Reddit vs Discord: The Battle of Social Platforms [2024]

Reddit vs Discord: Reddit and Discord are two of the leading social media platforms currently, with each having its own different advantages and disadvantages. These two are extremely interesting platforms for socializing with your community and online friends.

While Reddit is where you can find trending topics and more about your favorite community, Discord is where you can get together with your online friends and talk about trending topics on the Internet.

However, some questions like ‘can Discord be called a competitor of Reddit?’ and ‘Is Reddit a competitor for Discord?’ are widespread on the Internet, although these two platforms are not correlated or offer similar features and services at all.

Now, if you are interested to know how these two are different and what are the significant differences between the two, then our comparison battle between Reddit vs Discord mentioned below has got your back. 

Reddit vs Discord: Overview

Reddit

Reddit is a leading American-based social news aggregation, a discussion platform along with a content rating site. It allows registered users on the platform to share different types of content such as text posts, images, videos, and links.

Reddit allows users to vote up or down the post according to their opinions about the post. You can share a good variety of information from entertainment to politics. Overall, Reddit is a group of communities where you dive into your favorite hobbies, interests, and passions in depth. 

Discord 

Discord is a popular hangout application, a VoIP, and an instant messaging social media app. It allows its users to communicate in different ways like video calls, chatting, voice calls, files, and media through private chats as well as in community servers.

In this generation, Discord is probably the most unique social media platform for hanging out. It offers the easiest way to chat with your online friends and have a peaceful yet exciting time doing a good variety of activities with bots. 

Reddit vs Discord: Key Features

Reddit

• Live

Going live and streaming videos, audio conversations, and chat is not a new feature, but it gives you plenty of ways to connect to your community and engage.

• Anonymous

On Reddit, your profile doesn’t display your real name, country, age, job, or even social status, as long as you want it to, and you can stay totally anonymous.

Discord

• Moderation

The moderation feature is important, especially when you are handling a big server. This right is first with the creator of the server and then passed on to other coordinators or heads of the server to manage it systematically.

• Screen-sharing

All the video and audio channels in the server offer screen-sharing features where one of you can share their screen, like when you’re having a movie night with your online friends.

• Audit

The audit feature is not exactly popular, but helps a ton when the server is big. This feature will help the creator of the server know which member is changing the settings or anything else in the server through the audit log. 

Reddit vs Discord: Popularity 

Reddit

Reddit counts the total global visit traffic on its website, and in May 2022, about 1.7 billion visits were counted, helping it become one of the most visited online platforms.

Discord

As of 2020, Discord reported 300 million registered users on its platform. By January 2024, it was estimated to reach up to 550 million registered users.

Reddit vs Discord: Best For

Reddit

Reddit is best for finding trending topics, reviews on services and products, advisors, opinions, etc. You can also find alternatives to services and apps, popular news about your favorite industry, and much more.

Discord

Discord is best for group messaging where you can do pretty much anything with your group members. 

You can carry on with a project, a community, a random server where you hang out with your online friends, a gaming server where all the members gather to play multiplayer games, etc.

Reddit vs Discord: Plans and Pricing

Reddit

Reddit offers almost all of its services and tools free of charge. However, if you are interested in trying its paid version, Reddit premium, then the service is priced at $4.99 per month.

Through this subscription plan, you’ll be able to hide all the advertisements on the platform while getting access to an exclusive subreddit named r/lounge.

Discord

Discord has a good bunch of its tools and services for free. However, from personal experience, we can say Discord is much more fun when you opt for its paid version. It has 2 options for Subscriptions, and they are as follows:

• Nitro basic – starting at $4.99 per month.
• Nitro – starting from $9.99 per month

Reddit vs Discord: Differences

Working

The working of both Reddit and Discord is entirely different. At Reddit, you can post anything including text and multimedia like images and videos. 

On Discord, there’s nothing like ‘posting’ because all you do is a message in the channels or chat through private messages. In conclusion, you can communicate through both platforms, but in different ways.

Community 

Both Reddit and Discord are homes for thousands of communities from around the world. They welcome almost any type of community, however, in different ways. 

While Reddit allows you to talk in your community openly, you can participate in open discussions and join trends, Discord here allows you to chat openly in your community as well as direct message a person, or in private. 

Also, unlike Reddit, the discussions going on in a private server can’t be seen and witnessed by others.

App Interface

Reddit has a bit of a complicated interface for a beginner, and you’ll take about 2 days to get a hang of it. 

On the other hand, we have Discord – an extremely intriguing platform with a hard user interface. From personal experience, we were literally blank and confused for the first 3 to 4 days before understanding the working of it. 

