Best Discord moderation bots

Moderation is the first reason most servers add a bot, and the real shortlist is shorter than the directory sites suggest. You are picking between three shapes: Discord's own AutoMod, a dedicated moderation bot or one bot whose moderation is a plugin.

Everything below about a bot other than YourBot describes what kind of product it is, taken from its own public pages rather than hands-on testing. No feature, limit or price is claimed for any of them.

Discord AutoMod

Discord's built-in auto moderation, configured in Server Settings with no bot to invite. It covers keyword and spam basics and is worth turning on either way. What it is not is a case system: it filters messages, it does not give you a numbered case per action with an appeal and an outcome attached. Best if obvious spam is your only problem.

YourBot (Sentinel)

YourBot is one bot whose features are plugins, and moderation is one of them. Sentinel is included with every server and one switch away: an automod rules engine, four raid levels, a numbered case for every action, member appeals and member reports. The same bot also runs tickets, events, analytics and voice, and an open marketplace lets independent developers publish more. Best if you would rather run one bot with a moderation plugin than five separate bots.

Dyno

One of the longest running Discord bots, with first-party modules for moderation, auto roles and announcements managed from a web dashboard. Best if you want a proven, conservative all-in-one (compare).

Carl-bot

An all-in-one bot widely used for reaction roles, automod and logging. Best if reaction roles and logging sit at the center of your setup (compare).

MEE6

One of the most widely used all-in-one bots, best known for leveling and welcome messages, with moderation alongside them. Best if you want a mainstream all-in-one (compare).

Wick

A security-focused bot built around anti-raid and anti-nuke protection. Best if your main worry is a coordinated attack on the server itself.

Zeppelin

An open source moderation bot aimed at large servers, configured through a text config rather than a page of toggles. Best if you want version-controlled configuration and do not mind the setup.

What Sentinel actually does

Rules, not one fixed filter. 15 condition types cover words and phrases, spam rate, mention floods, caps, links, file types, account age, copypasta, emoji spam, newline spam, sticker spam, nicknames, phishing domains, risk score and risk band. Each rule fires any of 9 actions (delete, warn, timeout, kick, ban, quarantine, alert a channel, DM the member and auto-rename) on one of 3 triggers: a message, a join or a nickname change. Rules match on ANY or ALL of their conditions and can be aimed at specific channels or exempt your staff roles.

Watch before you enforce. Any rule can run in log-only mode, and a server-wide switch forces all of them into it. The editor has a tester: paste a sample message and Sentinel tells you whether it would trigger and which conditions matched. 11 rule templates ship, three protection presets bundle a starter set from them, and setup installs your pick in log-only mode by default.

Raids. Sentinel counts joins in a rolling one-minute window and, past the threshold you set, switches into raid mode itself. The 4 levels run from slowmode everywhere, through new joins quarantined, kicked or banned as you choose, up to a lockdown that raises Discord's verification level and closes every channel. It snapshots your slowmode and permissions, restores them when it stands down and stands down on a timer.

A risk score with its reasons attached. Case history, pending reports, denied appeals and recent automod hits combine into a 0 to 100 score with a per-factor breakdown, and old incidents decay: full weight for 30 days, half to 90, a quarter to a year, then nothing. Five bands drive what happens next, from quietly flagging a member to pinging your mod roles.

Appeals that undo the punishment. Members appeal in Discord with /appeal, and anyone kicked or banned appeals from a web page instead, since they are no longer in the server to run a command. Approving an appeal marks the case overturned and schedules the reversal, then DMs the member with your note.

Reports and cases keep the receipts. A member can right-click a message and report it, so a moderator gets the exact message with a jump link, a transcript of the surrounding conversation and a triage score. Every action creates a numbered case, automod hits keep the 11 messages around the trigger as evidence and open cases go stale after seven days so nothing sits forgotten.

If your current moderation bot is working, keep it. The useful test is whether you can answer three things about last week: who was actioned, why and what came of the appeal. Sentinel costs nothing extra to switch on, so the cheap experiment is log-only mode next to what you already have. See pricing for what a server costs after beta.