MeetingsTop Slack Standup Bots for Daily Standups in 2023

With growing calls for asynchronous work and remote culture, Slack has become a company’s virtual watercooler: a communication hotspot for teams to meet and greet. While Slack has been traditionally used for driving workplace chats, the app offers much more to drive team agility and productivity. Of these resources, Slack bots are most sought-after, keeping in mind their utility to run: Kanban standups, retrospectives, team check-ins, async conversations, and much more. 

Running Standups with Slack Bots 

Daily standup meetings are a widely-adopted practice that helps teams to stay apprised of their team’s work efforts, bottlenecks, and roadmap progress. However, the world evolved further to invent async standups for distributed, remote, and hybrid teams. Eventually, the asynchronous standup format has become a preferred choice. The reasons are simple- team members can now provide their work updates at a time and pace convenient to them. 

A majority of these async standups are run on Slack Standup bots. With options to customize response documentation, schedule follow-up tasks, async check-ins, pulse check-ins; standup bots have become a necessity to distributed teams. An engineering manager can add the bot to the Slack channel, set up basic details, and start getting dedicated reports seamlessly. These bots can accommodate cross-team meetings and time zone differences as well. Companies love these Slack standup bots because they are affordable, easy to use, and effective. 

Usually, Slack standup bots have 4 main functions:

1. Host asynchronous standup meetings
2. Sprint progress tracking
3. Reduce friction and interruptions to workflows
4. Generate insights

With these, you can align teams, stay updated with work progress, plan future work processes (sprints), and ease workflows. The Slack standup bots below go beyond these basic functions to make team management less burdensome.

Top 5 Slack Standup Bots

Check below our pick of the top 5 Slack standup bots for your dev team along with a bonus tool. 

1. Hatica

Hatica provides automated check-ins through Slack, email, or the Hatica App to run daily standups. A comprehensive and holistic engineering analytics tool, Hatica provides automated reports delivered to your email or Slack that helps engineering managers get visibility into their dev team performance, progress, and challenges. On top of that, Hatica’s dashboards simplify git metrics, project insights, and collaboration analytics into actionable insights to boost engineering teams’ productivity.

Moreover, Hatica tilts towards creating qualitative check-ins with integrations across developer tools so all activities could be tracked and visualized at one place. Hatica’s Slack bot comes with the flexibility for team members to answer the standup at their own pace so they can engage in deep work without engaging in frequent meetings and context switching. In short, Hatica takes care of your Zoom fatigue with minimal meetings, more work cohesion, and on-point collaboration.

The bot is also connected with the standup dashboard where all team progress is updated along with deep visibility into an individual’s workday, their blockers and even well-being analysis through mood emoticons.

In a Nutshell, Why Hatica?

1. Identify blockers and track team health. 
2. Provides actionable reports that highlight gaps in the team workflows.
3. Customizable option for check-ins and questions. You can configure custom options for submitters/ viewers based on your need.
4. Specific metrics to generate custom reports that aim at data-driven insights to increase productivity. 
5. Fetch real-time work progress, goal-oriented tracking, and team health tracking.
6. Integration with Github, Gitlab, Azure DevOps, Zoom, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Jira, Asana, Trello, Harness, etc. to get the real-time updates in your Slack channels.
7. Brings data from all the integrated apps to generate enhanced reports related to the developer’s productivity. 

Pricing and Support

Hatica’s transparent pricing with monthly payment options serves companies of all sizes. The free Starter pack comes with most core features and is already a hit among startups. For larger teams, the Growth plan is priced at $15/month per team member. For larger organizations, Hatica offers customized plans since each team has a different pain-point. 

2. Standuply

Remote teams can use Standuply to streamline the exchange of vital information between team members. Its primary purpose is to help maintain an organized Q&A platform to provide high-quality answers and avoid repetitive questions. Experienced members of the team can answer either through video recording or by reaching out in person. The tool allows you to automatically send out surveys and collect the team member’s feedback via the text, audio or video channels. Managers can export all team responses via PDFs and even use Webhooks to transfer data/products. 

Standuply is ideal for organizing detailed meetings, including Poker planning, feedback conversations, and retrospectives. Small teams can use the free version of the tool.

