“What platform should I use for my startup’s community? Should I move from Slack to Discourse? Wait...there’s a Discourse 

Now is a great time to build a community online, and there’s no shortage of really great tools to help.

But despite the many options, there’s no single tool to rule them all. There are just too many variables, including community size, engagement model, the size and capabilities of the team building the community, and more.

While there’s no silver bullet for building and growing a community online, there 

 a few key questions to consider that will help guide your tooling decisions and your 

In this article, we’ll discuss the key factors to consider when choosing a community platform, compare the three most popular options, and make recommendations based on a few different community scenarios.

The 3 key factors to consider when choosing

We’ll discuss plenty of details, but here are the high-level recommendations.

You want to take advantage of Slack’s large library of integrations and bots (limited to 10 on free plans), or use their no-code workflow builder (only paid plans).

You want threaded conversations in your realtime chat.

You don’t care that only the last 10,000 messages are retained (on free plans).

You and your community members already use Slack for work.

On the free plan, Slack only retains the most recent 10,000 messages, which means they automatically archive messages above that threshold.

Every community we’re aware of uses the free plan

Slack offers no real tooling for moderation. It’s specifically designed for workplaces, and they 

You need realtime chat with advanced permissions and moderation.

Making users sign up for yet-another-Slack group is a concern.

Integrations and bots are less important.

Your community won’t mind the casual gamer-centric aesthetic.

With Discord, community members use a single account to login to multiple communities. This user model means you can join new communities with a single click (versus creating a new user account for every community). But it means it’s impossible to use different avatars for different communities, which could be a concern for folks who have used Discord primarily for gaming in the past. It’s possible that some might not want to use their stormtrooper headshot in a professional setting.

Discord’s design and copy is playful and gamer-centric

, which could be confusing for community members who aren't familiar with Discord’s gaming roots.

Many community members will likely have similar questions or issues, and you’d like to point them to a library of common answers

You’d like community-generated content to be indexed (and thus findable in search engine results). This helps new members discover the community while reducing the core team’s support burden.

Moderation and fine-grained permissions are important.

You have enough community members for chat to be counterproductive.

Synchronous communication isn’t important, for example, if your community is distributed across many time zones.

You don’t mind paying to host the forum software, or are capable of hosting it yourself.

There are many technical options for starting a community on Discourse, including deploying the open source code on your own servers, paying a third party for hosting, or paying Discourse.org for a fully hosted solution.

For new members, starting a new thread in a forum can be perceived as a higher barrier of entry

, versus simply saying “hello” in a chat channel.

 chat (Discord or Slack) + Discourse if…

You want indexed content (Discourse) along with realtime vibes (chat).

Have the bandwidth to manage multiple platforms.

Want separate spaces for distinct groups, for example a chat for your champions and a forum for everyone else.

plugin for integrating with chat platforms

Three key factors to consider when choosing a community platform

When picking a platform, you’ll likely weigh some factors more heavily than others based on your situation. The factors here will provide you with a framework for assessing the options.

Three Key Factors

In the early stages of a community’s life, it’s important for the organizers to build strong connections with the first handful of members, since early adopters are more likely to join discussions, answer questions, and contribute in ways that make the community seem active and vibrant. Chat is good for this. Scalability and governance are less of a concern at this stage.

At this point, chat platforms can start to feel unmanageable for a few reasons. First, moderation becomes an issue, since it’s hard for a small group of community managers to keep up with the volume of conversations happening (Discord beats Slack on this point).

Second, most community members complain that, on chat platforms, they often answer the same question or address the same concern many times over. The conversations just disappear too quickly for others to easily find, and since they’re not indexed or perma-linked, it’s difficult to reference previously answered questions.

For large, well-established communities, forums are often the right choice, since live chat is difficult to manage and large scales.

Discourse provides fine-grained permissions and moderation that large communities will appreciate. Additionally, since large communities create lots of content, they especially benefit from indexed and shareable content.

Your choice of community platform should take into account your team’s ability to manage multiple channels, their timezone availability, and the number of folks available to interact on your chosen platform—all of which are a function of the team’s size.

Small teams tend to start with a single platform, since that’s what they can manage given their bandwidth. In general, teams of three or smaller should commit to a single platform to focus their time and keep overhead low.

These teams are more self-sufficient compared to small teams and won’t need to depend as much on other teams for support. They 

 be able to handle multiple platforms, but often choose to go deeper with a single platform, such as more clearly defining roles and responsibilities within the team, and designating team members to focus on specific parts of the platform.

