Tatsu is a great economy bot, but as a leveling system it's chat-only with paid XP boosts. Kiai adds voice XP free and imports your Tatsu levels in one command.
Tatsu is the most fun economy bot on Discord. If your members are collecting pets and decorating houses, keep it. But if Tatsu is doing your leveling too, consider what that actually buys you below.
Tatsu is one of Discord's biggest bots, with over a million servers, and its pitch is different from a leveling bot's: credits, a 2,000+ item store, pets, furniture, profile cards. That stuff is genuinely fun, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
But a lot of servers installed Tatsu years ago mostly to get a leveling system, and their leveling has been quietly running on what's effectively an add-on. Tatsu has never tried to be a dedicated engagement tool the way MEE6, Amari, or Kiai are. Here's the comparison for servers deciding whether that's still acceptable, and how to move if it isn't.
Tatsu's leveling, specifically
Tatsu has two progression systems, and it's worth understanding both:
- Global XP follows a member across every server that uses Tatsu. It's Discord-wide identity, like a player profile.
- Server score is the per-server metric that actually drives your ranked roles and leaderboards.
Both are earned by chatting. That's it. There's no voice component: people who spend five hours in your game-night voice channels earn the same as people who dropped one message. On servers where calls are the activity, the score system measures the wrong thing.
And a detail with real consequences: much of Tatsu's paid premium, including the Supporter++ user subscription at $39.99/month, increases a specific member's XP and credit earn rate by up to 100%. That's a design choice where rank stops being purely a measure of participation. Whether that's a bug or a feature depends on your community, but most server owners we talk to don't want purchase power on their leaderboard.
What Tatsu's pricing gets you
- Free: leveled roles for up to 10 slots, the full economy, pets, leaderboards, profile cards.
- Server Plus, $4.99/mo: 20 activity roles plus a +15% XP and credit boost for every member.
- Server Premium, $8.99/mo: 40 activity roles and a +25% boost.
- User subscriptions, $4.99 to $39.99/mo: personal earn-rate boosts, custom backgrounds.
Note what's happening above: even the server plans exist to give members bigger earn rates. Your $8.99/month buys a stat multiplier on the leaderboard, not a leveling feature you can't otherwise get. Cancelling the server plan freezes editing on activity roles too, so you're paying monthly to keep configuration access.
Kiai inverts this. Voice XP, role rewards with no slot ceiling worth mentioning, multipliers per channel and role, custom level-up announcements, and a full dashboard are all free. Premium at $1.99 to $9.99 per month per server (scaling with size) buys rank card branding, automatic leaderboards, XP streaks, and prestige: features, not stat boosts.
The switch from Tatsu
Kiai imports Tatsu data through the Tatsu API. The flow:
- Run
/importin your server and choose Tatsu. - Generate a Tatsu API key with the command Kiai's import prompt gives you.
- Kiai pulls your server's member XP and role rewards (leveled roles) from the Tatsu API.
- Confirm levels and roles landed right, then decide whether Tatsu stays.
What transfers: member XP and your leveled role setup. What doesn't: Tatsu's global XP (which Discord-wide profiles carry) and the economy items. Members' pets, credits, and houses stay with Tatsu, untouched, because the import reads your server's data rather than moving it.
A practical option many servers pick: keep both. Tatsu handles the fun cosmetics; Kiai owns leveling, voice XP, and role rewards. They're not in conflict. Use /import once, then re-check your leaderboard side by side over a week.
Where this comparison actually lands
Keep Tatsu if the economy is the point. Pets, the store, profile cards: those are the reasons to have it, and no leveling bot replaces them.
Switch the leveling if any of these are true:
- Your community is voice-heavy and the leaderboard ignores it
- The 10 free activity-role cap hit you and you don't want a stat boost sold at $8.99
- A member's wallet shouldn't be able to buy leaderboard position
- You want a dashboard instead of command syntax
One leveling system runs cleaner than two anyway, once you decide which it is.
Questions we get about Tatsu migrations
Do members lose Tatsu levels? Their Tatsu global XP stays on Tatsu's own profile if you keep the bot. Your server's score-based levels export through the API and rebuild in Kiai, so your per-server leaderboard carries over.
Does Kiai have anything like the economy? No, deliberately. Kiai is a leveling bot. Role rewards are your shop; XP is your currency.
Does voice XP exist at all on Tatsu? Not per their own leveling documentation: XP comes from sending messages. This is a gap on voice-heavy servers, and it's free to fill in Kiai.
Is Tatsu's paid XP boost an issue for us? It's an issue if leaderboard integrity matters to your community. If your members already joke about "who donated to top 5", you've answered it.
Both at the same time? Yes, that's the recommended path. Import once, compare for a week, then decide who stays.
The bottom line
Tatsu earns its keep as an economy: store, pets, profiles. As an engagement system it's chat-only, caps your roles at ten, sells earn-rate boosts, and charges monthly just to edit your own config. Kiai handles leveling for free, adds voice XP, attaches a sane premium to the server, and imports your Tatsu levels in one command. Run them together, or run one or the other.