Dyno bot alternatives: the honest options for moderation

Dyno's automod is one of the most configurable rule engines you can put in a Discord server, and its free tier includes all nineteen filters plus the full ban and mute ladder. So people looking for alternatives are usually not unhappy with what Dyno does. They have hit its per server pricing, or they have found that a rule engine does not catch the thing hurting their community.

Those two problems have different answers, and only one of them is solved by switching bots.

Why people look for Dyno alternatives

It is priced per server. Dyno's plans are described as "for one server of your choice", at $5.99 a month or $49.99 a year for Standard. Three servers is three subscriptions. We have covered what Dyno costs including the annual savings and what the paid tier actually buys.

Configuration takes real time. Nineteen filters, each with its own settings, actions, thresholds and role and channel scoping, is powerful and it is also an afternoon of work. Some servers want something that works out of the box.

Rules only catch what rules can catch. Dyno's Banned Words has two modes, and its own documentation illustrates the trade-off perfectly: exact mode matches only the exact word, so fr33 n1tr0 walks past, while wildcard mode matches inside other words, so banning "hi" also matches "high". Neither reads intent.

Some servers want fewer moving parts, or a specialist for one job rather than a general purpose bot with twenty modules.

The alternatives at a glance

There is a broader roundup of the best Discord moderation bots if you want the whole category rather than Dyno-shaped replacements.

Like-for-like alternatives to Dyno

Carl-bot

The best like-for-like replacement. It is the closest match in philosophy: a rule engine with serious moderation tooling, configured on a dashboard, free at the level most servers need.

Where it beats Dyno is the response side. Carl-bot's punishments are delete, warn, tempmute, mute, timeout, kick, tempban, ban, message, DM and defer, and they combine with commas, so delete, tempmute 20m is one rule. The defer action is unique in this group: it sends the offending context to a channel where moderators decide with reactions, turning ambiguous cases into a human queue rather than an automatic punishment. Premium is Patreon-based from £6.50 a month on a transferable server slot system, and automod itself is free.

Best for: servers that want the same configurability with a better answer for ambiguous cases.

Sapphire

Free, and broader than Dyno in some directions. Twelve condition-based automod modules, reaction roles, join roles, logging with over 80 log types, social notifications, and moderation case management, all at no cost. Its conditions are expressed cleanly as an operator, a count, a time frame and a unit, which is arguably more legible than Dyno's per-filter settings.

It also has genuine AI moderation for insults, threats, identity attacks and offensive language, which no rule engine here offers. Sapphire's own docs note it "only scans 10 messages per server per minute" without its paid Limit Increase plan, and that full AI language support is English and German.

Best for: replacing Dyno without paying, especially if you also want the AI layer included.

MEE6

The best known all-in-one, with eight automod checks and a strong enforcement ladder that escalates on warning counts inside a time window. Weaker than Dyno on automod configurability, stronger on levels, economy and social alerts. Priced per server at £11.99 a month, £49.99 a year or £89.99 lifetime, and its automod is included free.

Best for: servers that want engagement features alongside moderation.

Wick

A different category, and worth knowing about. Wick is a security bot built around anti-nuke monitoring, panic mode lockdown, backups and restore, quarantine and verification. Its automod is a Heat system where every action adds heat that decays over time, which handles spam bursts more gracefully than a fixed threshold does.

Best for: servers whose real risk is a raid or a rogue admin rather than message content.

If the problem is specifically moderation

If you are leaving Dyno because its filters miss the messages that actually hurt your community, be careful: swapping it for Carl-bot, MEE6 or Sapphire's rule modules gets you a different rule engine with the same blind spot. A calmly written threat trips no counter in any of them.

Discord AutoMod is the free floor, already in your server. Three ready-made categories, six custom keyword rules, and the one capability no bot has: it blocks a message before it is posted. Leave it on whatever else you run.

Supervisor is what we make, so weigh this accordingly. It reads what a message means rather than matching strings: 16 labels including harassment, threats, scams and self-harm, conversation context for ambiguous messages, image and video moderation, and over 100 languages. It is £13.99 a month, or about £4.99 on the three year cycle, billed per account so one subscription covers every server you run.

It is also not a Dyno replacement. Supervisor has three slash commands, no modules, no counters at all, and its actions are Delete, Timeout and Warn, so it cannot ban, kick or mute. Everything Dyno does with thresholds, Supervisor simply does not do. It runs alongside.

Best for: running next to a rule engine, when contextual harm is what you are missing.

Do you actually need to replace Dyno?

Frequently not.

Switching means rebuilding nineteen filters' worth of configuration, re-tuning thresholds you have already calibrated to your community, losing your automod log history, retraining moderators on a different command set, and reconfiguring every module you use beyond automod. Dyno's free tier already includes the whole automod engine and the full ban ladder, so unless you are paying for several servers, cost is often not the real driver.

Switching makes sense if the per server bill has become the dominant cost across a network, or if you want a feature another bot has and Dyno does not, such as Carl-bot's defer queue or Sapphire's AI moderation.

It does not make sense if your complaint is that harmful messages are getting through. That is a property of rule engines, not of Dyno, and adding a layer fixes it where switching does not.

For developers and platforms

None of these bots help you moderate your own product. If you are building rather than buying, Supervisor has a REST API with SDKs for Python, JavaScript, Go, Rust and Java, plus a Platform API for provisioning moderation to your own users. The API reference has the endpoints and rates.

Whatever you choose, test it on your own content rather than a feature table. Paste a message that gets past your current filters into the live demo and see whether it gets caught, or add Supervisor to your server.