Larger teams can handle multiple platforms and different sub-communities, such as a Slack for your MVPs and a Discourse forum for everyone else—but doing so introduces substantial overhead in terms of process management, identity resolution, and governance. That said, larger teams inside bigger companies tend to be better equipped to plan for and manage these situations.

What are the behaviors and norms you want your community members to model? Are you hoping for a casual vibe where members can congregate, discuss, and debate? Or are you more interested in cultivating deep knowledge sharing and collaboration? Once you decide, 

you should factor your engagement model into your tool choice

 outlines three engagement models that we think are useful to consider when choosing a platform:

ephemeral and emergent discussions about common interests

, and emphasize connection based on those topics. Examples include communities about art, gaming, or general technology trends.

community members share knowledge and insights about a common tool or technology, with an emphasis on leveling-up one’s expertise and experience

. Members often teach each other through demos and examples, driving further participation from other community members.

Examples include company-specific communities, like the 

 Slack group, where members share custom CSS and browser extensions as well as how-to videos to share their knowledge and help others excel.

In communities of collaborators, members work together on shared projects. 

The primary example is open source software

, where diverse people from around the world work together to build and improve a common codebase.

In addition to the key factors above, it’s important to understand the actual feature set each platform offers. The grid below assumes features for the baseline plans for each platform, and includes call-outs when features are offered only on paid tiers.

Table Comparing Slack, Discord, and Discourse

We’ll now look at detailed recommendations based on the key factors and the pros and cons of each platform.

we think a community’s engagement model should have the most influence over which platform is used

, so we’ve organized this section along those lines with caveats for size of community and team.

Casual communities should lower the barrier to involvement and focus on building close connections between users. For those reasons, we suggest using Discord. With Discord, new members can join with the click of a button (versus creating new accounts, as with Slack and Discord), which means they can get started quickly.

For servers managed by an official brand account, Discord also offers a 

, which unlocks additional features, like custom branding and short URLs, a verification check mark, and higher quality voice service. 

Discord is strong out-of-the-box, but doesn’t offer the depth of integrations and bots that you get with Slack. Additionally, content isn’t public and indexed, as with Discourse, though public content isn’t always as important for casual communities compared to the other engagement models. Finally, the gamer aesthetic can be polarizing, depending on the culture of the community members.

Champion communities need to strike a balance between causal connection between members and deeper sharing of information, learning, and projects.

For those reasons, we suggest Slack. It’s widely adopted and understood, and enables the real-time communication crucial to building loyalty among community members. Threaded chats enable community members to follow interesting digressions without distracting the whole channel, and link unfurling makes shared content standout in the flow.

Finally, Slack offers tons of integrations that are useful for sharing work, like the GitHub and Trello integrations.

Slack will let you go fast early in the life of your community, but expect to hit a wall around 1,000 active users. At that point, you’ll likely want better moderation and permissions, and you’ll start to bump up against Slack’s 10,000 message retention limit.

From a community member standpoint, it’s annoying to create a new account for every Slack community you join, and for Slack to force you through the same onboarding, even if you’re already a member of dozens of other groups.

 It takes most communities years to grow to thousands of members, if they make it there at all. That said, given Slack’s ease of startup and widespread adoption, it makes sense to take advantage of it for the speed early on, then consider a transition plan in the future once the pain points become prohibitive.

An in-depth comparison of 3 top community platforms across dozens of factors.

Slack vs Discord vs Discourse: The best tool for your community

Think of the last person you DMed on Twitter or in your community Slack. Maybe it was someone you wanted to build a deeper relationship with or ask for help with something.

These kinds of 1:1 interactions are essential to growing a community. But how did you decide who to reach out to?

There’s a good chance you made the decision based entirely on your intuition. 

Without a framework, you probably went with your gut.

In other words, you’re likely to think of newer community members or people you already know from Twitter.

As a result, there's a chance you spend time with only a handful of people from your community, while folks who would contribute more—if only they were asked—fall through the cracks.

When your community is small, it's easy to make decisions intuitively, but without data and a framework, it's hard for intuition to keep up as your community grows from dozens to thousands As you grow, a little data goes a long way. 

 comes in. It can surface data that helps you decide who to work with and how to prioritize as your community grows. 

One way to make more intentional and informed decisions about your outreach strategy is to 

, and then create playbooks for each group.

Once you’ve segmented your community into quadrants, you can plan intentional outreach and allocate your time based on each member’s relationship to you. 

Instead of only going with your gut and, for example, DMing whomever happens to be online, 

you can set goals and plan your outreach accordingly

Love and Reach Quadrants

is a member's level of engagement and activity in the community.

 is a measure of a community member’s sphere of influence.

