Since Discord was banned in the UAE, many users previously on the platform for gaming and team communication have had difficulty finding a new service to replace it. The problem is that finding a service that closely resembles the features, functionality, and UI of Discord so that they do not have to learn a whole new platform from scratch can be a time-consuming and frustrating process . Unfortunately, team communication solutions are often different from each other, and it is virtually impossible to find an alternative that is similar in every way.

However, there are quite a few Discord alternatives in the UAE that sport reasonably similar features and work for the same use cases with just a few tweaks. If team communication features are what you need the most, these alternatives will work perfectly for you.

Let’s take a look at some of the best Discord alternatives in the UAE.

What are the best Discord alternatives in the UAE?

Google Meet

The new video conferencing and team communication solution replacing the older, phased-out Hangouts, Google Meet is a capable contender that can fill in for Discord in the UAE with a host of convenient capabilities. Over time, the Google Meet platform has become enriched with updates and new features. Currently, it is one of the most popular team communication solutions in the market.

Text communication on Google Meet is very similar to other team chat apps, and the platform supports audio and voice calls and conferencing with up to 150 participants. Recent additions to the feature set include hand raising during conference calls and breakout rooms for categorized communication.

A significant new feature is tile view, enabling participants to see tiles of all other users in a call. The platform now also includes support for creating polls and Q&A segments. Overall, this is a viable alternative for Discord in the UAE thanks to its easy access and simple interface.

AirSend

A relatively new solution that is already gaining popularity due to its excellent feature set and easy usability, AirSend can be a great choice if you are looking for Discord alternatives in the UAE. AirSend brings many features to the table, including voice and video calling, integrations with third-party services like Office 365 and Gmail, and collaboration tools that can be put to good use for many different use case scenarios.

With AirSend, you get a clear and simple UI that is easy to understand. This is great if you want a chat and collaboration solution that is quick to transition to from Discord. There are Channels in which you can invite users and share a chat space, voice and video calling with screen-sharing, task management space, and other tools.

One great feature in AirSend is the ability to create public channels in addition to the usual private channels. This allows you to create communities with people both inside and outside of your circle by sending an email invite or sharing a channel link. The generous free tier contains most of the essential features, and every new user gets one year of the Pro plan free of cost.

Steam Chat

For gamers, an excellent Discord alternative in the UAE is Steam Chat. Many gamers already use Steam as their game platform of choice, and the Steam app has a chat client built directly into it. This contains many of the basic features of Discord and can be pretty helpful during intense team gaming sessions.

With Steam Chat, you can announce your online presence and maintain a list of friends while receiving notifications when they come online. You can add friends, manage friend invites, and add favorites for quick access. From there, you have the option of starting a group chat during a gaming session. You can also create voice chats for both individual friends and groups with the help of voice channels. Since this is already integrated into the most popular gaming platform globally, it can be used as a viable alternative to Discord in the UAE.

Jitsi Meet

If you are looking for a Discord alternative that focuses on voice and video calling, Jitsi Meet can be a solution worth considering. It is a simple video conferencing tool that allows for group audio and video chat and conferencing without most of the other options’ added features.

While this solution initially launched under the reputable 8×8 brand, it was soon branched off as Jitsi Meet – a simple, plug-and-play conferencing solution that can be used from a web browser on any device without the need to sign up or create an account. With Jitsi Meet, you get end-to-end encryption for secure communication and free video conferencing and chat with up to 100 users at one time.

Other valuable features include the ability to screenshare, which can be used by multiple users at once. Jitsi Meet also supports user remote control of the desktops of other participants. If you want to use this for business use cases, you can easily integrate it with several popular services from Microsoft, Google and Slack.

A paid upgrade to their premium offering, 8×8 meet, can bring meeting moderation, analytics, closed captioning, recording, transcription, and phone-a-guest features for those looking for more advanced capabilities.

Key Takeaways

With Discord banned in the UAE, both gamers and business users need to find alternatives that work for them. With this list of Discord alternatives in the UAE, you have a plethora of options, each with unique features that can replicate the feature set of Discord while also bringing new capabilities to the table. We hope that this blog post will help you choose the right Discord alternative for you.

Perspective: You have been turning the web inside out looking for a team communication solution that is more reasonably priced, user-friendly, and responsive than Slack, but to no avail.

