So here we have the three titans of voice and text chat, Discord, Skype, and TeamSpeak. These three applications have been competing for the best in the world in this genre, and we’re here to set the record straight. Which one is objectively the best?
Skype released in mid-2003, and was a wildly popular app, as it was the first to really accomplish what everybody had wanted. TeamSpeak released in mid-2008 and was competing with Skype up until 2015. Discord released in early 2015 and was immediately recognized to be one of the best Voice and Text chat apps in the world. It conquered over Skype and pushed Skype into a downward spiral. TeamSpeak was standing strong and was still popular, and the fight between TeamSpeak and Discord lasted a very very long time. After a while, Discord was starting to do much better than TeamSpeak in popularity, and TeamSpeak had started burning to ash.
Now that we got the history of the competition between these voice call titans out of the way, we will start to go over some of the differences between them.
| Discord | Teamspeak | Skype |
| ✔️Constantly updated | ✔️Updated Fairly Frequently | ❌Barely updated at all |
| ✔️Many different customization options for groups and servers | ❌Barely any customization for their groups | ✔️A bit of customization for groups |
| ❌Bad Host Servers, Bad Lag | ✔️Decent host servers, No Lag | ✔️Good host servers, No lag |
| ✔️You need to get people’s #’s (ex.) #1729, to be able to talk to them directly, Good Privacy. | ❌Cant Friend People period, Bad Privacy | ❌Random people can find your profile and message you, Bad Privacy |
Overall, Discord betters both Teamspeak and Skype in most departments, and the popularity of these applications shows it. Discord, according to Polygon, maintains a massive 14 million daily users; where Skype and Teamspeak maintain a combined 5 million. The numbers really speak for themselves, and it is clear that Discord is the best option if you want to use an application of this genre.
By Lyle Goldader ’24