, you can view this info on the Members page:

Love and Reach in the Orbit app

, check out the block called “Plot of Love and Reach,” which should look something like this:

Plot of Love and Reach from the Orbit Model Airtable Template

you’ll want to customize your plans and allocate your time to each group based on your strategy

, but hopefully these examples will get you started.

These folks are active community members 

 have a large reputation in the broader community, and there’s a good chance you’re already actively working with some of them. 

Here are some ideas for going deeper with these valuable community contributors:

Offer early access to new features and products

Offer to sponsor their newsletter or podcast

Donate to their Open Collective or Sponsor them on GitHub

Make sure they have top-tier or limited edition swag

These folks have explicitly demonstrated interest in your community, but don’t personally have the reach to amplify their love to the broader world. In these cases, you should try to provide opportunities for them to expand their reach:

Retweet their content from official accounts

Ask them to join as a guest on your podcast

Offer speaking slots at your webinars or your events

Given these members’ reach, even small increases in love will have a large effect. That said, because of their influence, you’re likely not the only person reaching out to them. As a result, they probably don’t have a lot of time, so the offer should be really valuable or really easy for them to complete.

Send a quick DM to compliment one of their blog posts, videos, or tweets

Since you have limited time, you should probably avoid 1:1 outreach to these folks until they reach out for support or otherwise engage. 

In the meantime, you can lean on content to encourage this group to do more with your product and community, thereby increasing their love. Guides, tutorials, and playbooks are particularly useful here.

Deliver the appropriate member experience

As a community leader, you will always have more community members than team members, so you have to make decisions about whom you can engage with and what kind of experience is appropriate for each person.

Instead of just guessing and hoping for the best, a framework like this will help your team prioritize their work and make data-informed decisions about the right kinds of experience for every member of your community.

How to use Love and Reach to better understand your community.

Use this segmentation grid to plan your community outreach

Many DevRel and community teams struggle to demonstrate how their activity impacts key metrics, like revenue.

We recently learned of a new SaaS metric proposed by 

 that we think can help, since it can contextualize the results of community activity within a broader business situation, and help show the impact of community on business growth.

how fast a company grows without even trying—before layering on incremental investments in sales and marketing

if your company immediately halted paid search, banner ads, outbound efforts of the sales team, and big marketing campaigns, how much and how quickly growth increase?

many companies are asking this very question

, which creates the perfect opportunity for DevRel and community teams to shine by influencing NRG.

NRG exists to measure a product's ability to grow through a combination of non-paid traffic and product-centric upsells, like inviting teammates and upgrading one’s plan. 

These are areas community teams already influence, but most don’t have a great way to communicate the impact of their effort

. We think NRG is one way to tell the story.

So how can a company drive more organic signups and ARR from products?

 one way community delivers business value through the generation of organic signups

, which has the side effect of driving ARR from products.

If you have a high gravity community with engaged and passionate users, they’ll continue engaging with each other whether or not your company is actively participating.

. It sees hundreds of posts per week, with the vast majority of engagement coming from non-Airtable community members. If the Airtable team stopped replying to messages for a month, the community would continue to operate.

Search engines would continue indexing discussions that happen there, and other users would continue to find helpful community-generated content. That content would drive more usage, and lead to deeper product usage and interest in paid features, like Blocks, leading to in-product upgrades. In other words, NRG would increase.

If community drives growth, how can you increase and measure and expand your community?

Gravity helps measure a community’s growth

, Gravity is the attractive force of a community that acts to retain existing members and pull in new ones, and we think it’s a key top-level metric company leadership should track.

, so an increase in gravity means two things.

First, it means the community has increased its ability to drive awareness about the community and the product it's built around (Reach). Second, it means the community has increased its level of activity, through PRs, content creation, active discussions, and more (Love).

When a community's influence and activity increase, so does its gravity.

So what about key SaaS metrics, like revenue and NRG?

Revenue is the end goal, but if community teams try to influence revenue directly, they risk alienating users with sales-centric tactics. Gravity will drop as everyone leaves the community.

Revenue & Gravity

revenue is a natural second-order effect of high gravity

. Just think of an ice cream cone. The larger the scoop on top of the cone, the more ice cream that drips down. With communities, 

as gravity increases, more users will end up in the adoption funnel

That means DevRel and communities teams should focus on growing the Reach and Love of their community, leading to higher gravity, which then leads to more organic signups.

higher gravity leads to more organic signups which leads to increased revenue.

We think one effective way to demonstrate the impact of community activities, then, is by calculating NRG and showing how community and DevRel contribute.

As a result, we think DevRel leadership should consider NRG as a metric it reports on, and clearly demonstrate how community and DevRel investments move this important metric.

A new SaaS metric for demonstrating the ROI of community.

