10 Free Slackbots That Will Make Your Work Life Easier

Slack is a powerful business tool that’s supported a variety of bots: Here are some of our favorites.

By Rob Watts

Slack is a fantastic business tool. Not only is it an effective messaging application, but it’s also customizable enough to be one of the best collaboration tools on the market, thanks in part to the wide array of bots available for the platform. Whether you want a tool that integrates with your productivity app, tracks performance, or just introduces new team members, there is a Slackbot for your needs. Best of all, you can try all of them for free.

Conclude

You’ll always have to deal with hard decisions to make at work. Conclude lets you bring in key team members from within Slack. Simply use the /raise command to create a dedicated channel, then add key team members to discuss the decision. Once you and your cohorts have reached a consensus, use the /conclude command to close the issue. Concludebot sends team members a synopsis afterward.

Busybot

If you’ve used a project management tool such as Zoho Projects, then you’ll find Busybot to be familiar. Busybot is designed to let you create, assign, and manage tasks in your organization, all inside your Slack app. You can assign tasks to anyone and Busybot will generate automatic reminders for that person. You can also track all assigned tasks from within the Busybot channel.

Paperbot

Your teams send countless messages every day on Slack, but it can be extremely difficult sorting the important information from the filler. Paperbot automatically organizes your Slack messages, making it easy to search for them by tag, name, channel, and more. You can even opt in to receive a recap at the end of the day via email.

Statsbot

Analytics platforms are useful, but they can be a pain to open and use in order to access important business performance information. Think of Statsbot as your miniature, non-sentient reporting analyst. Statsbot integrates with Google Analytics , Salesforce, and other platforms and delivers insights within Slack. Want a performance summary from last month? Don’t waste time logging into your Google Analytics (GA) account. Simply type in “@statsbot Summary last month” and let the miracle of automation do the work for you.

Dbot by Demisto

Sharing and collaboration are what make Slack great. It can be hard to determine from the link preview, however, which links are safe and which ones are malicious. Dbot by Demisto gives your company peace of mind by automatically scanning every URL, file, and IP address that users share in your Slack app. The bot uses multiple security threat feeds and malware analysis engines to ensure that it is up to date on the latest cybersecurity threats. If DBot finds suspicious activity, then it will automatically notify your team so that you can proactively curb security threats in real time.

Howdy

You want to make sure your team is staying productive and tackling their workload. However, the truth of the matter is that staying on top of your employees ends up taking precious time out of your day. Tell Howdy what information you want to gather from your teams and it will automatically collect and forward you those responses. For example, it can collect data on questions like “What are you working on this week?” or “Are you on track to finish the monthly report on time?” For less serious matters, you can even have Howdy ask your team what they want for lunch.

Donut

At the end of the day, it’s the people in your team that make your business special. Donut is designed to foster team building in an interesting way. Simply have your team members join the Donut channel and they will be introduced to a new colleague every week. It will then remind them to meet up, even if it’s just for a quick cup of coffee…and a donut. Busy work schedules make it difficult for employees to get to know each other. You never know what good might happen if two talented teammates get to know one another via this app.

TimeBot

Keeping track of vacation days, sick leave, and holidays can be a hassle. Instead of fussing with your company’s human resources (HR) portal, you can simply access TimeBot from within Slack. Your team only needs to fill out a personal time off (PTO) request command to TimeBot and answer a few questions, and the requests arrives in your Slack window. Once approved, TimeBot will notify the team that the employee in question will be out-of-office. It even has holiday reminders for over 100 countries.

@must-read

Don’t let your team miss important messages. @Must-Read (found in the Slack directory) lets you flag outgoing Slack messages as urgent. Much like Paperbot, the bot will then send you a daily digest of all tagged messages from that day. Slack channels can move extremely fast. @Must-Read is a quick and easy way to make sure teams read what matters.

FlexBot

If you’re not healthy, then there’s no way you can do your best work. But it can be difficult to maintain good habits during a stressful work week. Depending on how you configure the plug-in, FlexBot can send you reminders to perform breathing and mindfulness exercise. It can also remind you to stay hydrated as well as stand up and walk around once in a while to preserve your posture. FlexBot is also personal to you, so you can customize it for your unique needs without disturbing other team members.

Read more: “Microsoft’s New Teams Integrations Squarely Target Slack”

Originally published at www.pcmag.com.