9 State-of-the-Art Slack Integrations That Can Bring Your Team Together

There are numerous team messaging platforms on the Internet, but Slack has become a go-to for many people. Its user-friendly design and virtually unlimited functionality are just two of the perks you’ll enjoy by using it.

Since Slack has become such a hit in the digital world (see GIF below how they grow), people harnessed its potential and started creating all sorts of interesting add-ons for it.

Currently, their app directory has 18 categories and lists over 1000 apps. So, it’s obvious that integrations are of huge importance for them, as they even created their own $80M fund for the teams that want to build Slack integrations.

For this reason, a team can do a fantastic array of things with Slack, and this is probably just the beginning.

I am pretty sure you are well familiar with the most common integrations – like GDrive to get notifications about files within Slack, Trello to collaborate on projects inside a chat room, or Zendesk to handle customer tickets even faster. These are the ones we could call “default” or “essential”.

But in view of their large number, it is sometimes difficult to notice and find something new and worthy. So, we decided to make a list of the most interesting and useful integrations (in our opinion) which you might not know. These are the integrations that can make your team more united than it ever was.

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Everhour is the top choice for small businesses and small to mid-size teams of 5 to 50 members, including professionals like software developers, marketers, designers, consultants, lawyers, you name it!

Seamlessly integrating with popular project management tools like Asana, Trello, and Jira, its user-friendly interface and customizable reports make it the ultimate time tracking solution for small and mid-size teams.

With dedicated support ensuring you receive timely assistance, our team is here to help you promptly and with a smile!

GrowthBot

The Sales Department of any company is determinative to its success on the market. If you’re not selling your products or services, the ROI will drop accordingly.  

If you’ve been acquainted with Cleverbot, an AI bot capable of talking to people in real-time, you will understand the concept of the GrowthBot a lot easier.  

The GrowthBot was created by the CTO/Founder of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah, and became an indispensable tool for marketers fairly quickly because it’s capable of providing crucial information about trends, keywords, and analytics.

The bot works by taking commands and answering questions. Among others, it can:

• Provide articles on any topic you are interested in
• Show what keywords a company is using
• The trends on any other company’s website
• The top posts of a site
• Provide general company info
• Show what software a company is fond of
• Grade various websites
• Provide info on the organic traffic of a website

How can it do all these? Simple – the GrowthBot connects to a plethora of marketing systems, Google Analytics inclusively. Once you’ve entered a command, it scours those systems and brings back the information you’ve required almost immediately.

This is a fantastic tool for the marketers in your company. They won’t need to spend as much time researching as they do now. With one press of a button, GrowthBot will collect all the data they need to make better marketing plans.

In other words, GrowthBot is as much of a time-management integration as it is an informative one. We think the GrowthBot will eventually serve as the blueprint for even better bots (that is not to say this one is not good).

Tettra

Tettra is a useful tool for two reasons: 1) it can teach your trainees and 2) it facilitates the flux of information between your employees.

What is it?

Basically, Tettra is an “internal” Wiki for your Slack team where documents can be uploaded so they can be read by everybody. Let’s suppose somebody is at a loss when it comes to the process of updating a website.

Instead of bugging you, they go on Tettra, enter the directory that contains such information, and learn from the guidelines in there. The information is echeloned into Categories, which makes it even easier for people to gain perspective on a certain topic in a shorter time.

If you have trainees in your company, you won’t need to spend as much time trying to explain things to them. Just tell them to access certain directories on Tettra and you’ll be all set.

Of course, this does not remove your involvement completely, or at least it shouldn’t. It’s very important you take an active interest in training your new employees.

Just like GrowthBot, Tettra is simultaneously an informative and time-managing integration. The app is free for 15 days, so you can test it out without paying a dime. If you don’t find it as cool as it sounds like right now, you won’t lose anything.  

Everhour

Everhour is a time tracker that every business owner can use at leisure in order to make his/her employees work more efficiently.

The integration enables you to know whenever deadlines are missed, how much time each of your employees spends on a particular task, as well as see who is behind the schedule.

The app uses a timer, so you will get the precise number of seconds, minutes, or (god forbid) hours that have been wasted in your company.

In the future, you’ll be able to compare times and see how much it would take someone to finish a project. Moreover, it allows you to see if someone in your team has evolved in his/her job or has just stagnated.

Everything can be exported as either an Excel file or PDF, therefore monthly reports will be a lot easier to make. Everhour can be integrated into Trello, Asana, Basecamp, Jira, Github, TeamWork Projects, and more.

Updown

Instead of paying some good money to web diagnosticians to see what’s wrong with your websites, you can use Updown and save yourself from an unnecessary expense. When this is integrated into Slack, you will receive notifications whenever your sites misbehave.

