Running and building a successful and active Discord community is a tough job, especially as your server gets bigger.
How can you easily stay on top of moderation tasks without having to find a huge team of trustworthy people to help you? How to keep your Discord members engaged and coming back? How to make your Discord server a fun and inviting place to be? Here are a few of my recommendations of the best Discord bots for 2021 to help you reach your goals and keep your server fun and enjoyable for everyone!
1. PixxieBot
PixxieBot is a fun and factual Discord bot. It has no moderation features — instead it focuses on creating interaction amongst members keeping your community engaged and growing sustainably.
This bot’s fun commands include: Truth or Dare games, random “What Would You Do?” questions, ship, marry and divorce commands keeping your users coming back for more every day, cheesy pickup lines, nasty roasts and funny random nicknames you can self-assign or assign to a friend, as well as 50+ tailor-made and hand-picked GIF interactions!
It also has a unique feature called “Make a Sentence” where users take turns writing one word each to make up a sentence. It’s great fun and definitely gives some funny results!
Factual commands on PixxieBot include: a history command with over 38,000 historical facts, a list of the astronauts currently in space, the live position of the International Space Station on the map, and even the profile of a random drag queen from RuPaul’s drag race!
Did we mention that half the Patreon donations go straight to help fund cancer research?
The user reviews speak for themselves, PixxieBot is definitely a fun recommendation for anyone wanting to increase their Discord community engagement in 2021!
➡️ Invite PixxieBot to your Discord server
2. Color Chan
If you’re growing a big Discord community and want to allow people to set their own custom colour, then Color Chan is my recommendation for bigger servers.
It’s simple, you can set up a list of colour roles that your members can self-assign at will! You can also modify, add and remove colours at any time.
If you have multiple Discord servers you want to add this bot to, you can easily make your list on one server, then import it on another server with one simple command! This means you don’t have to re-configurate the entire list every time you add the bot somewhere new!
Colour Chan is my favourite colour role bot for anyone who wants to build a larger Discord community!
➡️ Invite Color Chan to your Discord server
Tip: Have a small server and want to allow users to use the exact colour they want? Try Lexa instead! It’s a cool indie bot that allows users to assign a role with their own HEX colour codes.
3. Tatsu
Ok, I’ll be honest, I only discovered this bot a month or so ago, but it’s one I’m definitely looking forward to playing with in 2021!
Tatsu’s mission is to gamify your community. As well as a global economy system, Tatsu also allows you to create your own custom store in your server, let your members earn your own server currency, XP, compete on leaderboards, create their own rank cards and more!
As for games, it has everything from slots to holiday-themed features like an advent calendar at Christmas with rewards behind each window! It also has interaction commands so users can tag each other with actions.
Tatsu also has extensive pets features. With over 90 available pets, you can feed, walk and train your pets to level them up and customise your house too with over 100 designs and 500+ pieces of furniture and fittings!
Tatsu will definitely help boost your server’s engagement and create lasting friendships within your Discord community!
➡️ Invite Tatsu to your Discord server
4. counting
Counting is another of my favourite bots for building engagement in a Discord server.
Again, this bot is simple but very effective. All you have to do is set up a counting channel, quickly set up the bot, then start counting! If you have a friend in the channel to spam numbers with, you’ll be surprised how quickly you can get to 200 without even realising how much time has passed!
Each user takes turns to count the next number up. You can even use equations — for example if your next number is 15, you can type 6+9 instead, or if the next number is 6, you can type 4+2+0. See what I did there? Yeah… You get the idea! It’s a fun addition to any Discord community!
If someone types the wrong number, the count gets reset to 0 unless you have a save in your inventory which you can earn by voting for the counting bot on top.gg.
Compete with other Discord servers on counting bot’s global leaderboard to see who can count the highest!
➡️ Invite counting to your Discord server
5. OwO
OwO brings engagement to your community by allowing users to hunt for animals on your Discord server, but also level-up and train a team of animals, allow them to equip deadly weapons, and fight in duels against other server members’ teams of pets.
