Best Discord Mod Bots in 2026: 8 Compared, Free and Paid

Last updated November 2026.

Large Discord servers break moderation tools in ways small ones never see. At 10,000 members the question is not which bot has the most features. It is which bot still works when 400 accounts join in a minute, when a scam campaign hits every channel at once, and when the worst incident of the month lands at 3am with no mod online. For a sense of the scale involved, see the biggest Discord servers ranked by members.

We build an AI moderation bot for Discord ourselves, so the usual disclosure applies: collony.ai is our product and we put it first because this is our blog. Every strength and weakness listed for the other seven is real, and for plenty of servers one of them is the right call today.

The short version

• collony.ai: best for scam, raid and impersonation detection at volume

• Dyno: best free automod depth, the sensible default

• Wick: best dedicated anti-raid and anti-nuke layer

• Carl-bot: best roles, logging and utility for big member counts

• YAGPDB: most configurable, if someone on your team likes config

• Sapphire: modern all-rounder with a generous free tier

• MEE6: fastest setup, but most moderation sits behind premium

• Discord AutoMod: the native baseline every server should switch on

Discord moderation bots compared

Prices are per server at the time of writing and change often, so check each site before committing.

Best free Discord moderation bots

Every bot on this list has a free tier, but they are not equally useful for free. Ranked on what the free version actually does:

• Dyno: the deepest free automod. Banned words, links, invites, mention spam and duplicate text, with no paywall on the core.

• Sapphire: almost every feature is free behind a modern dashboard, and $2.99 a month only lifts limits.

• Carl-bot: the most generous free roles and logging, with serviceable automod.

• Discord AutoMod: built in and free, the baseline every server should switch on first.

• collony.ai: a free plan that blocks known scam sources plus link and flood spam for up to 1,000 messages a day. The AI scam and impersonation detection is paid, from $29 a month.

• YAGPDB: free and self-hostable, if someone on your team enjoys config.

Wick and MEE6 have free tiers too, but their best protection sits behind premium.

Why keyword automod misses most scams

Between May 22 and August 7, 2026, collony.ai moderated just over 250,000 messages across Discord and Telegram communities. Of the messages it removed, 85.7% contained no word from a standard keyword blocklist. That is the ceiling for every rule-based bot on this list: scam copy is written and rotated to pass filters, so the signal has moved from words to behavior. The full dataset is in our Telegram and Discord security report 2026.

• 76.2% of bad actors were flagged on their very first message, with a median of 7.5 seconds from message to flag.

• 36.9% of incidents landed between midnight and 8am UTC, when most mod teams are asleep.

• 1 in 4 flagged accounts involved impersonation of an admin, a mod or a brand.

• 0.3% of flagged accounts ever showed up in a second community, so shared ban lists of known bad accounts barely help.

• The largest single wave was 783 incidents from 54 accounts in about five hours, the kind of load a human queue cannot clear.

None of this makes Dyno or Carl-bot bad bots. It means filtering content and detecting behavior are two different jobs, and a large server needs both covered. Our moderation bot comparison puts the main options side by side.

Running a Discord server? collony.ai catches the scams, impersonators and bot accounts that keyword rules and AutoMod miss, and it runs next to the bot you already use. Start free, no card needed.

1. collony.ai: best for AI scam and raid detection

collony.ai is the best Discord moderation bot for large servers dealing with scams, raids, and impersonation, because it scores behavior instead of enforcing rules a human wrote in advance: account age, join timing, posting cadence, link reputation, and coordination between accounts. That difference matters most at scale, because large servers are exactly where attacks stop looking like rule violations. A raid of aged accounts that passes every captcha, a scam link on a domain registered yesterday, a fake mod DMing new joiners. Keyword automod sees nothing wrong with any of it.

It runs 24/7 without a human in the loop for the clear cases and routes the ambiguous ones to your mods, which is the split big servers need anyway. It also reads images, which matters because a lot of scam posts are screenshots with no text for a filter to match. Gaming communities are the heaviest users, and we wrote up how that works in practice in our guide to AI moderation for gaming communities. Plans start at $29 per month with a Free plan. Weakness: it is not a utility bot. Levels, reaction roles and logging still come from a bot built for that, which is why it pairs with Dyno or Carl-bot rather than replacing them today.