If that is you, then you have come to the right place. Though very popular with business use cases, Slack is somewhat beginning to lose its position as a viable team collaboration tool. Be it because conversations get deleted after a limited 14-day period or that you get as much file storage as you pay for, past which files begin to get removed, you may find that Slack just isn’t working for you.

It is of paramount importance that team collaboration tools are highly intuitive and designed to ease users’ minds. If you feel that Slack does not quite live up to your expectations or meet your needs, it is time to look for a suitable alternative. We have compiled and reviewed a comprehensive list of the top Slack alternatives for you to choose from.

Why is Slack so popular?

With roughly 12 million daily users, Slack has come to lead the team collaboration industry over the years. Several factors contribute to Slack’s thriving user base.

1. The primary purpose that Slack serves is that of a comms tool. Allowing teams to collaborate over remote distances is a job that Slack does rather well.
2. Slack’s integration function enables users to receive notifications from all their work apps within Slack and, as such, boosts organization and efficiency.
3. If sifting through heaps of messages regularly is part of your job, Slack’s powerful search function can make it significantly easier.
4. Aside from all its practical uses, Slack partly owes its popularity to the fact that it is trendy. To a certain degree, it is a status symbol or a standard to determine how hip your company is.

The Best Slack Alternatives

Microsoft Teams

This business collaboration tool is targeted towards enterprise companies as their primary user base. One of the strongest suits of Microsoft Teams is its ability to integrate with Office 365 impeccably, something that can be extremely useful for businesses that are subscribed to and dependent on the Office 365 suite.

A predominantly chat-based collaboration platform, Teams facilitates all vital business communication functions such as video conferences, document sharing, and much more. This feature-rich application supports as many as 300 users divided across teams and channels. A freemium version of the tool makes it possible for individual users or small businesses to access the rudimentary team chat features such as instant messaging, audio and video calling, and integrations.

The audio/video communication features can accommodate up to 250 concurrent users. There is a 2 GB storage allotment for each user and a combined storage offering of 10 GB for team storage. Teams allows users to record complete meetings or calls, capturing video, audio, and screen sharing activity.

Google Chat

This Slack alternative is not just built into Gmail but deeply integrated with the various Google Workspace tools. It is a team messaging application with support for document and file sharing, video/audio conferencing through Google Meet, and so on. One of the most remarkable features of this application is that it facilitates viewing files from Google Drive and Google Docs directly within the conversation.

Not unlike channels in Slack, Google Chat has Rooms wherein conversations are put into threads. These rooms are private by default and only visible to those who are a member or are invited to the room. You can send both private and group messages using this tool, or you can simply hop on audio/video calls using the Google Meet icon. Other highlights of Chat include the ability to add bots to rooms. The application also allows over 50 integrations and supports 28 languages. Up to 8000 members can be added to each room.

Though quite versatile and easy to use, Google Chat does not have a freemium version.

AirSend

A product of CodeLathe, AirSend is another Slack alternative that allows for people-centric collaboration across remote distances with clients, teams, and customers. This service is free for the first year for professional service firms and SMBs. Having been developed by a global remote-working team incorporates numerous features that make remote collaboration a breeze.

The Dashboard feature of the application is essentially an organized workspace where the user’s active channels and the various clients, projects, and teams are visible at a glance. This boosts efficiency and convenience as it reduces the need to switch between applications while working. The individual channels incorporate chat functions, file organization functions, track open items, build wiki pages for sharing key information, and a plethora of other features.

There is absolutely no file size limit, and the Pro version of the application has as much as 100 GB of storage on offer.

Chanty

Though newer than Slack, Chanty is up there with other viable Slack alternatives with its intuitive, neat, and easy-to-use interface. It brings together some of the key features essential to a team collaboration tool without over-crowding the application. 

One of its standout features is the Teambook feature which facilitates the managing and viewing of shared links and files. The built-in task manager that enables users to convert any message into a task and share it with team members is a great touch.

Chanty is more responsive and significantly more affordable than Slack and even offers a freemium plan. Even in the free tier, users are allowed an unlimited number of messages and message backups. Besides audio/video calls, Chanty also has support for voice messages. Allowing for quite a few third-party integrations such as Zapier, the application is quite robust and perfect for small team collaborations.

Key Takeaways

If you are on the lookout for a team collaboration tool better-suited for your needs, thankfully, there are many options for you to choose from. This article touches on a few of those options to help you assess the pros and cons of each application so that you can end up with one that will enhance your work-from-home experience.