Hunting can be boosted using gems which you can earn by doing daily quests and opening lootboxes. It’s totally free to play, but I enjoy it so much I decided to join their Patreon page to unlock extra animals just for fun, while helping the developers of a bot I enjoy. Hosting costs money, someone’s gotta pay!
OwO also has some useful features, my favourite being the ability to steal emoji I find around Discord for my own servers in one simple command!
How good is OwO? They recently passed the milestone of 1,000,000 Discord servers. That says it all!
➡️ Invite OwO to your Discord server
6. Groovy
I had been using another popular music bot for a long time until a friend recommended Groovy to me about a year and a half ago. I haven’t looked back since!
Groovy is definitely the most reliable music bot out there. I’ve had downtime problems with other music bots in the past, but never with Groovy.
It plays music from SoundCloud and YouTube, but you can also drop a link to a whole Spotify, Deezer, Apple Music or Tidal playlist and it’ll queue up the whole playlist in one go!
In bigger servers, you can also assign a DJ role to allow members to moderate the queue.
If a reliable, high-quality music bot sounds like music to your ears, then look no further than Groovy this year!
➡️ Invite Groovy to your Discord server
7. PatchBot
Are you running a Discord server for a community built around a game? PatchBot posts all the latest updates and patch notes for your favourite games into channels in your Discord server.
From Among Us to Call of Duty: Cold War, and Fortnite to Minecraft, PatchBot has all the updates you need for the games that you love, giving you the edge over other teams when it comes to knowing the latest buffs, nerfs and bug fixes.
If you run a gaming community on Discord, this is the bot for you!
➡️ Invite PatchBot to your Discord server
8. Simple Poll
Polls can be a great tool for increasing engagement and getting to know your community better.
I’ve used Simple Poll in the past to find out when my teammates would be available play, and also in bigger community servers to get feedback on events we ran on our own Discord servers.
Making a new poll is very simple and literally takes the time it takes to write the question and the multiple choice answers, meaning you can get a headcount in no time at all!
Simple Poll is a useful addition to any Discord server in 2021!
➡️ Invite Simple Poll to your Discord server
9. Xenon
So you’ve just spent hours making your Discord server just right, now you would rather be safe than sorry and have a backup of your server stored somewhere? Or maybe a friend really likes your server and they want you to make the same one for them? Or maybe, you have no idea what you’re doing in the first place, but you need a good Discord server setup? That’s where Xenon comes in.
With one command, Xenon creates a backup of your channels, permissions and roles, ready to import to a new server. You then import that backup into another server using the unique code the bot generates.
Don’t know where to start with server building? Discord permissions setups can be a bit daunting when you’re starting out. Xenon has a huge gallery of user-generated templates to choose from which you can start using on your Discord server in a matter of minutes.
➡️ Invite Xenon to your Discord server
10. YAGPDB
YAGPDB (Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot) is my go-to moderation bot. I’ve been using this bot for a couple of years now on all my servers.
It has fantastic role reaction features that even allow you to use your own messages as role reaction menus in your Discord server, instead of a message from a bot. You can make your own commands, create a “muted” role, and even subscribe to your favourite YouTube and Reddit feeds, all within the web dash.
You can also easily set up a comprehensive auto-mod system to prevent raids, spam, and blacklisted words, keeping your Discord server safe and clean for everyone! On many occasions, YAGPDB has prevented people from spamming and maliciously interacting with my servers while I sleep.
YAGPDB is the best moderation bot in my opinion and once you familiarise yourself with the dashboard you can unleash its full potential! (Especially the soundboard where you can upload your favourite airhorn sounds!)
➡️ Invite YAGPDB to your Discord server
So those are my recommendations for the best bots for your Discord server in 2021! I can’t wait to keep playing with these bots this year and can’t wait to see what bot developers have in store for 2021!
Do you have a favourite Discord bot that I haven’t listed? Add your recommendations in the comments below!
