RingCentral Video vs Discord

Unlimited calls and video chat with up to 100 people

Meeting duration up to 24 hours

Unlimited integrations including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365

A remote employee meeting with colleagues via RingCentral Video

In today’s digital age, workplace communication tools are crucial to keeping teams connected. As more and more businesses align themselves with the remote work lifestyle, unified communications platforms are becoming an essential part of any company’s tech stack.

If you manage a remote team, you’ll benefit from a communication tool that also facilitates better collaboration, with additional features to streamline workflows and enhance productivity.

You could use a communication-specific tool alongside a separate project management tool. But, wouldn’t it be much easier to implement a unified solution that facilitates communication and collaboration?

Luckily, you’ve got plenty of options. But with so many options, how do you know which software is right for your business?

In this article, we’ll take a look at how two popular communication tools, RingCentral Video and Discord, stack up against one another. We’ll consider the functionality of each and how they can be used as business solutions to facilitate better remote teamwork.

Ready?

Discord vs RingCentral Video: Overview

Before we dive into our RingCentral Video vs Discord comparison, here’s a brief overview of each product.

What is RingCentral Video?

RingCentral Video is a team collaboration platform by RingCentral that empowers teams. It provides a unified online work environment that brings together essential communication channels, task management features, and robust file-sharing capabilities. RingCentral Video can be used by:

Startups
Small-medium sized business
Large businesses and enterprises

Whatever the shape and size of your business, RingCentral Video enables teams to stay connected wherever, whenever.

Co-workers video chatting using RingCentral Video

What is Discord?

If you’re in the gaming community, you’ve probably heard of Discord before.

Discord is a popular group-chat app that was originally designed to help gamers stay connected while they played. However, over the years, it has become increasingly popular as a business team communication tool. The platform lets teams communicate via text, voice, and video, either one-to-one or as part of a community (called a “Server”).

A server is created via the Discord interface

Let’s take a look at some of the similarities, differences, and use cases for each platform to see how they compare as team collaboration tools. First, here’s what RingCentral Video and Discord offer with their free plans.

A comparison of features between RingCentral Video vs. Discord's free plan
	RingCentral Video (free plan)	Discord (free plan)
Message history limit	Unlimited	Unlimited
Voice and video calls	Unlimited voice calls and shared video chat with up to 100 people	Unlimited voice and video calls, HD quality with Discord paid plan
Platforms supported	Windows, Mac, Linux web, Android, iOS	Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, Linux web
Team members	Unlimited	Unlimited
Guest users	Unlimited	No
File annotation	Yes	No
File storage	Unlimited	Unlimited storage with an 8MB file limit
Screen sharing features	Yes	Yes
Integrations	Unlimited integrations including Google Workspace and Microsoft 365	A limited number of integrations available

Now, let’s look more closely at some of the specific aspects of each tool.

Team messaging

Instant message is an essential feature of any team collaboration tool. When tasks must be managed remotely, team members need a way to send and respond to messages quickly.

Email doesn’t quite offer the same efficiency as an instant chat app, does it?

RingCentral Video’s team chat feature allows users to talk in real-time with colleagues, clients, and other types of guests from a desktop or mobile device. With RingCentral Video’s freemium plan, you’ll get unlimited message history and file storage, as well as the option to add an unlimited number of guests. That’s right—all for free!

The RingCentral Video interface showing the team messaging and video meeting feature of the app

The chats in the RingCentral Video communication app are called “teams.” You can create as many teams as you want, and set them to public or private to better organize conversations. For instance, you can create teams based on projects, clients, or for social reasons. Here are the steps involved in creating a team with RingCentral Video:

Click the “+” button to create a new team.
Add a short description and invite the relevant people to join.
Set the team to public (all co-workers can see) or private (only those in the team’s chat can see).
Jumpstart your team’s progress by uploading any relevant links and files.

It’s as simple as that!