One of the great things about Airsend is that you get to organize things the way that you want. There are so many different ways that you can arrange Channels, folders, files, notes, and actions. For example, some people organize Channels by project, others organize Channels by customer name, and yet others name Channels after internal teams such as Engineering, Marketing, and HR. This blog post is going to show you five different ways that you can organize your AirSend Channels.

Why It’s Important to Organize Your Channels Correctly

The vision that launched AirSend was that we wanted to create something to help you increase productivity by reducing context switching. Context switching is the act of juggling multiple tasks and apps at one time and can be a real productivity killer, not to mention expensive. By putting everything in one place, our goal is to save you time and money.

One of the ways you can increase your productivity is by organizing your AirSend Channels in the best possible way. What that will look like depends on what you are using Airsend for. An accountant’s Channel organization will be different from a writer’s Channel organization, which will in turn be different from a student’s Channel organization.

Five Ways You Can Organize Your Channels

Now we’re going to go over the five most common ways that you can organize your AirSend Channels so that you can get some ideas and choose or design the best Channel organization method for you.

Organize Your Channels by Project

Organizing your channels by project may be the way to go if you are a freelancer, small agency, creative, or any other profession that works on a project to project basis.

For example, if you owned a freelance writing business, you could name Channels like this: “Web Copy for KB,” “Blog Posts for Accounting Website,” and “SM Posts for Coaches.”

Doing so would make it much easier to stay focused while working. Instead of having to check your emails and waste time searching for notes and drafts when starting work on a certain project, all you would have to do is click into the AirSend Channel where all of your messages, notes, and files for that project would be in one place.

Organize Your Channels by Customer

Another common way to organize Channels is by customer. Let’s say that instead of a lot of one-off projects, your work is more customer-based. This can be the case for accountants, lawyers, and asset managers. You consistently complete work for a certain set of clients.

If this is you, a good way to arrange your Channels could be by customer name. You would name Channels like this: “John Smith,” “Jane Doe,” and “Big Ben.”

That way, everything you have for each customer is in one place. If a customer needs a certain file, you can easily find it in the files section of that customer’s Channel. If you’re in a meeting with her and you need to take notes, you can open up the wiki section and get right to it without the extra steps of making sure you label and store the notes somewhere where you’ll remember later.

Organize Your Channels by Team

If you are part of a larger organization and are using Airsend mostly for internal collaboration, then organizing Channels by team could be the way to go.

Your Channels would be named like this: “AirSend Engineering Team”, “FileCloud Marketing,” and “Human Resources.”

At Codelathe, creator of AirSend and FileCloud, our entire remote-working company of 60+ employees runs on AirSend. We use a hybrid Channel organization method that combines three out of these five methods: Teams, Project, and Subject. But team Channels are our core workspaces where we share ideas, have meetings, and store files and notes. It’s a great way to keep everyone in a team on the same page and stay connected, especially in a remote work setting.

Organize Your Channels by Access

Although there is overlap between this method and some of the others we’ve discussed, arranging Channels by access is more flexible. What it means is that you are creating and labeling Channels based on who you want to have access to certain information and files.

You could have Channels named “Myself,” “Smith Family,” and “Romantic Corner (Hubby and Me),” alongside Channels like “Dissertation Readers” and “Work Friends.”

Organize Your Channels by Subject

Finally, if you are using AirSend for school, research, or as a place to store personal files like vacation photos, you may want to organize your Channels by subject.

If you’re a high school student, you could have a Channel for each subject and add classmates that take those classes with you. Your Channel names might look something like this: “Algebra,” “AP Biology,” and “History.”

Can I Change My Channel Organization After the Fact?

Now you may be thinking, I like some of these ideas, but I already have my AirSend Channels a certain way. How can I change them? Thankfully, it’s very easy to make these changes.

The easiest way to adjust your Channel organization is to change the Channel names and remove or add access to Channels based on your wants and needs. Changing a Channel name can be done in 3 simple steps.

1. Click into the Channel.
2. Click the three cogs icon at the top of the Channel.
3. Type in your new Channel name and click save.

What Now?

Now that you’ve seen five different ways you can organize your AirSend Channels, you should have a clearer idea of how to arrange your Channels to best suit your needs. You may even choose to use a hybrid of several different methods to achieve optimal productivity.

Happy Working!

The AirSend Team