Discord vs Microsoft Teams
Discord and Microsoft Teams are both team chat software. Discord is a commercial product from Discord Inc. Microsoft Teams is a commercial product from Microsoft.
Which to pick
- Pick Discord when
- You run a public or semi-public community, such as gamers, an open-source project or a creator audience.
- Pick Microsoft Teams when
- Your business already pays for Microsoft 365 and wants chat and video meetings without another vendor.
Side by side
Voice, video and text chat organised into servers and channels, built for gaming groups and online communities.
Chat, meetings, calls and file collaboration built on Microsoft 365, with SharePoint behind team files and optional phone system.
Not built for business use: no proper data retention or compliance controls, and content is hard to search from outside.
The client is heavy and the chat experience is clumsier than Slack; in the EU it is now sold separately from some Microsoft 365 plans.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, desktop app and mobile app (both)
Not published (both)
Closed source, sold by Discord Inc.
Closed source, sold by Microsoft
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
42k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
20k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Other comparisons
More team chat apps
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.