Bots & Companion Apps

Already familiar? Jump to the Bots & Companion Apps docs or Getting Started guide. Bots are the most common type of Discord app. They appear in servers as bot users with an APP tag and can listen to events, respond to slash commands, moderate servers, send messages, and much more, all powered by your code via the Discord API. Bots can connect to Discord in two ways: a persistent Gateway WebSocket for real-time events, or an HTTP interactions endpoint for slash commands and UI components without a persistent connection. Most bots use one or both depending on their use case. Common bot use cases include moderation tools, server utilities, games, integrations with external services, and automated workflows. If you only need to push messages into a channel, a webhook might be a better fit than a full bot. Webhooks are simpler to set up and can send messages with rich embeds, but they can’t listen to events or respond to interactions like bots can.