We've categorized the best Slack apps for developers. Whether you are working in teams or you just want some bot for yourself we've got you covered in this post. While some of the tools in the list are not specific to developers alone, we listed them because we think they might still be useful for some.
Slack Apps for Productivity
In this category we'll explore the Slack apps we found that can help tech individuals and tech teams be more productive.
Axolo (that's us!)
"Every minute trying to understand each other is a minute not spent shipping features". Axolo focuses on making it easy for developers to talk about a pull request. The result is that pull requests are resolved faster, it's easier to stay on top of PR and there is an increase in focus due to less context switching.
What we like 👍:
Axolo creates a channel for every pull request and has a deep integration with GitHub. It will share the code comments, code reviews, issues, and even the GitHub actions. As a bonus, there is a /lgtm command that lets you approve pull requests in seconds from Slack.
More about Axolo: axolo.co.
Pomodoro Tracker
Some people have their Pomodoro on their OS but the benefits of having it in Slack is that you can let other people know in your team that you are in a focus mode and that they shouldn't expect you to answer within the next n minutes.
What we like 👍:
Simple and powerful. It does what it says it does :).
GoLinks Shortcut
Go Links saves all your favorite companies' important URL and makes it easy for you to see them.
Vidyard
Asynchronous video sharing
Vidyard allows you to record yourself/ your screen easily to share asynchronously. Great for "showing instead of telling"Vidyard on Slack Marketplace
Slack project management apps
This category is dedicated to apps that allow you to manage tasks within Slack. Those apps usually allow you to create and assign tasks directly in Slack. It's a crowded space so for brevity we'll just list the one that has been referred to us.
Linear
Linear defines itself as "The issue tracking tool you'll enjoy using".
Linear doesn't have an application listed in the Slack marketplace but you can integrate Slack from your Linear WorkSpace: Linear.
Linear has a traditional /linear command that allows you to create new issues. Link posted on Slack from linear will be displayed in an organized fashion for people to identify them easily.
What we like:
Linear has a way to create a specific channel for a project, sending updates from that project to a channel and making a contextual update on a specific linear project.
Learn more about the Slack Linear integration on Linear.
Trello
"Trello helps team move work forward".
Trello is the simple Kanban project management tool, they are pioneers in TODO DOING DONE. The app integration allows you to add new Trello cards with the /trello command, edit cards, attach conversations and get previews.
What we like 👍:
Trello is very popular and has other dedicated Slack app made by the community. So if you are a Trello user there are a lot of chances you will find what you are looking for.
Trello on Slack App Marketplace
Asana
"Move work forward" Asana is also a popular project management app based in San Francisco. Their integration does pretty much what the others do with the ability to be personally notified when they are changes about a ticket you own.
More about the integration: Asana on Slack App Marketplaceand about Asana: Asana.com
Jira
Jira started as a bug tracking system and has evolved into an all you can do project management App.
Find out more on: Jira on Slack App Marketplace
Pivotal Tracker
Pivotal is an agile project management tool made for developers. It’s old-school but does the job.
Find out more on Pivotal Tracker
Workast
Workast describes itself as "The missing piece of Slack". They seem to be the best-integrated project management app to Slack we've seen so far. They were built around Slack and is fully featured to be workable on Slack.
What we like 👍:
Fully integrated into Slack and easy to use for everyone in your team. For example, you can sign in with your Slack account, you won't need to sign up with your email.
Learn more about Workast: Workast.com
Notion
Notion started off as a wiki all-in-one workspace for notes and also does collaboration, tables, project management and much more. They have a clean UI/UX and has been around for a few years.
The Notion integration allows you to subscribe to changes for a particular page. This is good if you want to monitor changes in your Notion workspace.
What could be better 😬:
This integration only updates you on changes. Would be interesting to have workflow automation and more actions you could do directly in Slack.
More about Notion:
Slack Apps for Managing Teams and Culture
Disco
Enable value-driven work and foster team appreciation directly from Slack. Disco makes it easy to encourage actions within the organization by enabling kudos, appreciation dashboards, and raffles.
What we like 👍:
Value-driven company with a well-integrated with actions you can do directly into Slack.
More information on justdisco
heyTaco
"Build Stronger, happier remote teams". HeyTaco is here to help build camaraderie within the organization.
What we like 👍:
Who doesn't like tacos here?
More on HeyTaco: heytaco
Karma
Karma makes it super easy to give appreciation to one another, @tag ++ someone to give him Karma and show appreciation.
More on their website: karmabot
Greetbot
Greetbot is made for big teams who onboard new employees on a rolling basis. It will allow you to remind you and people in your team to greet and meet new people in your team.
