Custom Themes

Steps to use custom themes in Discord:

1. Download and extract BetterDiscord
2. Run BetterDiscordWI.exe
3. Check “Restart Discord after installation” and finish the installation process without changing anything else.
4. Wait for it to load
5. Join the BetterDiscord Discord Server
6. Read the rules and in #welcome, make sure to complete the steps required
7. Find a few good themes under #theme-repo and download them.
8. Click the Gear icon in the bottom left of Discord (User Settings)
9. Go to BetterDiscord and Themes
10. Click Open Theme Folder
11. Drag all the .css files into the folder
12. Go back to Discord and press CtrlR
13. Repeat steps 8-9
14. Enable your theme of choice
15. Enjoy your new custom theme

⚠️ Warning: BetterDiscord is against Discord’s Terms of Service

Before you install anything, you should know this: BetterDiscord is a third-party modification of the official Discord client. It is against Discord’s Terms of Service, and using it can result in your account being suspended or permanently banned.

Discord explicitly prohibits “self-bots” and modified clients, and they have been known to detect BetterDiscord. While most users don’t get banned for simply having it installed, the risk is real and is not zero. Treat any custom theme setup as a use-at-your-own-risk decision.

If your account is important to you - moderation tools, a large community, Nitro subscriptions, years of messages - consider the modern, supported alternatives further down this page before installing BetterDiscord.

Why do people use it anyway?

Despite the ToS risk, BetterDiscord has been hugely popular for one reason: Discord’s built-in theming is minimal. For years the only customization Discord officially offered was switching between Dark and Light mode. People who want a different accent color, a compact message layout, transparent backgrounds, or anything resembling the old IRC client feel were out of luck.

BetterDiscord fills that gap with:

• Custom CSS themes that completely restyle the client.
• Plugins that add features Discord hasn’t shipped - message loggers, search-in-page, custom status cycles, voice channel shortcuts, and more.
• Emote menus for servers that don’t have Nitro.

If you fall into “I just want my Discord to look different,” BetterDiscord is genuinely the path of least resistance - until you account for the ToS risk.

Modern alternatives to BetterDiscord

BetterDiscord hasn’t been actively maintained the way it once was, and the ecosystem has moved on. If you want theming and plugins today, the more current options are:

• Vencord (and the fork Vesktop, which is a custom Discord desktop client built on top of Vencord). Vencord is open-source, actively maintained, and supports themes and plugins in a similar way to BetterDiscord. Vesktop packages it as a standalone desktop app, so you don’t have to install into the official Discord client. Vesktop is considered lower-risk than BetterDiscord because it’s a separate client rather than a modification of the official one, but it is still a third-party client and still falls in a grey area of Discord’s ToS. Read the project’s documentation before relying on it.
• BetterDiscord alternatives like Replugged (open-source, plugin-based) and Powercord (older, but still around for existing users).
• Official Discord Nitro themes. Discord has slowly added more customization to Nitro subscribers - animated avatars, custom server icons, profile effects. None of them reach the level of “completely restyle the interface,” but they are the only options Discord officially supports.

For most users today, Vesktop is the recommended path if you want BetterDiscord-like functionality. The setup is similar (download the installer, run it, drop CSS files into a themes folder), and the project is more actively maintained.

How to uninstall BetterDiscord

If you’ve decided to go back to a clean Discord install, or you want to switch to Vesktop, uninstalling BetterDiscord is straightforward:

1. Open Discord.
2. Click the Gear icon (User Settings).
3. Go to BetterDiscord in the left sidebar.
4. Click Uninstall BetterDiscord.
5. Confirm and let Discord restart.

If BetterDiscord prevents Discord from starting cleanly (which can happen after a Discord update), you can force-remove it by deleting the betterdiscord folder from inside %AppData%\Discord\ and the bd-prefixed files in the same directory. The cleaner approach is to run the BetterDiscord installer again and choose Repair Installation or Uninstall from the options.

After uninstalling, you may need to clear your browser-level Discord cache (Ctrl+Shift+Delete → cached files) if the client shows visual artifacts on next launch.

Other things to know

• Discord updates break BetterDiscord regularly. Every time Discord pushes a client update, there’s a chance BetterDiscord stops loading until the BetterDiscord team pushes a compatibility fix. Expect 1-2 days of broken theming after major Discord updates.
• Custom themes can leak tokens. A malicious theme is just CSS with an url() to an attacker-controlled server. If a theme’s CSS file contains references to external resources you don’t recognize, don’t enable it. Themes downloaded from the official BetterDiscord repo are vetted, but third-party themes from forums or Discord servers should be treated as untrusted.
• Themes are CSS files. Everything in a theme is a CSS file, which means anything a malicious theme can do is essentially “fetch a URL and run whatever it gets back as a stylesheet.” Not as bad as a full plugin, but still worth being aware of.