The list of employees who are part of the Marketing Team on RingCentral Video

You can easily view your shared files and pinned messages straight from the dashboard. Collaboration is easy with shared document annotations directly within RingCentral Video, or you can connect with file-sharing tools like Google Drive. What’s more, RingCentral Video’s fully searchable—so you can find important documents, files, and conversations without having to scroll through hours of direct messages!

It features a rich text editor so team members can type using formatting tools to emphasize and organize messages. With RingCentral Video’s messaging app, users can also customize messages with a host of communication features, including:

Reactions for responding to messages.
A wide range of emojis because—after all—emojis can speak louder than words.
Gifs—just for fun!

That’s not all, though. One of the best things about RingCentral Video is that users can switch from a chat to a video call with a single click. If you decide your instant messaging conversation isn’t getting the job done fast enough, or someone isn’t quite getting your point, simply click the video icon in the top right-hand corner of the chat window to talk face-to-face.

An employee receives a video-chat invite in RingCentral Video

Now, let’s see what Discord has to offer in the way of messaging.

In Discord, teams are called “Servers.” It’s super easy to set up new Servers, invite team members, and start communicating. Servers on Discord support multiple text and audio channels, so you can organize your conversations by teams or projects. If you need to chat with a specific team member in private, Discord also supports one-to-one direct messages.

Discord’s layout is very similar to Slack’s. That’s probably why so many people opt for Discord as an open-source slack alternative. Teams chat via Servers, and there’s a list of channels on the left-hand sidebar (similar to RingCentral Video!), and users can easily switch between channels with a click.

The platform offers unlimited message history, and users can easily type requests into the search bar to locate specific messages, files, and documents.

However, one major feature Discord’s chat functionality skips out on is being able to reply to specific messages as a means of starting new threads. Doing this enables the better organization of message channels, as replies are directed where they’re supposed to be, rather than appearing at the bottom of the chat stream.

Its lack of threads makes Discord chat feel a bit cluttered and informal, not to mention that a constant stream of unrelated conversations doesn’t lend itself to getting work done!

In contrast, RingCentral Video allows users to reply directly to a specific message, allowing for more organized workflows, less miscommunication, and fewer missed messages.

The creative team are collaborating via group chat in RingCentral Video

Video Conferencing

Face-to-face team communication is just as important for remote teams as it is for co-located ones. It’s no wonder that video conferencing has become the most sought after feature for a team collaboration app. Nowadays, there are plenty of video call solutions on the market. You’ve probably used or at least heard of one of these video chat apps before!

Video conferences can improve your team’s communication by allowing team members to speak face-to-face and decreasing the chances of miscommunications occurring.

Businesses have come to expect crystal clear video quality and a range of extra features to enhance their communications. Therefore, good video conferencing capabilities can make or break a communications product.

Let’s take a look at how the RingCentral Video vs Discord comparison plays out when it comes to video functionality.

First up: RingCentral Video.

RingCentral Video’s video conferencing feature uses RingCentral Meetings to offer users HD video calls. It provides users with a 24-hour call duration and allows for up to 100 participants to join each meeting on the free plan. This makes it an ideal solution for team meetings, client conferences, and webinars. Starting a video conversation in RingCentral Video is easy; all you need to do is:

Head to the team chat or direct message window.
Click the video icon to initiate a video call.
Start chatting face-to-face!

If you run a larger business or an enterprise, you might need to facilitate meetings or webinars with more people than this. RingCentral Video’s got you covered with its Pro+ plan, which enables users to add up to 200 participants to a meeting! What’s more, RingCentral Video is protected by RingCentral’s enterprise-grade security, so you can rest assured your calls and data are secure.

RingCentral Video offers an array of capabilities to enhance collaboration among remote teams, such as:

Screen sharing features: During a video call, users can click to share their whole screen or just a screenshot. They can also enhance collaboration with on-screen annotations.
In-call text live chat: This feature ensures that participants can communicate and ask questions without interrupting whoever is speaking.
Call recording: Users can record important calls and store them for up a week on RingCentral Video’s free plan. With Pro+, you’ll get 10GB of cloud storage, so you can access recordings whenever you want.

