Chat App Wars

I’ve been and will continue to be an advocate for alternative platforms such as Guilded. Their feature set and how they’re implemented are on a higher plane than what you can receive from Discord. With features being locked behind the Discord Nitro paywall, many are looking to find alternatives. That’s where Guilded comes into play.

I’ve done several videos on the great options that are available to users and server admins alike over on the Indie Creator Hub YouTube channel. Features like 500mb file uploads, cross-server, animated emotes are just a few of the free features you have straight out of the box. Now, all these features are perfect for the great number of users. The thing is with Discord, the audience mind-share is hyper-focused on Discord.

We saw the same thing when Discord first appeared on the scene. Back then we had Team Speak as the dominate service that held most of the gamer’s attention. It took several months up to a few years that the migration from Team Speak over to Discord.

Now with a brief history of things behind us, my opinions on the players within this space are just that, opinions. My thoughts are that Guilded will become a larger player but, it will take at least another three years. With the backing of Roblox after the acquisition has allowed the team behind Guilded to increase work on the service’s infrastructure. The bot API being still under the beta flag has caused many bot developers to release their products and the work they’ve produced for Guilded is quite good. Including these bots and the Guilded bot flows, a server admin has many features already in-house without having to bring in outside bots to fill that gap.

Discord will remain the undisputed king of the chat apps, for the time being. They have been working on bringing features similar or even a direct copy of Guilded features. This works great for us, the end users. As competition is what drives innovation and improvements no matter what service you tend to align with. The future of the services will continue to be better than what we have today but, it comes down to which one controls the mind share of the public. To continue to see improvements we need both platforms to survive. Don’t out right disregard Guilded because you’re a Discord fan. Try out the features for yourself and see what works, what doesn’t and offer suggestions to the platform of your choice that you would love to see something similar.