Apollo alternative: YourBot vs Apollo

Apollo is built to run Discord events, with one-click sign-ups in Discord and a dashboard for organizers. You create an event with /event, which asks its questions in a DM, or on the dashboard, where drafts can be saved and finished later. Members sign up with a button under the event post. The free plan has sign-up presets, a cap with an automatic waitlist that promotes people when seats open and a limited number of recurring events. Reminders go to a thread on the event or to its channel, and members can opt out of them. The dashboard keeps the whole schedule and an archive of past events. Premium adds custom sign-up options, more reminders per event, unlimited recurring events, roles for attendees, automatic Google Calendar sync and attendees pulled into each event's thread. Premium Pro cross-posts events to several servers and gives the bot a custom name and avatar.

YourBot is one bot whose features are services. Ten are built in and run free on every server, and Beacon Events is the one that covers Apollo's ground. The other nine include Sentinel moderation, Tickets and Analytics. Premium, billed per server, adds a bot under your own name, the open marketplace and the Plugin Builder.

The short version

• Pick Apollo if you want a thread for every event, reminders each member can turn off or one event cross-posted to several servers on Premium Pro.
• Pick YourBot if you want your own sign-up roles and several reminders per event without a paid plan, in the same bot as moderation, tickets and the other services.
• If you run both for a while, post each event in only one of them, so nobody signs up twice for the same night.

Creating an event and signing up

Apollo creates an event from /event, with the questions in a DM, or from its web dashboard. Members click a button under the post to sign up. Sign-up presets are free and custom sign-up options are on Premium. A cap with an automatic waitlist that promotes people when seats open is on the free plan.

In Beacon Events, /beacon create opens a short form in Discord, and the web wizard builds an event in five steps (Event Info, Roles, Design, Actions and Finish) with a live preview, from one of ten templates or your own. The post carries Sign Up, Leave and Options buttons. Members pick a role, then a class or spec if the role has them, each with its own cap, and tentative, late, bench and absent are one click away. When a role or the event is full, new sign-ups wait. When someone leaves, the longest-waiting member is moved in and gets a DM. Sign-ups and promotions run in one locked transaction, so two people cannot take the last slot, and sign-ups can close a set number of minutes before the start.

Reminders and repeats

Apollo reminds attendees before the start in a public thread on the event, or in the event channel if you set it to, and members can opt out with /reminders off. Premium allows more reminders per event, each with a custom message. A recurring event is set up once, and one occurrence can be changed without touching the rest. The free plan has a limited number of recurring events, and Premium has no limit.

Beacon Events sends a server default reminder before every event, and each event can add as many reminders as you like, up to a week before the start, to the channel or by DM. Channel reminders mention everyone signed up. Reminders are set per event by the organizer, and members cannot opt out of DM reminders one by one. Events repeat daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly from the web editor, with an optional end date. Shortly after a run starts, the next one posts with the same roles, caps and reminders at the same local time.

Around the event

Apollo can give every event its own thread, and with Premium it pulls attendees in as they sign up and drops anyone who backs out. Premium also gives attendees a role and syncs new events to Google Calendar automatically; on the free plan, events sync with the /google sync command. The dashboard keeps the whole schedule and an archive of past events, with longer history on Premium, and Premium Pro cross-posts events to several servers.

In Beacon Events, the bot opens no thread per event and does not post one event into several servers. Turn on auto voice and it opens a voice channel before the start, in a category you choose, that can be limited to the people who signed up. The channel is deleted when it empties, or 30 minutes after the start at the latest. Shortly after the start, attendance is credited and late counts as partial. With auto voice on, a member who signed up but never joined the channel is logged as a no-show. Each member gets a reputation score from 0 to 100 with badges, and an availability heatmap shows the best times to schedule. The dashboard has a month and week calendar where a click on a day starts an event, and each event's attendees export to CSV.

Switching

Turn on Beacon Events and run its one-click setup, then pick the announcement channel, the default reminder and default roles on the settings card. Let the events already posted with Apollo run their course and post the next ones with Beacon Events, so members sign up in one place. Rebuild your weekly event in the web editor, set it to repeat and save it as a template to start similar events from. Pricing has the current terms, and the event bots table sets Beacon Events beside Apollo, sesh and Raid-Helper.