An employee is about to share his screen to a RingCentral Video online meeting

With RingCentral Video, it doesn’t stop at HD video. Users can enjoy a range of AI features to enhance the video calling experience. Let’s take a closer look.

1. Add virtual backgrounds

When you work from home, virtual backgrounds are an excellent feature for staying professional, even when you’re conducting meetings from your living room. You can use backgrounds to recreate a formal office environment or play around with creative backgrounds when the meeting isn’t so formal. You can also upload photos to personalize your background or blur it for complete privacy.

A remote employee is meeting a colleague via RingCentral Video

2. Closed captions

Closed captions automatically convert what the speaker is saying to readable captions in real-time. This feature can benefit:

The hearing impaired
People with varied language proficiency levels
Team members who are working in noisy areas

The captions appear underneath the video, so participants can easily keep up with what’s going on in the conversation. Closed captions help teams communicate smoothly, avoiding miscommunications that could lead to mistakes being made.

3. Noise reduction

Easily reduce background noise with RingCentral Video’s noise reduction feature. This way, if you or a team member is working remotely from a noisy cafe or public area, it won’t affect the quality of your call. Spend less time asking team members to repeat themselves and simply get on with what needs to be done.

An employee working from home is on a video conference with colleagues via RingCentral Video

Hold on a second; we’re not through with RingCentral Video’s video features just yet.

One of the additional features of RingCentral Video that sets it apart from its competitors is that it allows you to switch between devices during a call. For instance, if you need to take your meeting on the go, you can simply transfer it from a PC to your phone or tablet with the click of a button. This feature is super useful for remote teams that operate across time zones, so people can easily join important video meetings whenever, wherever.

So how does Discord compare?

Voice calls and voice messages are Discord’s bread and butter. Users can chat with up to 99 team members via voice channels. These voice channels look a little different from Discord’s text-based channels. You can spot them by the little sound icon located next to the channel name.

Discord began as a voice chat application targeted towards gamers. The idea of its voice channels was that you could start a Server, join a voice channel, and allow Discord to run in the background as you played a game.

This always-on audio function can be adapted to remote teams as users can leave the voice channel running while they collaborate on a project. It’s an easy way to quickly ask and answer questions and facilitates an office-like environment.

You can also turn channels off easily—useful if you need to focus—and there’s a “push to talk” setting that limits background noise by only using the user’s microphone when they press to talk during audio calls.

While it’s useful, Discord’s voice channels don’t offer the same collaboration potential as RingCentral Video’s unified message, voice, and video.

Discord does also feature video chat functionality, but only 50 users can participate in a call at a time. Easily start a call by clicking the video icon in the chat window. Users can also share their screens simultaneously, so users can flip between sharing their screen and viewing another—which is great for project collaboration!

Even though video meetings aren’t Discord’s main offering, it’s still high quality and could easily be used as a replacement for another tool. However, if business teams want HD video across devices with additional features to boost the calling experience, a solution like RingCentral Video is much more suitable—and scalable.

File sharing

RingCentral Video’s free version offers unlimited file sharing and storage. Yep, that’s right! Unlike other collaboration software, RingCentral Video allows you to store as many files as you want—for free.

Users can annotate and collaborate on files and documents in real-time, facilitating better teamwork. When you share files in RingCentral Video, you can easily access those shared files in the right-hand column or by searching for keywords in the search bar. Moreover, you can attach files to assigned tasks to make sure your team members have everything they need to work efficiently.

List of actions you can perform on RingCentral Video including starting a video chat, share files, create a task, or schedule an event.