2. Dyno: best free automod depth

Dyno's free automod is the deepest of any general bot here: banned words, invite and link filtering, mention spam, zalgo, duplicate text, plus per-channel overrides. For a large server on a budget it is the strongest starting point, and its slash-command moderation tools are fast for mod teams. We compared it head to head with MEE6 in Dyno vs MEE6 and it won on moderation substance. How behavior detection compares is covered in collony.ai vs Dyno.

Weakness at scale: it is still pattern matching. Rotating scam domains and coordinated joins walk past it, and its raid protection is rate-based, so slow raids of real-looking accounts do not trip it.

3. Wick: best dedicated anti-raid and anti-nuke

Wick is built for one job: stopping raids, nukes and compromised-account damage. Join gating with risk scoring, panic mode, anti-nuke rules that catch a rogue admin or hijacked bot deleting channels, and quarantine instead of instant ban. Large servers that have been burned once tend to install Wick the same week. We cover its pricing, setup and gaps in our Wick bot review.

Weakness: the configuration is dense, misconfigured Wick locks out legitimate members, and day-to-day content moderation is not its focus. It is a security layer, not a full moderation stack.

4. Carl-bot: best roles, logging and utility at scale

Carl-bot handles the operational load of a big server: reaction roles that scale to hundreds of roles, granular logging split by event type, sticky messages, tags and scheduled posts. Its logging is the reason many large mod teams keep it even when another bot does the enforcement, because audit trails matter once you have twenty mods across timezones. Its regex automod is strong if someone on the team is comfortable writing patterns.

Weakness: automod is serviceable but shallower than Dyno's out of the box, and nothing in it understands behavior. It is infrastructure, not defense.

5. YAGPDB: most configurable power tool

YAGPDB (Yet Another General Purpose Discord Bot) exposes a custom scripting system that lets a technical mod build almost any workflow: custom commands, conditional automod responses, role systems, feeds. Large servers with an engineer on the mod team can make it do things no off-the-shelf bot matches, and the code is open source if you want to self-host.

Weakness: that power is the product. Without someone who enjoys maintaining config, YAGPDB setups rot, and its out-of-the-box protection is mid-pack. We cover its permissions, custom commands and data in Is YAGPDB safe?

6. Sapphire: modern all-rounder

Sapphire has become the common answer to MEE6 fatigue: a clean dashboard, leveling, automod, logging and welcome flows with almost everything free. For servers that want one general bot with a modern interface and no paywall creep, it is a strong pick and the community momentum is real. We put it against the two veterans in Sapphire vs Carl-bot vs Dyno.

Weakness at scale: fewer battle years on very large servers than Dyno or Carl-bot, and like every rule-based bot here it filters content, not intent.

7. MEE6: fastest setup, thin free moderation

MEE6 is the bot most servers install first, because setup takes minutes and levels, welcome messages and reaction roles work well straight away. For moderation it is the weakest value on this list: the free tier has simple keyword automod, and the parts admins actually want, advanced automod and auto-roles among them, sit behind Premium at around $12 per month per server. If you are weighing it on security, read Is MEE6 safe? first. For a direct comparison, see collony.ai vs MEE6.

Weakness: moderation is not its focus, and you pay per server for features Dyno and Carl-bot give away.

8. Discord AutoMod: the native baseline

Discord's built-in AutoMod deserves a slot because every large server should max it out before adding anything: keyword and regex rules, mention spam limits, and blocking suspected spam content, all enforced by Discord itself before a message ever posts. It costs nothing and cannot go offline. Our Discord AutoMod guide has the config worth copying.

Weakness: it is a floor, not a system. No behavioral signals, no raid logic, no DM protection, and regex lists need constant manual updates. We broke down where it stops in rule-based bots vs AI moderation.

The right setup for your server size

• Under 1,000 members: Discord AutoMod plus one free bot, Dyno or Sapphire. Turn on mention limits and a verification level before you need them.

• 1,000 to 10,000 members: AutoMod plus Dyno or Carl-bot for rules, roles and logs. Add Wick the first time you get raided, and a behavioral layer the first time scammers start DMing your members.

• 10,000 members and up: one utility bot, one dedicated security layer (Wick for nukes, collony.ai for scams, impersonation and coordinated raids), and AutoMod as the floor. Plan for the hours your mods are offline, because that is when more than a third of incidents land.

• Crypto, trading and NFT servers at any size: treat scams as the main threat from day one. Fake admins and fake support DMs are the most common attack, so a behavioral layer earns its place early.

