Discord is in its own league compared with other social media or messaging platforms. It is different and has its own use case. But recently, a new service called Guilded was launched with a similar UI but more features and better options in the free version. As both the services look and work identical, it makes it easy to switch from one platform to another without the need to learn from scratch. But is it worth it? Here’s our comparison guide on Guilded and Discord.
Guilded vs Discord
Let’s start with the servers and go down comparing every aspect of it.
1. Server Customization
Servers are the heart of both platforms. Here are the basic customization options to make your server and therefore your community stand out.
With the free version, your Discord server can have a server name, icon, and 50 emoji slots. But you can boost the server with Nitro plan. On a level 1 boosted server, you get an animated icon, 100 emoji slots, and 15 sticker slots. With the level 2 server, you can get a server banner, 150 emoji slots, and 30 sticker slots. Finally, with a level 3 server, you can get a custom URL, 250 emoji slots, and 60 sticker slots.
In case you are wondering, you can use these emoji slots and sticker slots to upload your custom emojis and stickers that are not available on any server making your server personal to you.
On Guilded, you get a server icon, server name, server banner, custom URL, about section, and unlimited emojis in the free version. Guilded easily takes the cake if you compare the free version as all the features are free with unlimited emojis. But when you boost the server on Discord, you get a few additional features like animated icons and custom stickers.
Winner: Guilded
2. Profile Customization
Apart from the server customization, you can also customize your own profile.
On Discord, you get an avatar, about me section, and an option to connect 3rd-party accounts like Spotify, Twitch, GitHub, Steam, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and more With Nitro Classic, you can extend the features such as having an animated avatar, multiple avatars in the different servers, etc. With regular Nitro, you can also have a profile banner.
On Guilded, you have a profile picture, profile banner, about me section, custom URL, and option to connect your other accounts such as Twitch, Steam, XBOX, Play Station, Nintendo, YouTube, and more all at the cost of $0.
If you have a gaming niche server, Guilded is a better option as you can connect more gaming-related accounts to it. Whereas Discord works for any type of community as it offers more diverse accounts to link up.
But unlike Discord, on Guilded, you can post a status to your profile that can contain many things like quotes, polls, forums, images, and more. You can even provide links to your other accounts that are not supported by Guilded by default.
Winner: Guilded
3. Channel Types
Channels are an integral part of servers. This is where you send messages, make calls, voice chat, etc. But this is also where both the platforms completely differ from each other.
On Discord, you have a limit of 500 channels on your server which is quite a lot. These channels can be classified into 4 categories ⏤ Text, Voice, Announcement, and Stage.
- Text is a normal text channel to chat with people in your community.
- Voice channels can be used to voice chat.
- Announcement channels can be used to send announcements to other servers.
- Finally, the Stage channel is something like a voice channel, but only a few people have permission to talk while others can listen – something like Twitter Spaces or Clubhouse.
On Guilded, you can create unlimited channels and they can be classified into 10 categories.
- Text channel to chat with people on your server.
- Voice channel to voice chat with people obviously.
- Streaming channel to stream your gameplay or live video with the community. It doesn’t have an option to connect with Twitch or OBS Studio as of now as the Streaming channel is still in beta. You can only stream to people on your server.
- Calendar to create a calendar of events for all the people on the server.
- The scheduling channel will provide a scheduled view of the calendar but also makes it easy to add events and organize the calendar.
- Announcements channel to announce via text messages to other servers that follow your server.
- Forums channel can be used to create forums where people can ask questions and take help from others on the server.
- Lists channel is sort of a to-do, but for everyone on the server. Can be quite useful to complete the tasks collectively.
- Documents channel to create and publish posts.
- Media channel to access all the media in the chat in one place. You can also just upload media to the media channel and organize all the photos and videos uploaded.
With unlimited channels and more channel types to choose from on Guilded, it is miles ahead of Discord. While all the types of channels don’t seem practical, they can come in handy for different types of servers and admins.