Users can share directly with RingCentral Video or integrate the app with external sharing and storage platforms like Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive. RingCentral Video’s unified approach extends to file sharing, as users can collaborate on documents and tasks with instant messaging and video. Moreover, you can share and access files from any device. With RingCentral Video’s powerful file sharing and unlimited storage, teams can:

Increase productivity file syncing across platforms
Share in seconds (no more email attachments!)
Achieve better workflows with instant sharing and in-app document collaboration

Storage doesn’t stop there. If you need to store recordings of meetings, you can do so for up to a week. Upgrade to RingCentral Video Pro+ to enjoy up to 10GB of cloud storage for video recordings—so all your most important meetings remain accessible forever.

The Website Redesign team communicating and collaborating via the RingCentral Video team messaging feature

Discord’s file storage and sharing capabilities are less robust. You can upload files, but with stricter limits. A single file upload limit is just 8 MB on the free plan. This isn’t ideal for teams working on big projects. With Discord Nitro, users can upload files up to 50 MB.

However, if your team needs a collaboration app with comprehensive storage and sharing capabilities, you’ll find RingCentral Video to be much more appropriate.

Integrations

When it comes to integrations, RingCentral Video is a step ahead of the game.

With its free version, RingCentral Video offers unlimited integrations with a wide variety of business apps that can enhance your team’s productivity and streamline their communication and collaboration.

It’s important to note that RingCentral Video’s APIs are constantly expanding with new integrations with apps across many software categories. Currently, RingCentral Video uses Zapier to allow users to integrate with a host of third-party apps, including:

Integrations with file-sharing software like Box, Dropbox, Google Workspace, and Microsoft OneDrive.
Time-tracking software like Harvest and Toggl
CRM software and help desk integrations (Salesforce, Zendesk, etc.) to streamline business operations
Marketing automation software like Hubspot
Email integrations with G Suite and Microsoft Outlook
Social media integrations with Instagram and Twitter
Development tools like Github, Heroku, Jira, and more

RingCentral Video has integrations to your favorite work and business apps

Even though RingCentral Video features a built-in task manager, it also offers integrations with various third-party apps. This way, your team doesn’t have to give up their favorite project management tool.

Users can combine the power of RingCentral Video with popular collaboration and project management tools like Trello, Asana, and Wrike to streamline internal communications, enhance teamwork and improve the way business teams communicate.

Phew! And that’s not even half the list of integrations you can benefit from with RingCentral Video!

Integrating Airbrak into RingCentral Video only takes a few clicks

In contrast, Discord offers fewer native integrations. You can stream using Twitch or Youtube, share screenshots via Droplr, or connect with social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Additional integrations include Reddit, Spotify, and Xbox Live.

Discord’s integrations are targeted towards the gaming community. Its lack of robust project management features and integrations with external productivity tools and business apps means that Discord doesn’t meet the dynamic needs of most remote teams.

That being said, it does offer bots that bring a host of useful features to Discord’s communication platform. Discord’s bots were developed by its own community and bring unique functionality to the platform. For instance, a bot can set reminders for other team members, stream music from Spotify across voice chat channels, or moderate a workspace.

Bots are easy to set up, and once added to your Server, they can be found under the “Members” tab. Although they bring some unique features to your Discord Servers, they won’t directly improve your team communication and collaboration in the same way RingCentral Video’s built-in task manager and unlimited integrations do.

List of available apps that integrate with Discord

Task Management

Task management features are an integral part of any great team collaboration app. If you’re managing a remote team, you’ll benefit from tools that help you delegate and track tasks. Not only does this increase accountability for team members, but it’ll streamline your workflows and make working together remotely much easier.

RingCentral Video offers users a built-in task manager feature where you can create, assign, and track tasks directly from the dashboard. What’s more, it’s integrated right into the chat feature to prevent you from having to switch between apps. With RingCentral Video’s task management features, you’ll be able to:

Assign team members tasks with notes and file attachments, so they have all the info they need to get started immediately
Organize tasks with color-coding
Get a bird’s eye view of upcoming deadlines and assigned tasks
Set up recurring tasks so you don’t have to create them over and over
Assign tasks to yourself (RingCentral Video’s your own to-do list!)
Reply to, like, and share tasks with a single click

Creating a new task in RingCentral Video

If your team is already used to using another project management app, RingCentral Video offers integrations with popular platforms like:

Pivotal Tracker
Asana
Jira
Trello

This way, you can streamline task management and empower your team with all the tools they need to work better—together.