What each one costs

• collony.ai: free plan without AI, AI from $29 per month.

• Dyno: the core automod is free. Premium is about $5 per month per server ($4.17 when billed yearly).

• Wick: a limited free tier, with premium from about $5 per month.

• Carl-bot: the most generous free tier of the veterans, premium from about $5 per month.

• YAGPDB: free, with a premium subscription that raises limits, or self-host it at no cost.

• Sapphire: almost every feature is free, and lifting all limits costs $2.99 per month per server.

• MEE6: a restricted free tier, with Premium at around $12 per month per server.

• Discord AutoMod: free and built in.

For the full budget picture, including what a human mod team costs next to these, see how much community moderation really costs.

How we evaluated

Each bot was judged on its free tier as shipped: what it catches out of the box, what it catches after proper configuration, how long setup takes, and what walks straight through. For scam and raid patterns we used what we see in production across the communities collony.ai moderates, summarized above. We build collony.ai, so read its entry with that in mind and try the others yourself, since every bot here has a free tier or a trial.

Which one should you pick?

For most large servers the strongest 2026 setup is one utility bot (Dyno or Carl-bot) plus collony.ai as the behavioral security layer. If you are picking a single bot, start with what is actually hurting. Raids and nukes: Wick, or AutoMod plus Dyno if you want free only. Operational load, roles and audit logs: Carl-bot. One general bot without paywall creep: Sapphire or Dyno. A technical mod team that wants full control: YAGPDB. Scams, impersonation and attacks that do not look like rule violations: that is the gap collony.ai exists for, and on gaming servers it is usually the difference that shows up in the first week.

Most large servers today run a stack, one utility bot plus one security layer, and that is honest advice for right now. It is also the broken status quo. Our bet with collony.ai is that moderation, protection and community health end up in one platform, which is why the behavioral layer comes first.

If you are coming from MEE6 specifically, our MEE6 alternatives breakdown covers that migration in detail.

Coming from Dyno instead? Best Dyno alternatives covers that move, Carl-bot vs Dyno vs MEE6 settles the three way question, and Discord security bots compared narrows the list to defense-only tools. Looking at support tools rather than moderation? Our Mava review covers the leading support inbox for Discord and Telegram communities.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best moderation bot for a large Discord server?

For rule-based moderation, Dyno has the deepest free automod and Carl-bot the best logging and role tooling. For raids and nukes, Wick. For scams, impersonation and coordinated attacks that rule-based bots miss, an AI behavioral layer like collony.ai. Most large servers combine two of these.

Is Discord AutoMod enough for a big server?

No. AutoMod is a strong free baseline for keyword and mention-spam filtering and every server should enable it, but it has no raid logic, no behavioral detection and no DM protection. Large servers need at least one dedicated layer on top.

What is the best free Discord moderation bot?

Dyno, for most servers. Its free automod covers banned words, links, invites, mention spam and duplicate text without a paywall. Sapphire is the strongest newer alternative, and Discord AutoMod adds a native layer under either. For scam links specifically, collony.ai’s free plan blocks known scam sources, with AI detection as a paid upgrade.

What is the difference between anti-raid and anti-nuke?

Anti-raid stops people flooding in from outside: mass joins, spam waves and mention floods. Anti-nuke stops damage from inside: a compromised admin account or a rogue bot deleting channels, mass banning members or changing permissions. Wick covers both. Most general bots only offer a rate-based version of anti-raid.

How do I stop a raid on a large Discord server?

Preparation beats reaction. Run a join gate with risk scoring (Wick, or collony.ai for coordination detection), keep AutoMod mention limits on, and have a panic-mode plan that locks joins and posting in one action. Rate-based raid protection alone misses slow raids of aged accounts, which is what behavioral scoring is for.

Is MEE6 good for moderation?

It is fine for basic keyword filtering on a small server. Most of the moderation features admins want sit behind MEE6 Premium at around $12 per month per server, and Dyno's free automod already goes deeper. MEE6 is a better pick for levels and welcome flows than for moderation.

Do I need AI moderation if I already run Dyno or Carl-bot?

They solve different problems, and running them together is the standard setup. Dyno or Carl-bot handles rules, roles and logging while the AI layer catches what pattern matching cannot: fresh scam domains, impersonation, and raids that pass captchas. Neither replaces the other today.