While Reddit has posts, advertisements, related content, recommendations, etc jumbled up one after the other, Discord has multiple servers, channels, etc to handle – and when you look at everything at once, it just gets confusing in the start. 

Content-sharing

Both platforms allow you to share similar content through text, and multimedia like images, GIFs, and videos. However, when you share content on Reddit, as long as it’s not private or secured by a certain bug, anyone in the world can view and respond to it.

Likewise, you can change the settings of your server in Discord to private so that only the people who are invited will join in and be able to see the messages in channels.

Moreover, with Reddit, you can go live and share content, videos, images, text, etc. With Discord, you can do everything aforementioned, plus, you can go for group video calls, voice calls, etc for verbal and face-to-face conversations. 

Good for Discussion 

Both Reddit and Discord are good for all types of discussions. However, with Reddit, you can only post stuff on your message board and let your community members know to start a discussion. The discussions can go on through threads and comments.

On Discord, you can have discussions but all the members will be able to respond to them equally. Along with that, you can gather responses and answers all at once, unlike Reddit where comments will continue to come after years of posting. 

Apart from all that, Reddit is good for discussions, but when you want a quick review, answer to any question, etc – anything fast, Reddit might not be a pleasant choice, since your post will take time to reach the people.

However, if you ask the same question in your community server, people will take a maximum of 48 hours to answer, but in active servers, you’ll probably get it within a couple of hours of messaging. 

Good for Hangout

Reddit is certainly not a place to hang out. It doesn’t have private chat rooms or video and voice rooms where you can spend quality time with your online friends.

On the other hand, Discord here has chat rooms along with video and voice call rooms where you can have a blast at virtual parties, including limited members, and go on for movie night, karaoke party, etc. 

Good for Projects

Whether we are talking about a college or school project, or something related to an NGO, a community, etc in any case, Discord is the best option when you want to prepare for a project online. 

Discord has plenty of tools to help you systematically plan and carry on the project, whereas, on Reddit, it is good to find ideas, inspirations, trending topics, etc, but that’s it. 

You simply can’t openly discuss anything about your project through posting in the community globally, as long as we are talking about a huge project where anyone can volunteer and the community has thousands of members.

Bots

Reddit doesn’t have anything like ‘Bots’. For it, its entire platform is filled with genuine people and real users. 

On the other hand, we have bots working in Discord servers, doing a bunch of tasks- actually, pretty much everything for users. Like – we have a bot for daily attendance of the server members and some random yet popular bots for fun like Dank Memer. 

Reddit vs Discord: Difference Table

Features/Tools	Reddit	Discord
Goal	It acts as a huge forum where all types of communities can gather and discuss their favorite content.	It acts as a real-time communication platform, one of the best apps to hang out with your online friends.
Interface	Discussion Posts and Threads along with Comments.	Servers including channels subdivided into chat and voice rooms.
Ease of Use	Can be a bit hard at the start.	Beginners will take at least a couple of days to understand how the platform works.
Pricing	Reddit premium – $5.99 per month.	Starting from $4.99 and $9.99 per month.
Moderation rights	All users in the community have moderation rights, where they can upvote or downvote any type of post according to their liking. Some can even edit subreddit rules.	Moderation rights are first only given to the creator of the server, but can later be passed on to other members of the community, and some bots.
Use of emoticons	Can be used in posts and comments.	Can be used in texts and also as reactions to messages and media.
Content-Type	Messages, Text Posts, Videos, GIFs, and Images.	Messages, Files, GIFs, Images, and Videos.
User Count	Over 1.5 billion global visits are counted.	300 million registered users measured in 2020.
Screen-sharing	No	Yes

Is Reddit a competitor for Discord?

A big No to that! Reddit was and can never be a competitor to Discord unless it starts offering similar features. 

Reddit here acts like a huge forum for 100s of communities. Moreover, Reddit is a place where you can openly discuss any topic, ask for opinions, give your reviews, etc – something you can't do through Discord.

On the contrary, Discord here focuses more on communication services, where you can discuss privately as well as publicly your favorite topic. 

At Discord, you can join multiple servers, play games, call, video call, make groups of your favorite friends, etc and do a good variety of things, totally different from Reddit. 

Final Words 

With all the headlines and points highlighted in the above comparison battle, it is clear that Reddit and Discord have very few similarities, but can still go along well, not as competitors, but as two entirely different platforms.

For instance, you can use Reddit to know what’s trending on the Internet, like which is the top anime or game, and further visit Discord to talk about the same topic with your gamer or anime friends. 

With this, we have come to a clear conclusion and hope that you now know what are the differences that tell Reddit and Discord apart.

Frequently Asked Questions 

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