Features

1. Standuply allows automation and flexibility for running daily standups and managing workflows. 
2. The reporting system has various unique insightful categorized and illustrated reports.
3. The bot is customizable to adapt to businesses’ needs and workstyle. The questions, reports, and integration are customizable to maximize functionality. API also opens the door for endless custom features. 
4. Standuply’s bot accommodates different time zones. The users can snooze or fill the async daily standup before time.  
5. Integration with JIRA, Trello, HubSpot, Asana, GitHub, etc., to run surveys seamlessly. 
6. It enables lively polls within Slack reports via additional requests. 

Pricing and Support

You just need to select the number of employees and functionality required. Upon this, Standuply recommends the plan apt for your team. It offers 4 different pricing plans:

3. Polly

Polly is a free standup bot with automation options for recurring tasks. It is not very customizable but hosts standup meetings efficiently. The bot management takes place on Slack and the web. Also, It enables multiple admins. However, the biggest downside of Polly is around its pricing, plus the product doesn’t run around standup bots exclusively. Polly’s added expenses can be owed to its dexterity with running helpdesk health, interview feedback and Slack adoption. However, for most team leads who are only looking for a Slack standup bot, Polly might not be a scalable solution. Use Polly if you have a use-case for multitude of surveys and frequent employee onboarding. 

Features

1. Custom templates catering to specific requirements. The personalization is limited to reports and polls. It has the option to run anonymous polls with partial control over settings. 
2. The team can reply only via voting or a text message format. 
3. The downside is availability of only Jira integration, also requiring a lot of steps to configure the functionality of adding tasks.

Pricing and Support

Polly chats support confines to a chat format that requires the user to fill out a feedback form. It has four pricing options:

4. Troopr

Troopr is another Slack standup bot that offers async process automation and 8 unique templates for the survey. The bot management takes place on the web and Slack with a user-friendly UI. However, the lack of customization options reduces functionality.

Features

1. A built-in Wiki system that automatically answers frequently asked questions in Slack itself. 
2. The bot is flexible regarding setting up questions and adjusts seamlessly to the local time zone. 
3. It accepts responses in text and emoji, limiting to 10 items.
4. Troopr provides a vacation calendar to track employee absences and support multiple admins.

Pricing and Support

It has a robust customer support system that offers chat, feedback form, and demo options. Pricing is complex and has certain loopholes. One needs to assess the needs and opt for an appropriate option carefully. See the Troopr pricing below: 

5. Kyber

Kyber is a free Slack standup bot that allows a team of 5 members or less to run async daily standup meetings for free. It enables standup meetings, polls, surveys, and message scheduling. Also, The companies can create micro apps by configuration and customization to handle specific use cases.

Features 

1. You can extract data across the channel to generate an insightful summary. 
2. It integrates with project management tools to assign, schedule, and track tasks. Channels act as kanban boards to easily track progress without leaving the app.
3. set reminders & personal agendas, automate and customize to enhance functionality. 

Pricing and Support

The customer support team is reachable only via the feedback form. The Kyber pricing plan has 3 options:

Bonus Tool: Dixi

Dixiapp is known for automating standup reports, schedule meetings across multiple time zones, and even informalize workplace conversations wherever required (for building team culture, well-being, and transparency). How Dixi stands out in the list is its additional attention to creating a healthy work environment through mood tracking, developer happiness, employee feedback, and impromptu team meetings- for smooth onboarding, jamming, and ice-breaking.

Navigating Dixi is equally simple- team leads just have to add channels, participants, work schedule, and questions- with frequent edits and multiple admins. Moreover, the report compilations are also automated- as soon as a response is logged, managers get an update notification. The best part is for the last- Dixi is a free Slack standup tool, so companies, irrespective of size can integrate it with their Slack account for smooth meetings. 

Final Words

Slack standup bot can make all communications efficient, be it asynchronous standups or a real-time meeting. From scheduling a cross-channel meeting to getting quick check-ins, a Slack standup bot has you covered. It keeps your sprints in check, updates work progress, reduces backlog, aligns teams, and keeps workflow healthy. 

If you want a bot that does much more than a basic standup bot, Hatica is what you are looking for. Hatica is a one-stop solution to manage your engineering teams. With multiple available integrations, Hatica ensures deep visibility for managers, and in turn sustainable productivity for each team member. Say goodbye to unproductive standups with Hatica and try Check-ins, for free.