What we like 👍:
Schedule follow-ups, encourage connections, and view the latest activity. The app is well thought and does the job!
Onboarding ⚡ by Roots
Onboarding by Roots does a similar job to Greebot and also allows you to set up a workflow. You can automate asking tasks to specific people like creating a Gmail GSuite email to @support and more.
AnonymityBot
Anonimity bot Ask polls, make anonymous announcements, or ask anonymous questions to your team. I feel this could be useful in some company cultures where some employees might be afraid to speak on their name.
Anonymity feedback on Slack marketplace
Lunch Train
Do you work in a city and have you ever tried to organize lunch with more than 2 colleagues in your company? Lunchtrain is the answer, making it easy to organize your lunches by getting everyone on board.
What we like 👍:
Great copy, fun, and simple Slack app that works well for its purpose.
Lunch Train on Slack marketplace
Whatis
Does your company use a lot of acronyms? Whatis is the answer. It will identify when you use one and show the members of the channel what this acronym does. It also makes it easy for you to create a dictionary of all the acronyms in your company.
Code Related Integrations
PR Patrol
PR patrol allows you to monitor some part of your codebase you care about. You can set it up to be alerted whenever a specific file gets changed.
What we like 👍:
Easy to set up!
Circle CI
Circle CI Slack integration will post to a channel of your choice whenever a build finishes.
AppFollow
With AppFollow, you can track critical app updates around rating, keywords and reviews from your favorite stores. Passively receive alerts, reply to user reviews or monitor all your app data without leaving Slack.
1Password
1 Password Slack integration allows you to share private notes within Slack. Can be useful for developers to share private keys or things you don't want to be out there in the wild.
1password on Slack marketplace
StatusPage
Be alerted when there are changes to your Status page.
notifications on Slack marketplace
CodeMagic
Easily follow your mobile app development with Code Magic. Configure a channel to get notified of relevant events.
More on Codemagic
Standup Slack App Bot
Standup meetings are notorious in tech teams, they allow you to stay in sync with your team in a (usually) short and efficient way. A standup meeting is usually a time where you share what you've done the day before and what are your plans for the day. It's simple and allows you to share if you need help, and vice versa, see if there is a colleague to who you can give help.
Standup.ly
Automate standup meetings, retrospectives, other agile processes and get an internal Q&A system to level up the productivity of your team.
What we like 👍:
Standup.ly is more than just a simple standup bot it also allows to have other agile processes with 360 feedback, retrospective meeting, and more.
Find out more on: Standuply
DailyBot
Daily bot is pretty similar to Standup.ly and seems to have analytics in your team motivation and blockers.
Find out more on Dailybot
Calendar Slack apps
Google Calendar
Connect your calendar and update your status automatically when you are in a meeting. Pretty useful to know if someone in your team is busy in a meeting and won't be able to answer you're urgent question straight away.
You can also set it up to get notified of your events coming up during the day.
Find out more on Google Slack Marketplace
Fellow
Fellow encourages people in the meeting to come prepared and to follow a course of action during the meeting. The fellow also makes it easy to manage your agenda directly in Slack.
Find out more on: Fellow
Random Slack appsGiphy
Giphy might be the most used / underrated / overrated app in the Slack marketplace. With a simple command /giphy (text) one can send a giph in seconds.
Gif Keyboard
Giphy has a competitor and Gif Key is there to help you add a caption and search Giphy in a more productive way ;).
Gif Keyboard on Slack Marketplace
BirthdayBot
Show that you care and make sure not to forget anyone’s birthday in your company!
What could be improved 😅
Free trial is only for 14 days and no free version of the product.
Miro
Miro is a whiteboard collaboration app. Great to brainstorm or even to share ideas with post it or drawings or anything you could do on a white board. Their slack integrations allows you to Install review comments, find recently updated boards, and approve access requests.
Find out more on: Miro Slack App Marketplace
Automation Slack Apps
Here is a list of Slack apps that can automate some of your workflows. They can be useful in numerous ways in order to automate repetitive tasks.
Zapier
Zapier is the most famous automation tool out there. Easy to use, with workflow, they seem to be well connected to the Slack API. The first pricing goes for 20$/month.
Automate.io
Automate.io does a similar job to Zapier. You might want to use Automate since they have a cheaper alternative and might have some specific integrations. The first pricing goes for 10$/month.
Integromat and HotGlue
Two other automation apps. I honestly couldn’t tell you which one to go for, they all seem to be working well. It will probably depend on if you are already one of those tools. Pricing is about equivalent, and they sometimes have different integrations and different levels of integrations.
