Slack is one of the most popular tools to connect and organize communication within your company. With over 10 million active daily users, this software tool is used widely (and wildly) by remote companies and ones that have a physical office.
Over the past few years Slack has become robust and allowed for integrations with other platforms that you might be already using. Thanks to useful and fun integrations that have been built on top of it, you can now improve how people in your company communicate with 3rd party solutions.
What are Slack Applications?
Slack integrations are software tools that can be integrated into your Slack workspace to expand on top of the functionalities that are available natively. Those are developed by 3rd parties and some of the most popular software tools on the internet have Slack integrations that can make your work more efficient and quick.
How did we organize this collection of Slack applications?
Just like in the normal software world, there is an entire spectrum of Slack Apps that are designed and created for different purposes. From fun to productivity, we divided them into several categories.
Team Culture. Our favorite apps that can help you foster collaborative team culture & boost employee engagement.
Social & Fun. All the weird and fun integrations that bring smiles to your peer's faces daily :)
Productivity & Project Management. Integrations that help you work more quickly and efficiently.
Design. UI / UX design tools that can be connected with Slack.
Analytics. Slack Apps that help you view reports, surveys and any important data that you might want to see immediately.
Scrum. Apps that help you manage your weekly scrum process, sprints and daily standups!
Best Team Culture Slack Applications
1. flat.social: best for creative online meetings & fun virtual happy hours
With flat.social you can put all of your internal company events on autopilot.
Each event will be hosted within a 2D virtual space where each attendee can move places and talk with others around.
Apart from the standalone functionality, Slack integration allows you to start a meeting with just one single slash command. You can also set up weekly recurring events (Wednesday Lunch Breaks, Friday Happy Hours etc.) and flat.social Slack integration will take care of notifying everyone within the channel that you have chosen.
2. SimplePoll: polling made simple!
Simple poll is the most popular Slack application for running polls and surveys straight from your workspace. It's used by over 680k teams! It's simple to install and a no-brainer to use.
2. Disco: celebrate individual and collective achievements with kudos
Disco is a platform that allows your team to celebrate achievements and foster team appreciation. While there is no actual dancing involved, there is no friction in setting it up and the app is pleasant and entertaining to use.
Best Slack Apps for Productivity & Project Management
1. ClickUp: easy project management
ClickUp is a highly customizable cloud-based tool for project management. It offers team collaboration, status alerts, product updates and task-setting functionalities. Its flexibility, clear interface and the just-right amount of Swiss Army knife features make it one of the leading project management software tools in the market.
ClickUp's slack integration allows you to add and edit tasks directly from Slack. It can also quickly turn messages into tasks and send you notifications into the Slack channel of your choice.
2. LucidChart: create diagrams & sketches
Lucidchart is an excellent tool for creating diagrams and sketching things out quickly. It has a well-stocked library of templates, objects to get you started quickly. There are also multiple options for exporting and presenting diagrams. It's simple, easy to learn and doesn't require any special design skills to get that new software architecture diagram into your presentation!
LucidChart's slack integration allows you to share diagrams directly into Slack channels, and receive notifications about new documents, comments and requests. Creating a new LucidChart diagram is as simple as using one single slash command!
3. Notion: customizable & collaborative workspace
Notion is a cloud-based application that's so flexible, it's actually quite hard to describe it in one paragraph. It describes itself as an all-in-one workspace for notes, wikis, project management and collaboration. For us, it feels like a wiki, can be organized like a database and also serves as an excellent note-taking tool.
We use notion at flat.social to keep track of the tasks, organize backlog and ideas and also as a CMS for some of our static data - notion can be also accessed programmatically via an API!
Notion's Slack integration allows users to receive notifications anytime a change or comment is made in a Notion page.
Best Slack Apps For Design
1. Figma: real-time design collaboration
Figma is one of the most popular UI/UX design tools. It's available on Windows, macOS and can also be accessed as a web application. One of the best aspects of Figma is the real-time collaboration. Multiple people can work on the same design at the same time and the interactive cursors show where the other person is currently at. The collaboration feature is especially useful for those who work remotely and don't have a physical office where they sit together on a design review.
With Figma integration in Slack, you can view comments you've been mentioned in, get feedback and customize Slack channels with updates on specific projects and teams. The integration mostly acts as a notification system to keep everyone updated on the current work that is being done within the Figma projects.
2. Miro: collaborative whiteboard
Miro allows you to turn a blank online canvas into something more by providing an entire spectrum of collaborative tools to fill it. It's a mixture of a several types of software in one package. Partly, it's used for diagramming and flowcharts but it can also be used for creating presentations and mind maps. Ah, there is a videoconferencing in there too.
Miros' Slack integration does a lot of things. You can manage boards, contribute to them and receive notifications about new comments and mentions. New boards can be also created directly from a Slack channel.
Best Slack Apps for Analytics
1. Sentry: real-time code health monitoring
Wanna give your developers a heart attack? Connect Sentry to Slack! Make sure to tag them all :) Whenever one of your users has an app crashing, you they will know immediatelly.
Sentry is the first choice when it comes to monitoring potential problems that are happening in web and mobile application. Integrating Sentry is an easy task and the amount of visibility into the code health that developers' get is incredibly helpful.
Make your remote team feel like a team again
Despite the lack of a physical office, a distributed team should have fun too.
Over the past year we've been working on flat.social - an online platform for virtual meetings which are fun, playful and creative. It's to ZOOM what a cocktail party is to a business presentation.
