Comment by sudotechie12

The benefit of a forum is searchability. Answers from a forum can be indexed in Google SEO which ended up driving a ton of traffic.

I think forums struggle when you're building a product that is changing/evolving quickly. The information becomes dated and can even end up misleading users since workflows, terms, feature implementations are always changing.

The success of a forum or any place where interaction occurs depends on engagement. Is there enough activity? Are people responsive? Is it discoverable? If you're not seeing traffic in your Slack/Discord server, then a forum will most likely not do much better. I also think empty forums feel like a graveyard, so I wouldn't expect my question to get many eyes. If you do go with the forum route, you'll need to seed content.

One thing you can do is run both and see what happens. There are tools now out there that help you see all interactions across your various community channels. I work for a company called commonroom.io that shows you all activity, categorizes it, and enriches the user information, making it easy to see what's going on in your community and quickly segment for reporting or segmentation.