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A central question of community ecology is to understand how the interplay between processes of the Neutral Theory (e.g., immigration and ecological drift) and niche‐based processes (e.g., environmental filtering, intra‐ and interspecific density dependence) shape species diversity in competitive communities. The articulation between these two categories of mechanisms can be studied through the lens of the intermediate organizational level of “functional groups” (FGs), defined as clusters of species with similar traits. Indeed, FGs stress ecological differences among species and are thus likely to unravel non‐neutral interactions within communities. Here we presented a novel approach to explore how FGs affect species coexistence by comparing species and functional diversity patterns. Our framework considers the Neutral Theory as a mechanistic null hypothesis. It assesses how much the functional diversity …