Carl-bot alternative: YourBot vs Carl-bot

Carl-bot describes itself as a fully customizable and modular Discord bot featuring reaction roles, automod, logging and custom commands, and that order is fair. Its reaction roles come in many modes, from unique and verify to binding, reversed and temporary, and its logging can be split event by event across five channels, while TagScript lets a server script its own commands without a developer. It is provided by BotLabs.gg and has a free tier, and a per-server Premium tier raises its caps and unlocks features such as levels.

YourBot starts from a different idea. It is one bot whose features are services. Ten are built in and run free on every server: Sentinel moderation, Tickets, Analytics, Beacon Events, Group Finder, Voice Channels, Welcome, Announcements, Giveaways and Social Feeds. Premium adds your own bot identity, an open marketplace where independent developers publish plugins and a Plugin Builder that writes one from a description.

The short version

• Pick Carl-bot if your server lives on reaction roles with many modes, scripted custom commands and suggestions. YourBot's role menus have six modes, and it has neither scripted custom commands nor a suggestions module.
• Pick YourBot if you want deeper moderation, a support desk, server analytics, event signups, a group finder and a bot that runs under your own name, all from one dashboard.
• Both bots can share a server, so the safe move is to run them side by side and retire whichever one stops earning its place.

How the two are built

Carl-bot's docs list its modules, and its terms of use cover personal, non-commercial use with a separate license for businesses. Servers can share tags through an import link, and the docs showcase tags made by the community. Its site and docs describe no developer program or third-party marketplace.

YourBot's marketplace is open. Anyone can build a plugin with the SDK, publish it, set a price and keep 70% of each sale, rising to 85% as their volume grows, paid to their own Stripe account. Public submissions go through a staff review queue and every version is scanned: nine unsafe code patterns block an upload outright and an obfuscation-aware analyser scores the rest. At runtime a marketplace plugin lives in a container with no network access, a read-only filesystem and hard memory and CPU limits, and you approve what it can touch when you install it. Marketplace plugins run on a custom bot, which comes with Premium.

Moderation

Carl-bot's automod is built around rate limits and lists: message, attachment, mention and link spam with a threshold per timeframe, a link blacklist and whitelist, an invite filter, a substring bad-words list, a caps percentage, honeypot channels, media-only channels and an unsafe file filter. Punishments can be combined per rule, from delete and warn through timed mutes, timeout, kick and timed bans, and a rule can defer a case to a channel where moderators vote on it, which needs Premium. Warnings do not expire on their own. Manual tools cover the usual set plus softban, hardmute, mass ban, purges with filters and a timed lockdown of a channel or the whole server. Raid or join-rate protection, an account-age gate and ban appeals are not in its documentation, and a captcha appears there only as a community-made tag.

Sentinel, YourBot's built-in moderation service, is a rules engine. A rule pairs conditions from 22 types, including phrase and regex matching that strips invisible characters, spam rate, mention floods, freshly registered domains, known phishing links, account age, missing avatar, staff look-alike names and a per-member risk score, with any of 13 actions, including voice mute, deafen, disconnect and move, on three triggers: a message, a join or a nickname change. Every rule can run in Testing, where it only notes in the mod log what it would do, and the editor's Try it box says whether a sample message would fire before you save. Warnings expire on a schedule you set. Around the rules sit raid mode that arms itself on join velocity, look-alike join clustering that revokes the invite it came through, anti-nuke with twelve watches that can undo mass bans and revert dangerous permission changes, and lockdowns of a channel, the server, a role, new joins or invites. Every warning, timeout, kick, ban and quarantine opens a numbered case, and a rule that acts on a message keeps the messages around it as evidence. Members appeal from a public web page, which matters because a banned member cannot run a slash command.

Logging

This is Carl-bot's strong suit and the honest comparison says so. Each event it logs, from deleted and edited messages to role, name, avatar, channel, emoji, server and voice changes, can be toggled on its own and routed to one of five channel types, and one command builds the whole category. Its modlog keeps an infraction history per member with the responsible moderator and exports it as a text file. Two details worth knowing: edits and deletes are logged only within a window after the message was sent, and bans handed out by other bots or moderators appear in the modlog on Premium.

Sentinel keeps its own short-lived copy of recent messages, so its message log shows the before and after text of an edit or delete and who deleted it even when Discord's cache no longer has the message. Server changes post to seven log categories, members, channels, roles, server settings, voice, content and moderation, each entry with what changed and who did it from the audit log, and bursts of edits are folded into one entry. Auto-setup creates the log channels for you.