What’s Your Community’s NRG? 

Organizers should rethink online gatherings from the ground up

Each gathering should start with a well-defined and actionable purpose

Don’t conflate the category of the event with its purpose 

From the guest list to event format, organizers should make purposeful decisions, even if they feel hard to make

Asking guests to contribute to a gathering ahead of time can increase the quality of the gathering

At the event, skip the opening logistics and dive right into the experience

Horseless Carriage

When automobiles first appeared on roads around the world, they looked a lot like their predecessors: the horse carriage.

For many years, the perception of cars was just that: “horseless carriages,” and designers and engineers seemed constrained by this paradigm. It would take many years for them to explore cars as an entirely new platform divorced from the expectations and limitations of carriages and to imagine an entirely new reality.

Thanks to COVID-19, the community of community builders finds itself at the beginning of the exact same transition with the shift of in-person to online gatherings.

A recent tweet from David Spinks sums up the challenge and opportunity well.

How can we begin to rethink our events from the ground up?

The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

 by Priya Parker, and I think it holds many clues. It’s a must-read for anyone building communities, and I think 

it provides community builders with a set of questions and ideas that will help us all thoughtfully transition to a world defined by the need to connect in virtual spaces

"When we gather, we often make the mistake of conflating category with purpose."

We talk about "online events" and "online conferences," but they're really all just gatherings, and according to Parker, 

all gatherings need a clearly defined purpose

Often, though, organizers often get trapped in circular logic when defining their purpose. For example, “We're hosting an online event so we can meet our community online.”

Have you thought about why you’re planning an online event? From the attendees’ perspective, are you trying to educate and inform? To increase connection between community members? To give folks a platform to show off their projects?

From your company’s perspective, is your goal to engage existing community members? To find new ones? To generate leads?

If your answer is, “Yeah, all that,” then you probably haven’t done enough planning. Says Parker,

“Specificity is a crucial ingredient. The more focused and particular a gathering is, the more narrowly it frames itself and the more passion it arouses.”

The driving purpose for your online event shouldn’t be just because “Our in-person events have been canceled.” 

Instead, your purpose should provide a clear desired outcome that will be guide and inform each planning decision.

How do you know if you’ve arrived at a good purpose? One trait of a powerful and actionable purpose is that it will be 

“If you say the purpose of your wedding is to celebrate love, you may bring a smile to people’s faces, but you aren’t really committing to anything, because who would dispute that purpose?"

For example, a baby shower to celebrate a coming baby is not disputable or particularly actionable. On the other hand, a baby shower that celebrates the equality and contribution of both parents, and involves women 

 men, would, in many circles, seem like a disputable purpose.

Instead of hosting a general purpose live coding session, what if you created an event for “Devs who Used to Hate JavaScript and Still Do."

Defining your why and discussing and stating your gathering’s purpose in this way will help you plan the right experience and achieve the results you really need.

Michael Porter, godfather of competitive strategy, said “

The essence of strategy is choosing what 

" This essence applies specifically to your guest list and agenda, both of which you should consider strictly in service of your gathering’s purpose.

For many community folks, the idea of excluding anyone from an event might seem unimaginable. But according to Parker,

“If everyone is invited, no one is invited—in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.”

Based on your stated purpose, who should be invited to the gathering? Have you built a target list, or are you simply hoping the signup form will attract the right people?

In addition to choices about your guest list, you should decide what format will most effectively serve your purpose. Would a one-to-many webinar make the most sense, or would a 12-person coffee meeting?

"In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating."

For many, the bulk of event planning revolves around the day of the event itself—the content and flow, which platform to use, who will MC. But according to Parker, "

90 percent of what makes a gathering successful is put in place beforehand.

For the majority of online events I’ve participated in, the bulk of the pre-work on the participant's part is simply to complete a registration form. And ahead of time, the only communications I’ve received from the organizers are template reminders about the event date and time.

what if asking your participants to do some prep before the event helped achieve your gathering’s purpose?

, asked the participants to complete her 

 quiz beforehand as a way to educate the audience and set the context for the seminar.

By taking the quiz before the event, I learned just enough about my storyteller type to prepare me for the session and get me excited about asking questions and learning more. 

"Asking guests to contribute to a gathering ahead of time changes their perception of it. Many of us have no trouble asking guests to bring a bottle of wine or a side dish, but rarely do we consider what else we might demand of them in advance."

Quotes & questions for rethinking online events.

Orbit Blog

An in-depth comparison of 3 top community platforms across dozens of factors.

How to use Love and Reach to better understand your community.

A new SaaS metric for demonstrating the ROI of community.

Quotes & questions for rethinking online events.

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