Raid-Helper alternative: YourBot vs Raid-Helper

Raid-Helper calls itself the ultimate tool to create and organize your events within Discord, and for a raiding guild that is a fair description. It has run since 2019, and its sign-up model is the one most World of Warcraft and FFXIV guilds picture when they hear the word: a class chosen by reaction, a spec chosen over DM, role counters above the roster and Late, Bench, Tentative and Absence one click away, with emote sets for seventeen games from Guild Wars 2 to Throne and Liberty. Around the event sit the tools a raid leader actually uses: a composition tool, a DKP ledger with automatic payouts, a softres.it link, loot rolls, attendance statistics you can filter by date, tag, channel and role, a CSV export and a REST API with per-server and per-user keys, plus manager and assistant roles with custom permission groups. Events copy forward by a week and sign-ups copy between events. A thread or forum post can hang off each one, and a temporary voice channel can appear for its duration.

Its free tier is generous, and its docs are clear about what Premium adds: recurring events, Discord's native scheduled events, custom templates with your own emotes, personal reminders, mirrored events that sync across servers, an event logging channel, archiving, a live overview, form profiles, a temporary role for attendees, a synced composition and a custom avatar, plus webhooks. Premium is bought per server as a one-time package and can be moved between servers with a command.

YourBot answers with two of its ten core services, both free on every server with no feature paywall. Beacon Events posts an event with role slots and a Sign Up button, then runs the waitlist, the reminders, the voice channel and the attendance, and it scores members on whether they show up. Group Finder handles the pickup side: listings with role slots, time polls, repeating runs, calendar links and cross-server sharing. Both share the bot with Sentinel moderation, Tickets, Analytics and the rest, and Premium, billed per server, adds a bot under your own name, the open marketplace and the Plugin Builder.

The short version

• Pick Raid-Helper if you run a raid guild that lives on class and spec rosters, DKP, soft reserves and a composition tool. It is also the pick if you need recurring events, Discord's native events, an event API or events mirrored into other servers. Beacon has none of those.
• Pick YourBot if you want event sign-ups with reminders, an auto-created voice channel, attendance and reputation free, in the same bot that moderates the server, runs the tickets and finds groups, with a marketplace when you outgrow the built-ins.
• Both bots can share a server, so the safe move is to post the next few events on both and keep the one your members actually click.

How the two are built

Raid-Helper is a first-party event bot with a web dashboard, hosted by its makers and translated into multiple languages. Its docs describe events, sign-ups, attendance, DKP, embeds, reaction roles, a welcome DM, timers and an API, and nothing on its pages describes moderation, tickets, analytics, giveaways, a marketplace or a way for outside developers to add to it. Its templates, emotes and features are all Raid-Helper's own.

YourBot is one bot whose features are plugins. Beacon Events and Group Finder are two of the ten built in, and the marketplace is where independent developers publish the rest, each running sandboxed with no network access and reviewed before it ships. So this page compares Raid-Helper against two YourBot services, with the other eight and the marketplace as the reason to prefer the bundle.

Creating an event

Raid-Helper starts an event three ways: /create opens a dialogue in your DMs, /quickcreate does it in one command with natural-language dates and the web dashboard has a form with saved profiles. An event carries a title, description, date, duration and template, a colour or hex value, an image and thumbnail, a countdown, up to ten co-leaders and mentions on creation. It can open a thread or forum post with tags, display a voice channel or create a temporary one, and it inherits a two-layer set of advanced settings from the server. Events can be scheduled to post later, copied forward a week, bulk deleted and recovered.

Beacon starts an event two ways. /beacon create opens a short form in Discord, with name, description, time, cap and roles written as Tank:2, Healer:4, DPS:14, Flex; the web wizard walks through basics, roles, appearance, buttons and schedule with a live preview of the embed. Times take UTC, a zone name, an abbreviation such as EST or CET or a fixed offset, and the embed shows them as Discord timestamps, so every member reads the start in their own local time. Colour, thumbnail, banner and footer are yours, and custom fields have presets for location, requirements, loot rules, voice channel, contact and notes. Up to five buttons carry your own labels. Events can be cancelled, closed, reopened, cloned onto a new date and recovered. There is no scheduled posting and no thread per event.

Sign-ups

This is where the two differ most in feel. Raid-Helper members sign up by clicking a class reaction, and if the class has specs the bot DMs them a list to choose from; its docs describe button and menu sign-up as a placeholder for a future update. A template holds up to twenty classes with up to fifty specs each and six role counters. Sign-ups can carry a note and an alternative name, a member can hold up to three specs and by default members change their sign-up or mark themselves absent rather than leaving outright. Limits are enforced with a bench or a queue that notifies the first member in line when a spot opens, and a minimum can cancel an under-filled event. Allowed and banned roles and per-user limits gate who signs up, and managers can add or remove anyone, including placeholder users.

