Quantum discord (QD) is a general measure of bipartite quantum correlations with a potential role in quantum information processing tasks. Spin clusters serve as ideal candidates for the implementation of some of the associated protocols. In this paper, we consider a symmetric spin trimer and a tetramer which describe a number of known molecular magnets and compute the QD in the ground and thermal states of the clusters. The variations of the QD as a function of an anisotropy parameter, magnetic field and temperature are investigated. We obtain a number of interesting results such as a finite value of the QD in the trimer ground state for which the pairwise entanglement is known to be zero, differences in the nature of some of the variations in the ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic cases, and discontinuous jumps in the magnitude of the QD at first-order quantum phase transition points. A remarkable feature that is observed is that the QD completely vanishes only in the asymptotic limit of temperature T → ∞. We further study the dynamics of the QD and the pairwise entanglement at T = 0 under the effect of a dephasing channel describing the interaction of the reduced spin cluster state with independent local environments. The QD is found to vanish asymptotically as t → ∞. In the case of the spin trimer, the pairwise entanglement has a zero value at all times and reaches a zero value in a finite time in the case of the tetramer. © 2011 IOP Publishing Ltd.