Lanyard vs Slack

Lanyard exposes a Discord user's live presence — online status, current activities (games, Spotify listening data), and any custom key-value data set via their Discord bio — over a free public REST endpoint or a subscribable WebSocket feed, with no authentication required. The catch is that both the requester and the target user must share a Discord server with Lanyard's bot, since Discord's gateway only surfaces presence data for mutual-guild members.

Slack's Web API lets registered apps read and post messages, manage channels, and react to workspace events, authenticated with OAuth 2.0 bot or user tokens scoped to a single Slack workspace. Methods are rate-limited across four tiers and most write actions cap out around one request per second per workspace, so high-throughput integrations typically move to the Events API or Socket Mode instead of polling.