Winner: Guilded
4. Messaging and Calls
We have already discussed text and voice channels in the channel types section. But there are quite a lot of differences between them on the two platforms.
In the text channel on Discord, the maximum file size you can share is 8MB. But you can get the Nitro Classic to increase the limit to 50MB. For regular Nitro, you can increase that limit to 100MB. But on Guilded, the maximum file size is 25MB for images and 200MB for video, in the free version.
Guilded also has an advantage when it comes to voice channels. It provides the option to text message directly in the voice channel. So you don’t have to create a new text channel for voice. Can come in handy to send links, images, etc. when you are in voice call.
Winner: Guilded
5. In-Built Streaming Option
One of the most important features that Discord lacks is streaming options. While the streaming option on Guilded lacks a connection with Twitch or OBS, you can still use it to stream within your Guilded Server. It also supports multiple streams, so you can partner with other people on Guilded and stream together.
It supports all the basic streaming features you would expect like chat options, different layouts, partnering up with people to stream together, screen sharing to even niche features like noise cancellation, keyboard shortcuts, etc.
Winner: Guilded
6. Server Groups
Servers become overloaded with different channels as they grow bigger. You have the option to categorize the channels in both Discord and Guilded. But Guilded goes one step ahead even with server groups.
A server group is nothing but a sub server inside a server. You can create channels in this server just like on your parent server. These servers can be restricted to only a few roles or you can leave the option to people to join the server group they like. This declutters the server as you can have many sub-servers inside it and makes organizing much easier. You can access server groups by clicking on the + icon in the left sidebar.
Winner: Guilded
7. Bots
Discord has an advantage here as it is playing this game for a longer time than Guilded. There are thousands of bots you can choose from. Also, there are many bot stores available like the top.gg to find and add bots to your server easily.
Guilded, on the other hand, has only 4 bots related to services like Twitch and Patreon. APIs to create bots are in the beta version, so Discord has an upper hand here.
But Guilded provides the option to create your own bot and it is stupidly easy to make them. You can automate by setting up triggers to activate and actions to perform. There are many types of triggers like when someone joins the server, an event is created, someone is muted, toggled list, a forum is created, a new announcement is made, Twitch stream starts, etc. Also, many actions like a custom message, assigning a role, adding XP, etc.
You can easily find bots that can do all of this and even more on Discord.
Winner: Discord
8. Server Discoverability
Firstly, Discord has a lot of servers than Guilded as it started way before. But not just that, you can use the Explore option on Discord to quickly find popular Discord servers in various categories like gaming, music, science, student hubs, entertainment, etc. You don’t have any such option on Guilded.
Also, there are many third-party sites like the top.gg that help you find the server you need. As Guilded is a new service, there aren’t any well know third-party sites that create a list of popular guided servers.
Winner: Discord
9. Platform Availability
Both Discord and Guilded are available on all operating systems like Mac, Linux, Windows, Android, and iOS. But Discord has an upper edge as it also has a web client which is missing from the Guilded side. Also, the mobile apps of Discord are way better than what Guilded is offering as of now.
Winner: Discord
10. Pricing and Plans
Discord comes with two paid plans – Nitro Classic and regular Nitro. Nitro Classic is $5/month and the regular Nitro is $10/month. You get all the additional benefits as discussed in the above points from custom emojis, URL, more file size, more customization options, etc.
But Guilded provides most of them or even more than Discord in some cases completely for free. That being said, server owners have the option to restrict a few features so that they can offer paid plan to remove those features. As Guilded is providing those options to the server owners, you can consider it better than Discord.
Winner: Guilded
Wrapping Up: Discord vs Guilded
When it comes to features and most importantly offering them for free, Guilded comes at the top. It has more customization options, more types of channels, can upload bigger files, and even more. Also, additional features like streaming and server groups are not even available on Discord. But Discord obviously has an advantage as there are more servers for you to join, bots that improve the functionality, better smartphone apps, and even a web client.
Irrespective of which service won in more cases, you can choose the one that suits your needs. You can’t go wrong with either.
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