The original Polaris Discord leveling bot is discontinued. How to export your Polaris data, import members' levels and role rewards into Kiai, and what changes.
Polaris has one of the strangest stories of any Discord leveling bot, and its current state matters more than any feature table. The original Polaris, built by Colon, is discontinued. Its successor situation is confusingly named: Polar Lab's Polaris V3 is a different project, a full moderation-and-economy suite. Which one you knew determines what your switch actually looks like.
What happened to the original Polaris
The classic Polaris was a beloved leveling-focused bot: per-server XP, unlimited reward roles, a powerful multiplier system, and unusual customization depth ("a dozen lines of code, why the heck would anyone charge for this?"). You might know it through gdcolon.com/polaris.
It's no longer accepting new servers. Colon open-sourced the code in late 2024 for self-hosting, and the original instance is running out its remaining life. If you're hosting your own fork, that's a legitimate path, but it's a developer's path, and most server owners don't want to babysit a MongoDB deployment.
The practical consequence: existing Polaris servers are running on a bot that will eventually stop being maintained. If you're reading this because you saw a "bot is leaving Discord" message, that's the situation, and your next decision is where to take your data.
Taking your Polaris data to Kiai
The good news: we built support specifically for this. /import with a Polaris data export (from the original dashboard's Data tab, "Download all data") carries over:
- Member XP and levels for the whole server
- Role rewards and their level thresholds
The parts that don't carry directly, multipliers and dashboard-level settings, are manual but quick: multiplier values are visible in the export, and rebuilding them in Kiai's dashboard is fifteen minutes for the typical server.
Original Polaris users lose something real in switching: Polaris was famously customizable, including oddball options like "only send a level up message every 5th level". Kiai's model covers most of that ground differently, milestones firing their own reward messages rather than global announcement intervals.
If you were looking at Polar Lab's Polaris V3 instead: that's a different bot (moderation, anti-raid, economy, tickets, music, leveling), priced $2.99 to $4.99/month for premium tiers. It's a suite decision, not a leveling decision; compare the whole stack.
Why a leveling-focused bot makes sense post-Polaris
The honest case for classic Polaris was always "it does leveling, excellently, and nothing else". If that was your reason for choosing it, the direct successor in spirit is a focused leveling bot with a maintained service behind it. Kiai's free tier covers message and voice XP, role rewards, multipliers, level-up messages, denylists, streaks, and drops, plus a dashboard, which is the closest match to "customizable leveling, nothing I have to pay for to configure".
Two specific Polaris habits transfer over cleanly:
- Unlimited reward roles: Polaris's "no limit on reward roles" carried over on Kiai's free tier.
- The multiplier philosophy: channel catboost half XP, boosters double XP. In Kiai, channel and role multipliers are free, including temporary ones, so your balancing schemes survive (with an honest cap: temporary multipliers over 24 hours are premium).
The migration, step by step
- Add Kiai
- On the original Polaris dashboard, open your server's Data tab and download the JSON
- Run
/importin your server, choose Polaris, attach the file - Re-add multipliers and announcement settings in the dashboard
- Run both for a week, then thank Polaris for its service
One caution for big servers: run the import once, confirm the leaderboard depth matches what Polaris showed, then remove the old bot. Running both simultaneously for a week is fine; running both forever double-counts member activity in your role assignments and confuses nobody more than it confuses your top members.
What about Polaris V3 (Polar Lab)?
Different product, genuinely. If your server needs moderation, tickets, economy, music, and leveling from one bot, it's a reasonable suite option with a free tier. If what you actually want is the thing classic Polaris was good at, deep, free, configured leveling, that's Kiai's lane. And they can coexist: leveling in one bot, safety stack in another, is a common setup with clearer failure modes than one mega-bot.
Quick answers
Is Polaris shut down? The original by Colon is discontinued and open-sourced for self-hosting. Polar Lab's Polaris V3 is a separate, active project that shares the name.
Will my members lose levels? No. /import with the Polaris dashboard export carries XP and role rewards.
What about my multipliers? Values need re-adding in the dashboard. They're visible in your export for reference.
Why did Polaris shut down? Per the developer, hosting had become increasingly annoying to maintain. Respect to them for open-sourcing rather than letting it die silently.