Incident Apps
I’ve seen numerous incident apps coming up in the past few/months/years. They are usually targeted at bigger companies that have SRE (Site reliability engineers) in the company.
They are quite useful to put a methodology in place for any tech and non-tech urgency that one company can have. They usually have a similar process: you have a command you can do from slack /incident create and you need to fill out a form. In the form you put someone in charge, mention the severity and information you can provide to show the problem.
It then spins off a channel and you can discuss how to best resolve it with the right team and people who are automatically invited to that channel.
Incident.io
Incident.io is a well-funded company by ex-Monzo (banking) employees. They have a 250+ people community in Slack and seem to have happy customers. I’ve seen screenshots of incident recaps and it looks nice!
Allma.io
Also another funded company. Check out their website. They have a great way of showing how their process works in Slack so you can see if it’s something you should be interested in.
Bug Tracker
Bug tracker apps will let you know whenever there is something going wrong with your apps. There are many different services but here are the most common ones.
BugSnag
BugSnag has been mentioned by a lot of tech teams. It’s a world-famous service. The integration allows you to snooze, or say that you’ve resolved the bug from Slack.
Find out more on BugSnag in Slack Marketplace
Sentry
Sentry is a similar service. What we particularly like about the Sentry slack integration is that you can assign a bug to someone directly from the Slack integration.
Sentry on Slack app marketplace.
Raygun
“Resolve errors, crashes, and application performance problems faster with Raygun and Slack”.
What we like about Raygun:
The error display is wide and seems like you have enough information to handle most of your errors.
Raygun on Slack app marketplace.
Log tracker:
Papertrail
Papertrail integration enables you to receive important system and application messages right when they happen. Papertrail app offers an intuitive Web-based log viewer, alerts, charts and analytics exports, long-term archives, and other time-saving log tools. Papertrail was developed by Slack.
Papertrail on Slack app marketplace.
Polls Slack Apps
It's easy to ask a poll as a question and get an emoji response but if you want to go further there are other apps out there that can help you be more precise.
Simple Poll
“What is your preferred JS framework?” “Where should we have lunch?” Create polls in seconds with Simple Poll. Easily collect your team’s preferences and know how your team is feeling with this integration.
Simple on Slack app marketplace
Typeform
With Slack app, receive all your respondents' answers in Slack as soon as they’re sent! Collect them in specific channels and start collaborating with your colleagues without leaving your app.
Typeform on Slack app marketplaceScreenshot
Data Visualizer:
New Relic
With New Relic Proactive Detection, anomalies from your APM-monitored applications will surface in their activity streams and anomalies feed. You will be able to create an automatic analysis of these anomalies and receive notifications from Slack directly.
New relic on Slack app marketplace.
CRM + Customers
Hubspot
With the Hubspot Slack integration, you are able to query any source of information from your CRM, create tasks/tickets and change specific information regarding your customers. A chat feature is available to answer to your users right from Slack as well.
Hubspot on Slack app marketplace.
People Management Platform
Café
Café on Slack app marketplace. COVID forced everyone to work from home and it made collaboration hard. Café knows teams need to meet but it’s a real struggle. Their real-time flex agenda is designed for teams that mix Office and Remote work.
Donut
With Donuts, discover new rituals for your team that foster camaraderie, collaboration, and community. You can organize random coffees, schedule meetings to have a water cooler chats with your colleagues, and create bonds between coworkers, no matter whether they’re in-office or working remotely.
Donut on Slack app marketplace.
Cloud Hosting
Heroku ChatOps
Heroku ChatOps enables you to deploy code, and get CI tests directly within Slack. Stay on top of your Heroku app’s status without jumping from one site to another.
Command output is organized into threads for easier readability, with app details like who performed the operation, the Github repo, hash, and task duration. If you need to further investigate, the app will link you to your dashboard, where additional details and configurations will be available.
Heroku on Slack app marketplace. Screenshot
AWS Chatbot
AWS Chatbot is an interactive agent that simplifies monitoring and interacting with your AWS resources in your Slack channels and Amazon Chime chat spaces. AWS Chatbot allows you to receive alerts, execute commands to return diagnostic information, call AWS Lambda functions, and create AWS support cases.
Awsome
Awsome enables simple, easy and quick management of Amazon Web Services EC2 instances directly from Slack. You can start using Awsome features with the `/awsome` Slack command. Awsome simplifies the process of: - starting AWS EC2 instances - stopping AWS EC2 instances - checking AWS EC2 instances status.
Also check out: Top 5 GitHub pull request Slack Integration and the Top 4 GitHub Action Slack integrations.