Beacon members press Sign Up, pick a role, then a class or spec if the role nests them, and known role names get their own emoji. Each role and the event carry a cap; when one is full the sign-up waits, and the moment a spot opens the longest-waiting member for that role is moved in and DMed, inside the same transaction as the leave, so two people cannot take the last slot. Tentative, late, bench and absent sit under the Options button without losing the spot, and a sign-up deadline stops new sign-ups before the start. Leave is one click. There are no allowed-role gates, per-user limits or placeholder sign-ups.

Reminders, voice and threads

Raid-Helper sends a channel reminder that pings all attendees a set number of minutes before, plus announcements to a channel at a time you pick, including one aimed at raiders who have not signed up. Personal reminders, which each member sets for themselves, are Premium. Its temporary voice channel lives for the event and is deleted 24 hours after it, and a temporary role for attendees is Premium.

Beacon reminders go to the channel, a role or by DM, as many per event as you like, from a minute to seven days ahead, with a server default 30 minutes before every event; channel reminders mention everyone signed up, and a failed reminder is retried five times. Turn on auto voice and the bot creates the channel 1 to 120 minutes before the start in a category you choose, optionally restricted to people who signed up, and deletes it when it empties or 30 minutes after the start. Members cannot opt out of DM reminders individually.

Repeats, calendars and other servers

Raid-Helper's recurring events repost on an interval in days, editing the schedule changes every future post and titles can carry an incrementing number. The same Premium tier creates Discord's native scheduled events alongside the bot's own or on their own, mirrors an event into up to five other channels or servers with sign-ups kept in sync and shows a live overview of upcoming events. Each server sets a timezone and each member can set their own, and events display a localized timestamp, a zoned time or both. A calendar view exists on the web; iCal or Google Calendar sync is not documented.

Beacon does not repeat events yet; the clone command copies last week's raid onto a new date with its roles, caps and reminders. It does not create Discord's native scheduled events, and it does not mirror events between servers. Its dashboard has a month and week calendar, and clicking a day creates an event on it. Group Finder covers the repeating and calendar side for pickup groups: a listing can repeat daily, weekly, every two weeks or monthly for up to 52 runs, and every scheduled listing carries an ICS download and a Google Calendar link. A network shares listings across allied servers as live copies posted by each server's own bot, with a public board and a web chat per group.

Attendance and after

Raid-Helper's /attendance reports percentages over finished events, filtered by date range, tag, channel and role and optionally counted only since a member joined; /export writes events to CSV; DKP can pay out automatically after an event; a logging channel that records every sign-up change and edit is Premium.

Beacon credits everyone marked attending when an event ends, counts late as partial and logs no-shows, and with auto voice on it treats a member who never joined the channel as a no-show. Staff can bulk-mark from the event page. Each member gets a 0 to 100 reputation from attendance, streaks, no-shows and late cancellations, with badges such as one for a 20-event streak and a server leaderboard. An availability heatmap built from who signed up and who showed suggests the best two-hour windows, and an analytics tab shows attendance rate over 90 days, popular times and role distribution. /beacon export writes the attendees of any event to CSV, and polls, which live in the same plugin with up to 25 options and anonymous voting, export theirs too.

Beyond events

Raid-Helper also documents an embed builder, reaction roles by reaction, button or dropdown, a welcome DM for new members, timers, a Discord timestamp helper and a WoW item lookup. YourBot covers that ground with separate services: Welcome for join messages, cards and role menus, Sentinel for moderation, Announcements, Giveaways, Social Feeds, Tickets, Analytics and Join-to-Create Voice, with the marketplace for anything game-specific.

Hosting and plans

Raid-Helper is hosted by its makers, who advertise 24/7 uptime and server costs covered years ahead. Premium is a per-server package bought once for three, six or twelve months or for life, activated with a command and movable between servers without limit; no self-hosted or custom-branded bot is documented beyond a custom avatar and banner.

YourBot's shared bot runs all ten services free with no feature paywall. Premium, billed per server, runs a custom bot under your own application, name, avatar and presence on a private node, hosted and restarted for you, and adds the marketplace, the Plugin Builder, 50 lifetime Start Your Server credits and premium support.

Switching

Invite YourBot next to Raid-Helper, enable Beacon Events and pick a template that matches your roster. Post the next raid on both and watch which one your members sign up on, then move the reminders and voice channel over once they follow. If your guild depends on DKP, soft reserves or the composition tool, keep Raid-Helper for the raid and let Beacon run the social events and Group Finder the pickup groups. Nothing forces the choice.