make occasional gaming references. This might not seem like a big deal, granted, but things could get confusing for people who aren't familiar with gaming culture and language.

  • Only 50 regular and 50 animated custom emoji per server without paying for Server Boosts. This might sound like plenty. It isn't. Zapier's Slack has over 10,000 emoji and couldn't operate under these sorts of conditions.

If any of these limitations are dealbreakers, Discord isn't for you. Consider using an alternative chat app instead. If you can live with these limitations, however, Discord might be worth a shot.

Business uses for Discord

Newegg Discord community
Brands like Newegg use Discord to connect with customers through official communities.

While it started as a voice and text chat platform for gamers, Discord grew into a tool that anyone could use to build a community. This versatility lends itself to all sorts of business uses. Here are some ideas.

Internal communications

Just like your favorite business chat app, Discord has separate text channels to organize your conversations, making it just as usable for internal comms. The Champion Leadership Group team uses Discord's text and voice capabilities for communication and project management. "We've also built project-specific channels to track progress and keep everyone informed," CEO Jeff Mains says.

Client communications

Discord also offers a space for you to communicate with clients. For example, you could make a server specifically for a client and use Discord roles to separate internal and external communications. According to Sammy Hardesty at Heaven Media, the agency often uses Discord to communicate with clients because they work in the gaming industry, where it's the go-to platform.

Communities

Discord offers a wide range of community-centric features that you can use to build one for your audience. You could create a free community like Newegg, where you can get to know your customers. Or, you could use Server Subscriptions and Server Products to monetize it.

Audience research

The casual nature of Discord communities makes them a great place for you to learn more about your audience. When Dogwood Solutions started working with a truck driver insurance company, they turned to Discord's trucker communities to better understand their lives. "We learned the language they use and what their day-to-day lives are like and looked at lots of pictures of their rigs," owner Liz Sweeney says. The Dogwood Solutions team even found truckers to interview to develop buyer personas.

Image generation

Midjourney is one of the highest-quality AI image generators, and it's available in an interesting, community-oriented way through Discord. If AI image generation is core to your business, Discord can be a part of those workflows.

Events

Discord servers are great spaces for online events like talks and webinars. You can even set reminders that appear in your server and automatically convert to the viewer's local time.

One of Discord's lesser-known features, stage channels, are voice channels where only designated speakers can talk. Stage channel moderators can add and remove speakers on the fly so the audience can chime in as well. It's a great way to host an audio webinar.

Bot services

Some servers, like Midjourney, act as a bot service, where the main focus of the server is to use the built-in bot. Most of the prominent servers of this type in Discord's Discovery menu enable you to use generative AI, but you can take this approach with any bot that performs a service for the user. Some examples:

  • Applying filters to images

  • Playing music or videos

  • Reporting the weather

  • Sharing randomly-generated text (like a fortune or fun quote)

Supplement Discord's integrations with Zapier

Apps like Slack, Google Chat, and Microsoft Teams offer official integrations with other apps, allowing you to do things like see when a new file is uploaded to Google Drive or your company is mentioned on social. Discord doesn't offer much in the way of official integrations, at least not for business-facing apps. There's pretty much just user-created bots, most of which don't offer any kind of support.

You can build your own Discord bot using Zapier as a sort of workaround. Or you can use Zapier to connect Discord to any of the other apps you use, allowing you to build just about any Discord integration you can imagine. You could, for example, find out when there are new posts on an RSS feed or when a new YouTube video is posted. But you could also create more work-related workflows, like alerting you when a meeting is about to start or when a new task has been added to your project management tool.

Learn more about how to automate your Discord server, or try one of these pre-made workflows.

Send new YouTube videos in Discord channel messages

  • YouTube logo
  • Discord logo
YouTube + Discord
More details
    Don't worry about forgetting to post videos to Discord again! Zapier helps you handle the busywork so you can focus on making better content. In a few clicks, use this Zap to automatically post new YouTube videos to a channel on your Discord server.

    Send daily messages to Discord channels

    • Schedule by Zapier logo
    • Discord logo
    Schedule by Zapier + Discord
    More details
      Want to send a recurring reminder or other related message to your Discord server? This integration can help! Set it up to send a daily message in a Discord channel automatically. Just specify your Discord channel, schedule the time, and customize the message. Zapier will handle the rest!

      Post new RSS items to Discord channels

      • RSS by Zapier logo
      • Discord logo
      RSS by Zapier + Discord
      More details
        Want to view an RSS feed on your Discord server? Activate this Zap to share new RSS items to your Discord channel automatically. You can also customize the message to show the author, source, link to the article, or a personalized greeting.

        Zapier is a no-code automation tool that lets you connect your apps into automated workflows, so that every person and every business can move forward at growth speed. Learn more about how it works.

        Related reading:

        This article was originally published in April 2020. The most recent update, with contributions from Melissa King, was in April 2025.

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