In contrast, Discord offers very little in the way of task management. Although Discord can facilitate the communication required to synchronously work on tasks, it doesn’t feature a built-in task manager or any integrations with project management software tools. So, you’ll need to invest in another platform like Trello, Asana, or Jira to manage workflows.

Pricing

RingCentral Video is available in a free (RingCentral Video Pro) and paid plan (RingCentral Video Pro+). Think it’s strange that RingCentral Video’s free version is called “RingCentral Video Pro”? You won’t when you take a look at the features RingCentral Video offers users for absolutely nothing.

With Pro, users can enjoy unlimited voice and video calls with up to 100 participants. RingCentral Video’s paid plan costs just $11.99 per month. If you’re a growing business or a large enterprise, this is a small price to pay for all the extra features RingCentral Video Pro+ offers. Upgrading will allow you to make video conferences with up to 200 participants, access up to 10GB of cloud storage for call recordings, and enjoy single sign-on access.

What’s more, you can enhance your business operations with advanced analytics across channels and devices to understand exactly how your teams are using and benefitting from RingCentral Video. You’ll also get 24/7 customer support, so you can rest assured you won’t have to wait hours to have your requests answered.

RingCentral Video Pro $0

Unlimited voice and video meetings up to 100 participants
24 hours meeting duration
Unlimited integrations with project management tools
Instant join in—no downloads required
Switch calls between devices with a single click

RingCentral Video Pro+ $11.99

All RingCentral Video Pro features, plus:
Host up to 200 participants
10GB cloud recording storage per user
Single sign-on access
Advanced analytics across text messaging, video, and other devices
24/7 customer support

The cost of Discord is exactly what makes it one of the most popular alternatives to Slack and other team chat apps. Slack’s price can be pretty hefty, especially for startups and small businesses. When you have to pay per user, costs quickly add up.

Discord pricing includes the free plan (Discord) and Nitro (paid plan). With the free plan, users can enjoy basic text, voice, and video meetings, along with screen sharing completely free. What’s more, Discord allows you to communicate with up to 250,000 co-workers (although we doubt that’ll be necessary) at no extra cost. Discord Nitro is available for $9.99 billed monthly or $99.99 billed annually (per Server!)

Nitro only really provides higher quality voice and video chat along with larger file upload limits (an upgrade from 8MB to 50MB).

Discord vs RingCentral Video: Which one is a better team collaboration app?

When it comes to communication and collaboration apps, Discord is no match for RingCentral Video. And we’re not just saying that because we’re biased toward our own baby, promise.

Although Discord offers easy-to-use text and voice chat and therefore can be used as a tool to connect remote teams, it doesn’t offer the same productivity-enhancing collaboration features as other solutions on the market. RingCentral Video does.

RingCentral Video offers unified communications across multiple devices, as well as robust collaboration features that facilitate better teamwork—wherever, whenever. RingCentral Video’s comprehensive platform offers a simple user interface that allows users to connect and collaborate in several ways. Initiate a text chat, switch to a video meeting with a single click, share files, manage tasks—it’s all possible with RingCentral Video.

RingCentral Video can help business teams of all shapes and sizes to achieve:

Enhanced productivity with in-app collaboration
Streamlined workflows with RingCentral Video’s built-in task manager and countless integrations
Improved communication with unified text, voice, and video chat

If you’re looking for a powerful solution to facilitate better teamwork among your remote business teams, RingCentral Video Pro offers everything that you need. If you work within a fast-growing business, you might want to consider spending just $11.99 per month for RingCentral Video Pro+ to enjoy larger video calls, enhanced analytics, and better support.

Whichever version of RingCentral Video you choose, your team will thank you for it.

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