If you're building a Discord bot, you've probably already hit the question that starts half the arguments in every dev server: Python or JavaScript? The short version is that both are great, both will run your bot for years, and the flame wars are mostly people defending the language they happened to learn first. Let's compare discord.py and discord.js fairly and skip the tribalism.
The honest answer first
Use the language you already know. That's it. That's the whole secret.
If you write Python at work or at school, build your bot with discord.py. If you've been doing web stuff and JavaScript feels natural, reach for discord.js. The library you pick matters far less than how comfortable you are debugging at 2am when your bot stops responding and you have no idea why.
A bot is mostly glue code. You're reading messages, calling some API, formatting a reply, and saving a bit of data. Neither language has a real advantage at that. The thing that slows people down is not the language, it's fighting unfamiliar syntax while also learning Discord's quirks at the same time. So if you already know one of these two, you've basically already decided. The rest of this article is for people who genuinely don't have a preference yet, or who are curious how the two feel different in practice.
Library maturity and community
Both libraries are mature and actively maintained, so you're not gambling on either one.
discord.js is the bigger of the two by raw numbers. It's been around a long time, the docs at discord.js.org are genuinely good, and because so many bots run on it, almost any error message you paste into a search engine has already been answered by someone. It tracks new Discord features quickly. When Discord ships something, discord.js usually has support for it fast.
discord.py has an interesting history. The maintainer archived the project in 2021, a lot of people panicked, and forks like Pycord and nextcord popped up. Then discord.py came back and resumed development. Today it's healthy again and well maintained, but you should know the landscape: when you search for Python Discord tutorials, some of them will quietly be using a fork, and the code won't always be a perfect copy and paste into discord.py. Read the import lines before you trust a tutorial.
In our experience helping people on our Discord, the discord.js crowd tends to have more ready made answers floating around, just because there are more of them. The discord.py community is a little smaller but very solid, and the official documentation is clean. Neither will leave you stranded.
How the async models feel to write
Both libraries are fully async, because talking to Discord means waiting on the network constantly. But the two languages handle async with a different mood.
In JavaScript, async is just part of the air you breathe. Promises and async/await are baked into the language, and discord.js leans on event listeners. You attach handlers, things fire, you respond. If you've done any frontend or Node work, this will feel like home immediately. The catch is that JavaScript will happily let you forget an await and then your code keeps running while the thing you wanted hasn't finished yet. Those bugs are sneaky because nothing crashes. It just behaves weirdly.
Python's async came later to the party and it shows a little. You write async def and await, and discord.py uses decorators for commands and events, which a lot of people find very readable. Honestly, for a beginner I think the Python version reads more like plain English. But Python is stricter in a helpful way: if you forget to await something, you'll usually get a warning about a coroutine that was never awaited, which points you straight at the mistake.
So the trade is roughly this. JavaScript's async feels more natural if you already think in events and callbacks. Python's async feels more readable line by line, and the error messages are a bit more forgiving when you mess up the await.
A tiny ping command in both
Nothing explains the difference better than the same simple command written twice. Here's a classic ping command, the bot replies with Pong, in each library.
discord.py (Python), in a file like bot.py:
import discord
from discord.ext import commands
intents = discord.Intents.default()
intents.message_content = True
bot = commands.Bot(command_prefix="!", intents=intents)
@bot.event
async def on_ready():
print(f"Logged in as {bot.user}")
@bot.command()
async def ping(ctx):
await ctx.send("Pong!")
bot.run("YOUR_TOKEN")
discord.js (JavaScript), in a file like index.js:
const { Client, GatewayIntentBits } = require("discord.js");
const client = new Client({
intents: [
GatewayIntentBits.Guilds,
GatewayIntentBits.GuildMessages,
GatewayIntentBits.MessageContent,
],
});
client.once("ready", () => {
console.log(`Logged in as ${client.user.tag}`);
});
client.on("messageCreate", (message) => {
if (message.content === "!ping") {
message.reply("Pong!");
}
});
client.login("YOUR_TOKEN");
Look at the shape of each. The Python version uses decorators (@bot.command()) so the command name comes from the function name, and the framework does the parsing for you. The JavaScript version is more explicit. You listen for every message and check the content yourself. Both are fine. The Python one is shorter for simple prefix commands. The JavaScript one shows you exactly what's happening, which some people prefer.
A quick warning that applies to both: don't paste your real token into your code and then push it to a public GitHub repo. Put it in a .env file and load it from there. People scrape GitHub for tokens constantly, and Discord will reset a leaked token on you, sometimes before you've even noticed.
Memory footprint on cheap hosting
This is where it gets practical, especially if you're running on a small plan or a free tier.
A bare bones bot in either language sits somewhere around 80 to 150 MB of RAM when it's just idling in a few servers. That's a rough rule of thumb, not a promise, because it depends heavily on how many servers you're in, how much you cache, and what your code holds onto.
Generally speaking, a small discord.py bot tends to idle a touch lighter than a small discord.js one, because Node carries a bit more baseline overhead. But the gap is small and it's almost never the thing that decides whether your bot fits on a plan. What actually blows up your memory is caching. discord.js by default caches a lot of things (members, messages, channels) so it can answer questions instantly without hitting the API. That's great for speed and rough on RAM once your bot joins big servers with thousands of members. You can tune this with cache options and sweepers, and you should if you're on a tight plan.
On the Python side, discord.py caches members too, and the same advice applies. Turn off the intents and caches you don't need. If your bot never reads member lists, don't request that data.
A few honest pointers for keeping memory sane on a small plan:
- Only enable the intents your bot actually uses. Every intent you turn on is more data to cache.
- For discord.js, look into the
makeCacheoptions and cache sweepers to throw away stale data. - Keep your bot running with a process manager. On Node, pm2 will restart it if it crashes and show you memory usage. On Python, a simple systemd service does the same job.
- Watch the bot for a day under real load before you decide it needs more RAM. Idle numbers lie.
For most hobby and community bots, a small plan with 512 MB to 1 GB of RAM is plenty in either language. We run plenty of customer bots in both, and the ones that run out of memory are almost always doing something heavy like image processing or holding huge in memory data structures, not just being written in the "wrong" language.
Slash commands work great in both
This used to be a real differentiator and it isn't anymore. Discord pushed everyone toward slash commands (the ones that pop up when you type /), and both libraries support them properly now.
In discord.js, slash commands are handled through the application commands API. You register your commands, then listen for interactionCreate events and reply with interaction.reply(). There's a registration step where you tell Discord what your commands look like, which trips people up the first time because a command can take an hour to show up globally (register it to a single test server and it appears instantly).
In discord.py, slash commands live in the app_commands module. You decorate a function with @bot.tree.command(), then sync your command tree to Discord. Same idea, same gotcha about global commands taking time to propagate.
So neither library is behind here. If someone tells you to pick JavaScript "because slash commands," they're working from old information. Both do slash commands, buttons, select menus, modals, and the rest of the interaction toolkit.
So which one?
If you've read this far hoping for a clear winner, here's the most honest version I can give you. Pick Python with discord.py if you like readable code, you're newer to programming, or you already do data or scripting work. Pick JavaScript with discord.js if you already live in the Node world, you want the biggest pile of existing answers to copy from, or you're planning to share code with a web app you're also building.
Both will run fine on a small hosting plan, both handle slash commands, and both have communities that'll help you when you're stuck. Whichever you choose, set up a process manager, keep your token in a .env file, and turn off the intents you don't use. Do those three things and you'll have a bot that quietly does its job for a long time, no matter which side of the language fence you landed on.
