Best Discord Bots for Moderation, Levels and Quizzes
Sapphire and YAGPDB handle moderation for free. MEE6 now keeps moderation and levels for Premium at $11.99 a month. Groovy has closed.
Add Sapphire to your server first: moderation, logs, reaction roles and welcome messages on a free plan. After that, one or two bots for whatever the community is about, such as TriviaBot for quizzes, sesh for events or Craig for recording calls. More than that and you are mostly managing bots.
Moderation bots that cost nothing
Sapphire‘s website describes it as completely free, and the feature list is long: moderation with case management, more than ten auto moderation modules, over 80 kinds of log, reaction roles, welcome messages and alerts for Twitch, YouTube and TikTok. Each feature has a limit, there, the site says, to keep it free for everyone. Lifting them all costs $2.99 a month, and a version with your own bot name and avatar starts at €5 a month.
YAGPDB, short for Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot, is for people who like to configure. Its automoderator can mute, kick or ban after a set number of violations in a set time, its custom commands go as far as regular expressions and a small database, and it also runs role menus and feeds. It is open source, so you can host it yourself. The free limits are generous: 100 custom commands and 25 automod rules, against 500 and 150 on premium, which is sold through Discord or Patreon with no price on its page. It has dropped its built-in typed commands that began with a dash, so you use slash commands now.
Carl-bot is best known for reaction roles, where members click to give themselves a role. The free tier allows 250 per server, with automod, logging, welcome messages and custom commands alongside. Its own comparison puts levels, sticky messages and timed reaction roles on the premium side, sold through Patreon or a Discord subscription with no price on the page.
Is MEE6 free?
Barely. The plan comparison on its support portal marks moderation, reaction roles, welcome messages, and XP and levels as not available on the free plan. What stays free is short: the search command, achievements, the starboard and a single timer.
MEE6 Premium is $11.99 a month, $49.99 a year or $89.99 for a lifetime plan, per server. Twelve months at the monthly rate come to $143.88, so the yearly plan saves $93.89, and the lifetime plan costs less than two years of the yearly one.
Each of those jobs has a free replacement: Sapphire for moderation and welcome messages, Carl-bot for reaction roles and Arcane for levels. Arcane gives levelling and up to 15 role rewards free, and says in its App Directory entry that it has no vote locks. Voice levelling and unlimited rewards are premium, on a monthly or yearly plan, with a “Login to purchase” button on its premium page in place of a price.
XP, pets and quiz games
Tatsu, once called Tatsumaki, turns chatting into a game. Members earn XP and credits for talking, spend them on profile cards, pets and furniture for a virtual house, and compete on server leaderboards. Server owners can set up a store that sells roles for points. It is free, with an optional supporter page. It does not come up in a search of Discord’s App Directory, so add it from tatsu.gg.
TriviaBot runs quiz rounds in a channel, and members answer by typing. Its directory entry counts over 160,000 questions in more than 50 categories, with three game modes, teams and a free public leaderboard for every server. Premium adds your own questions, longer quickfire rounds and scheduled games, at £3 a month, £8 a quarter, £30 a year or £99 once.
Pokécord is gone. It shut down in 2020, and its website said at the time that it had closed indefinitely.
Event calendars, support tickets and call recording
sesh is a calendar. You create an event in one message, typed the way you would say it, and members RSVP and get reminders in their own time zone. Polls and a link to Google Calendar are free. Recurring events, custom RSVP options and two-way Google Calendar sync are in Premium, from $6.99 a month, billed yearly, for one server.
Ticket Tool opens a private channel between a member and your staff when someone asks for help. The free Standard plan is capped at 10 tickets a minute, which a small server will not reach. Premium at $7.99 a month adds full customisation, ticket claiming, direct messages to users and automatic closing of old tickets.
Craig records a voice channel with a separate audio track for each speaker, which is what you want for a podcast or a game session you plan to edit, whether on a computer or in an Android audio editor that handles many tracks. Free recordings run up to 6 hours and are kept for 7 days. Patreon tiers at $1, $4 and $8 a month raise that to up to 24 hours and 30 days, and the top tier adds transcripts. Tell everyone in the channel before you record them.
Why Groovy and Rythm shut down
Groovy and Rythm, two of the best-known music bots, both closed in 2021. Groovy’s website still carries the message: it “has ended its service” after receiving a legal notice, and refunds were started for premium users. Asked about alternatives, its makers wrote that they discourage using any music bot after this. Rythm’s notice from the time, saved by the Internet Archive, says it ended its service to comply with a notice from YouTube, its main source of music, and shut down on 15 September 2021.
Bots that advertise YouTube playback are still easy to find, and we leave them all out: Groovy and Rythm were both told to stop, and Groovy’s makers wrote that they did not expect to be the only ones. Pancake is left out too. It is still running, but its website leads with music “from multiple sources” and does not name them.
Rythm itself is back in a different form. It has a page in the App Directory, and rythm.fm now describes a music streaming service with a Discord bot, a Discord Activity and desktop and web apps. Its terms say the music comes from Rythm and its content licensors. Premium removes the adverts.
Discord has two answers of its own. Watch Together is a Discord Activity for watching YouTube videos with others in a call, with a shared playlist. And if you connect Spotify to your account, friends can use Listen Along, though Discord notes they need Spotify Premium.
How to add a bot to a Discord server
Discord’s support page on discovering and adding apps gives the steps. You must own the server or have the Manage Server permission.
- Click the server name at the top left and choose Server Settings, then App Directory. The directory works in the desktop app, in a browser and on Discord’s website.
- Find the bot and read its Overview.
- Press Add App and choose the server.
- Read the screen that lists the permissions and access the bot is asking for.
- Select Authorize.
The bot then appears in the member list and under Server Settings, Integrations. To remove one, kick it from the member list or use the Integrations page.
On a phone, two routes do not depend on the directory. Select the profile of a bot you have seen posting in a chat and press Add App, or use the Add to Discord button on a bot’s website, which opens the same authorisation screen in a browser.
Which permissions a bot should get
The permissions screen is the part people skip. Look for Administrator. Discord’s own guide to roles calls it the most powerful permission, one that grants every other permission and bypasses all channel restrictions.
Bots differ widely here. In the App Directory, the install links for MEE6 and Arcane include Administrator. Carl-bot’s asks for a long list that includes kicking, banning and managing roles, but not Administrator. Craig asks for five permissions: view channels, send messages, embed links, connect to voice and change its own nickname.
Match the request to the job. A moderation bot needs to kick, ban and delete messages. A quiz bot does not. After adding a bot you can still cut its powers: Discord says to open Server Settings, Roles, and edit the role that carries the bot’s name. Under Integrations you can also limit which members, roles and channels may use its commands.