Roles, welcome and verification

Carl-bot's reaction roles are emoji reactions on a message with a mode per message: unique, verify, binding, drop, reversed, lock, limit, linked messages, a cap on how many members may hold a role and timed roles on Premium. Buttons and dropdowns are not documented. YourBot's Welcome service ships role menus as emoji reactions, on a message the bot posts or one already in your server, or as buttons or a dropdown. Each menu runs in one of six modes: any combination, one at a time, add only, remove only, reversed or first pick is final, with an optional limit on how many roles a member can pick and on how many members can hold a role.

Both bots greet new members with a channel message and an optional DM, post a message when someone leaves, give roles on join, can delay them and give roles back on rejoin. Carl-bot adds ban messages and birthday messages. Welcome adds a welcome card you design from 12 templates, animated when its background is, up to 25 rotating greetings with their own images, member-count milestones and a verification gate that works three ways: a Verify button, a captcha or a web page, with an Unverified role and a deadline. Carl-bot's verification is a reaction-role mode; a captcha exists only as a community-made tag.

Custom commands and automation

Carl-bot wins this section outright. Tags are custom commands scripted in TagScript, with variables, conditionals, embeds, random and math blocks and command blocks that run real bot commands, and triggers reply in TagScript when a message contains a phrase or matches a regex, or when a role is added or removed. Starboard, suggestions with votes and a decision log, reaction polls, reminders and repeating autofeeds round it out. YourBot has a starboard in Analytics but no custom command builder and no suggestions module. What it has instead is scheduled announcements that post once, daily, weekly or monthly in your server's timezone, plus two ways to get a feature nobody shipped: install it from the marketplace or describe it to the Plugin Builder, which plans, writes and validates a real plugin you can keep private or sell.

Levels or analytics

Carl-bot has a full leveling system on Premium: XP with a voice toggle, role rewards, level-up announcements, a public leaderboard, custom rank cards and an import that keeps a MEE6 XP curve. YourBot has no XP bar and no level-up message. Analytics ranks members on what they actually did, across 12 leaderboard metrics from messages and voice hours to reactions and threads, and Role Rewards grants a Discord role once someone crosses a threshold on any of 15 metrics, with revoke when they drop below it. Around that sit 11 dashboard pages: cohort retention, an hour-by-weekday heatmap, voice session percentiles, dead-channel detection, counter channels, opt-in presence tracking, a public stats page and CSV export, none of which stores what anyone said. Carl-bot's statistics are commands: server info, member rankings by age or join date, starboard and modlog stats.

The rest of the set

Tickets are not in Carl-bot's docs; its nearest tool is a report command that posts to a channel. YourBot's Tickets opens each request as a private channel, a private thread or a review queue, with intake forms, staff teams, response-time targets, a knowledge base and transcripts that outlive the channel. Beacon Events takes button signups into capped role slots with waitlists and reminders, where Carl-bot offers reminders and scheduled messages. Group Finder runs LFG groups with roles and partner servers. Both bots run giveaways. Both post Twitch and YouTube alerts; Social Feeds also takes Bluesky, RSS, Steam news, GitHub releases, Reddit and status pages, and Carl-bot adds free-game alerts from the major stores. Carl-bot's temporary channels, on Premium, delete themselves after a set time; YourBot's Voice Channels gives each member a voice room they own, with a control panel, that deletes itself when the last person leaves.

Hosting, branding and what each costs

Both bots have a free tier and a per-server paid tier. Carl-bot Premium is bought through Patreon or Discord. It unlocks levels, sticky messages, auto purge, voice-role links, timed reaction roles and the drama channel, raises its caps and lets a server upload a custom avatar and banner for the bot. The bot itself stays Carl-bot. YourBot's free plan runs all ten core services with no feature paywalls. Premium, billed per server, moves your server onto a custom bot: your own Discord application under your own name, avatar and presence, hosted as a dedicated process that YourBot watches and restarts, with the token encrypted at rest. It also opens the marketplace, the Plugin Builder and premium support. Pricing has the current terms.

Switching

Nothing here needs a cutover weekend. Invite YourBot next to Carl-bot, turn on Analytics and Sentinel on day one with Spam & scams in Testing, then move welcome and roles when you are ready. Keep Carl-bot for the tags and reaction roles it does better for as long as you like. The other head-to-head comparisons are written the same way.