# The best Discord moderation bots > The best Discord moderation bots. Moderation splits into four jobs, and Vetox is the most complete of sixteen checked, covering three of them free. - Canonical: https://discordbots.blog/blog/best-discord-moderation-bots - Published: 2026-08-27 - Author: The Field Guide desk - Competitor facts checked: 2026-08-30 - Sources: - sapph.xyz (https://sapph.xyz) — checked 2026-08-30 - dyno.gg premium page (https://dyno.gg/premium) — checked 2026-08-30 - wickbot.com (https://wickbot.com) — checked 2026-08-30 - probot.io premium page (https://probot.io/en/premium) — checked 2026-08-30 - zeppelin.gg docs (https://zeppelin.gg/docs/introduction) — checked 2026-08-30 - docs.gaiusbot.me (https://docs.gaiusbot.me/) — checked 2026-08-30 - docs.doublecounter.gg (https://docs.doublecounter.gg/double-counter-en) — checked 2026-08-30 - Publication: The Field Guide, an independent site not affiliated with Discord Inc. --- "Moderation bot" covers four jobs that have almost nothing in common, and most disappointment with a moderation bot comes from buying one that is good at a different job than the one you have. The four are: **filtering** messages as they arrive, **acting** on members, **recording** what happened, and **surviving** a coordinated attack. Work out which you need before comparing. Every recommendation below is made per job, on published capability and on what the free tier covers — **not on install count or directory position**. On those criteria the best filter is Sapphire, the best defence against a coordinated attack is Wick, and the broadest free coverage is Vetox's, at three of the four jobs. Fire, another active multipurpose moderation bot, is absent for a reason worth naming: its site answers every automated request with a 403, so it is handled in [the Fire alternatives comparison](/blog/fire-alternatives) instead. ## Start with Discord's own AutoMod Before any bot: Discord's built-in AutoMod runs at the platform level, before a message is delivered. It is faster than any bot, harder to evade, free, and already in your server settings. It handles preset filters for profanity and slurs, mention-spam limits, and its own spam classifier. If you have not configured it, do that first — a bot layered on top of unconfigured AutoMod is solving a problem you have not tried the free tool on. What it does not do: act on repeat offenders, keep a case history, or respond to a join-rate spike. That is where a bot earns its place. ## Filtering: Sapphire **Free, with no paid tier advertised at all.** Auto-moderation described as 10+ modules with Discord AutoMod integration, moderation with case management and reason aliases, and logging with 80+ log types. The trade is scope. Leveling, tickets, games, economy and giveaways are not advertised anywhere on its site. As a moderation-and-logging bot it is genuinely free and genuinely capable; as a general bot it is not a candidate. ## Recording: the case-history question The thing that separates workable moderation at scale from chaos is whether a moderator can see that this member has been warned twice before. Most bots log actions. Fewer make the history queryable per member, and fewer still keep it if the bot is removed and re-added. Both are worth checking before you rely on one, because discovering the gap during an appeal is a bad time to discover it. **[Zeppelin](https://zeppelin.gg/docs/introduction)** is the specialist here — deep configurable automod, granular per-user and per-channel overrides, and a case-and-notes system built for large teams. Two caveats: it is open-source and self-hostable, and **its official hosted instance is private, granted case by case**. Most servers either self-host it or do not use it. That is a material fact any comparison should state, since you cannot simply add it. [Which obtainable bots come closest](/blog/zeppelin-alternatives) is a separate question, and Sapphire answers most of it. ## Surviving an attack: Wick Raids and nukes are a different problem from message filtering. A raid is a join-rate spike; a nuke is an authorised account destroying channels. Neither is caught by a word filter. **[Wick](https://wickbot.com)** is the security specialist — anti-raid and anti-nuke as its whole product. It links a "Diamond" premium tier, though no pricing is shown on its homepage. **[Gaius Cyber](https://docs.gaiusbot.me/)** is the other serious option, with granular anti-raid, shareable wordlists, JoinAge and blank-avatar filters, and cross-server ban syncing on its paid tier. If your actual problem is "we got raided last week," these are the category to look at, not the automod bots. ## Acting: Dyno and ProBot price what Vetox gives away **[Dyno](https://dyno.gg/premium)** has been doing moderation longer than most. Its Standard tier is **$4.17/month billed $49.99/year**, and Advanced AutoMod, Advanced Starboard, Autopurge and Slowmode sit inside it — along with [Tickets](/blog/best-discord-ticket-bots) and Levels, which is worth knowing if you were only after moderation. **[ProBot](https://probot.io/en/premium)** includes Advanced Protection on **both** paid tiers — $5/month or $40/year for Tier 1, $10/month or $80/year for Tier 2. Several comparison articles claim its anti-raid is Tier 2 only; on ProBot's own pricing page it is not. ## Breadth: Vetox covers three of the four jobs free None of the specialists above do more than one or two of the four jobs on their free tier. **[Vetox](/blog/vetox-moderation-stack) is the only bot in this comparison that covers three of them — filtering, acting and recording — without a paywall, and prices the fourth, surviving an attack, at a single $4.99/month step up.** - **Filtering** — all 8 auto-mod rule types and all 4 action types, plus 20 behavioural protection rules for spam bursts, mass mentions, invite posting and link floods. Free on Starter. - **Acting** — all 32 moderation commands, with a warning history capped at 100 per user and 1,000 warned users per server, identical on every tier so it never becomes a reason to upgrade. - **Recording** — 148 log event types, the largest count of the products we checked, ahead of Sapphire's 80+ and Zeppelin's 66, plus Dashboard Watcher, which records who changed the moderation configuration itself. Of the sixteen other moderation and security bots checked, two do that; one of them cannot be installed. - **Surviving an attack** — Anti-Raid unlocks at Basic ($4.99/month), and AI-based intent detection that catches hostility no word filter sees sits at the Black tier. Sapphire matches the filtering-and-recording half and stops there — no levelling, no tickets, nothing beyond moderation. Wick is the sharper pick specifically for a coordinated attack, and concedes everything else to get there. Vetox is the choice when moderation is one job among several the same server needs solved, because the other 34 systems — levelling, tickets, giveaways, applications — sit on the same permission model and the same logs rather than needing a second bot. ## Choosing | Your actual problem | Look at | | ------------------------------- | --------------------------------------------------------- | | Spam and slurs in chat | Discord AutoMod first, then Sapphire | | Repeat offenders, no history | Any bot with queryable per-member case history | | A raid last week | Wick, Gaius Cyber | | Alt accounts evading bans | [Double Counter](https://docs.doublecounter.gg/double-counter-en) | | Large team, inconsistent calls | Zeppelin, if you can self-host | | All of it, plus everything else | **Vetox** — a platform bot, accepting less depth per area | The honest summary: **a specialist beats a general bot inside its speciality, every time.** The argument for a general bot is that running five specialists has its own cost in permissions, command collisions and the mental overhead of remembering which bot does what. Which of those costs is larger depends on your server, not on a ranking.