Top 9 Slack Bots for a kickass workspace

While there are tons of incredibly helpful Slack Apps, this post is focused on Slack bots. Typically, a bot’s main job is to pull information from the outside world, and bring it into your workspace.

Slack bots bring CRM entries, new blog posts, incidents on production, new reviews or social media mentions, reminders and all sorts of other things into a Slack channel – public, private, or personal.

If you’re hoping to boost your Slack workspace with smart automations and relevant information, these 9 apps are a good place to start!

#1 Salesforce

It’s no secret that we’ve all grown a little impatient. When buyers want an answer, they want it fast. Chili Piper – a sales meeting booking solution – published a great piece going over the concept of speed to lead in detail.

Here are the highlights: the odds of qualifying a lead drop by 80% after 5 minutes (source), yet the average speed to lead in the B2B industry is 42 hours (source).

If you’re not getting swamped by hundreds of leads per hour, connecting your CRM to Slack can be a great way to increase your speed to lead, which directly leads to more sales.

Most CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot, or Pipedrive come with a Slack integration that can feed new leads to a specific channel, and let you define attribution rules to distribute leads fairly between sales reps. In most cases, the integration carries lots of other features, to improve your validation process, follow-up on deals, or just pull information from your CRM about a specific account or contact.

You could also consider connecting another third party if that’s more relevant to your funnel. For example, Clearbit comes with a pretty neat Slackbot, notifying you every time a new lead is created, with clearbit-enriched data.

Another example: lots of very small businesses use Typeform (or another no-code form builder) to capture leads on their website. Most of these solutions will come with a Slack integration to notify you every time a new form is submitted.

#2 PagerDuty

PagerDuty is a well known solution for ops and devops teams around the world. Their one-liner goes “Automate, orchestrate, and accelerate responses across your digital infrastructure”.

Basically, when something breaks, PagerDuty helps your teams communicate about it, and get it fixed. They integrate with over 700 apps (such as AWS, Zendesk, Datadog, …) to detect issues, and their Slack app allows you to

• Get notified any time a new incident is created
• View who is on call right now
• Easily create an incident from the Slack interface
• Escalate incidents and run automated responses
• And of course, interact with team members, with all the contextual information about the incident pulled into a Slack thread

Check out PagerDuty’s Slackbot

#3 RSS

RSS is one of the Slack apps developed by the Slack team themselves, and it’s both remarkably simple and powerful.

An RSS (for Really Simple Syndication) feed is an XML file that pretty much every website generates automatically, and that distributes any updates made to the site in real time.

The main use case is to get notified anytime a new post is published on a blog or media site.

Setting up the RSS Slackbot, you can pull every new post from a subset of websites into a Slack channel (#competitive-intelligence for example) which allows you to automatically share any significant update with the entire team.

It might generate a little bit of noise, so choose wisely what sources you pull content from. A simple RSS feed can be a great way to generate market knowledge and understanding across all teams in an organization.

#4 Reviewflowz

Reviewflowz is a review monitoring Slackbot, built by yours truly. We support pretty much any review platform, and send notifications to the Slack of your choice (#reviews for example) any time a new review is found.

You can define a custom link we’ll add to all notifications to send you directly to the review platform back-office to save time in replying, and you can set up rating or content filters if you’re getting lots of reviews and want to cut out some of the noise.

Sharing reviews on Slack doesn’t just make it operationally easier to handle reviews. It brings the words of your customers inside your workspace. If you make the reviews channel public, everyone on your team can read them, understand your customers’ pain points, frustrations, and where your solution brings value, and discuss solutions directly in a Slack thread.

Our premium plan also allows you to track competitor reviews, which is a great way to find differentiation opportunities, and gain a deeper understanding of the market.

You can try it free for 14 days, and paid options start at just $10 / mo.

#5 Syften

Syften is a social monitoring service, focusing on specific social media platforms like Twitter, Reddit, Hacker news, Quora, etc

If these platforms are instrumental to your business, Syften is definitely a must have. They offer very powerful and detailed filters, allowing you to cut through the noise and get relevant notifications only on your favorite Slack channel.

A word on Twitter: You might know they recently pumped the API prices, causing tons of twitter apps to shut down. Reddit announced the same thing recently with over 8000 subreddits going dark, pretty epic stuff. At the time of writing, Syften still supports Twitter, but it’s worth double checking if that’s the main reason for setting it up.

Paid options start from $20 / month, and you can get started on a free trial

#6 Vacation Tracker

Vacation Tracker helps teams keep track of who’s on leave at what time. Team members can request leave straight from the Slack app, managers can approve or deny requests, and the whole team can get notified daily or weekly of who’s in and who isn’t.

The app also synchronizes with calendar apps like G Suite & Microsoft Outlook to ensure your calendar stays updated when your leave is approved.

Prices start at $1 / user / month, with a minimum of 25 users, and you can try it free for 7 days.

#7 Spendesk

Spendesk is a spend management software solution. It allows anyone on your team to request a virtual credit card to their manager, and to use that virtual card to buy things. They support recurring payments and one-off payments, and they help with receipt collection to avoid burdening your finance team.

Hardly an issue for very small teams, but as businesses scale, spending definitely becomes a major pain point, and poor processes can slow down projects significantly.

The cool thing about their Slackbot is it will chase down a receipt for every payment directly on Slack, and in a fairly convenient way. As someone who used to signup on 15 different free trials and 3 paid plans every day when running experiments, it really helped!

But the part I really love about their integration with Slack isn’t actually the bot part, it’s the approval process. Getting a payment approved every time you want to sign up for a free trial gets a little painful, and as a manager, getting a Slack message telling me to go check my emails for a request and approve it every other day got a little tiring. Bringing the approval directly on Slack made it all a lot easier.

Spendesk isn’t exactly cheap, but they do not charge per seat and the Slack integration is available from their first plan (Starter). If spending is becoming a pain point, it might be worth reaching out!

#8 Stripe

This one is more of an indie hacker thing I think, as I’d imagine it gets a little noisy for established businesses, but I found the Stripe integration with Slack to be remarkably useful.

Who doesn’t love that new payment notification?

But the most useful bit is actually for failed payments or subscription cancellations. It allows me to stay up to date with every issue, and with the communications that are automatically sent to our users.

Check out Stripe’s Slack App

#9 Zapier

Zapier is sort of the catch-all Slackbot. The cool thing about Zapier is you can set triggers to send a Slack notification from pretty much every service you can think of. Without code or technical knowledge.

Nothing really fancy to mention here, apart from the fact it’s definitely a must have.

An alternative worth considering is Make.com, they’re not nearly as widely used as Zapier, but significantly cheaper, and I have a strong personal preference for their scenario builder over Zapier’s.

Check out Zapier’s Slack App