This can mean slowed responses, dysfunctional buttons, and links, errors when requests are made, and many others. You can receive all alerts as e-mails or SMS. After a performance check was done, you will get a list with the metrics.

By using Updown, you’ll avoid much graver problems that could require some very costly maintenance.

Marker

Marker is a screen-capture type of software that allows you to take screenshots and edit them with one click of a button. Most of us still do it the old-fashioned way, i.e. open Editor and do the editing there.

Marker works on a similar principle but it opens as fast as you’ve done a screenshot. Moreover, it does not save the files on your computer, so your desktop won’t be full of clutter. It sends all edited pictures to Slack.

This will be handy for emphasizing certain things in a picture or report.

Rubberduck

Privacy is essential to a business and all its employees. Unfortunately, common search engines do not ensure it. If you’re having issues with this, an integration like Rubberduck will serve you well.

This is simply a search engine that keeps no track whatsoever of your digital whereabouts. Whatever it is you’re searching for will stay between you and Rubberduck. It sounds a bit shady, but when you’re in business, you cannot be too cautious.

Rubberduck is considerably better than Google, which records pretty much everything you’re searching for on it. And of course, you can’t use Thor for a business because it doesn’t make any sense. Rubberduck cuts you some slack. Pun intended.

Slack Digest

I think we can all agree that scrolling through the Slack windows in order to see what was discussed the previous day is a boring chore. Thanks to this integration, you won’t need to do that ever again.

What Slack Digest does is take out vital information from all the Slack channels you might have in your company, compile a digest and send it straight to your inbox.

This way, when you come into work the next day, you open your inbox and start reading the digest. You won’t be missing out on any important piece of the discussion. You can also get the digest as a text message.

Editing the integration so it does its job properly takes a few minutes, and it implies you clicking from start to finish.

We recommend you use Slack Digest if there are double shifts in your company. Consequently, the employees that come in will be given the digest of what has been talked about until the first shift ended.

Each of your employees should be invited to Slack Digest. It really makes a huge difference. Just install the integration, set it up with the desired requirements, and hit “Get Digest Now.”

Slacker

The last integration on our list was designed for those times when your team needs to blow some steam. Maybe it pulled off a huge sale that took a lot of effort or perhaps they gave more than 100%.

It may sound a little odd, but Slacker can also be used to give some bad news with a pinch of humor. So, what is Slacker? A Slack integration that allows you to reply to messages as your favorite characters, from Hermione and Daenerys Targaryen to Darth Vader and Kanye West.

The integration comes with 50 default characters, but you can add more by hitting the “Add Character” button. It can be used with all teams, as well.

We mustn’t forget that sometimes a company cannot work without some fun built into it. It’s important to have a good time once in a while. And even if you must give bad news to somebody, Slacker will be of help.

For instance, use Bill Lumbergh to say “I’m going to need you to go ahead and come in tomorrow” and let an employee know he doesn’t have the day off. It’s less likely that he/she will be mad when a little fun is involved in the equation.  

Just make sure Slacker doesn’t become more important than work itself because you’ll have a problem then.

Trello

Going from desk to desk to see if a project is finished can be time-consuming. Why use Trello you may ask? Creating To-Do lists for everybody, too, takes a good chunk out of a team leader’s schedule.

Trello is the perfect solution to those problems. Instead of checking your employees “manually,” so to speak, you just add Trello to Slack and start managing the projects – both ongoing and finished – from there.

The integration provides boards and organizational cards and lists, but the best thing about it is that it shows them all to you in a slide-manner, i.e., a row of visual representations of the projects you need intelligence on.

To cut a long story short, Trello is nothing but a helpful and user-friendly project management add-on.

Trello is free which is yet another reason for you to start using it. It’ll save you a lot of nerves. In comparison with other project management integrations that might exist, Trello is incredibly easy to use.

It doesn’t require any special expertise. You just install it and browse through the projects.

Slack Integrations: How to Add?

It’s not rocket science, and this is probably one of the reasons why Slack has enjoyed such an unbelievable rise in popularity.

There are two ways to add an integration to your Slack. You can go to the Slack App Directory and search for something you need or click on the “Add to Slack” button that exists on each website with an app.

If you open a hyperlink enclosed in a blog post or article, for instance, a new tab will be opened. That’s the website of the integration. Just look for the “Add to Slack” button, and you’re all set. It doesn’t really get any easier than this.

Concluding Remarks

Slack is a fantastic platform that can make teams more consolidated than ever. It can be used by anybody and, with the help of Slack integrations like the ones above, it can be adjusted to serve various purposes besides its natural one.

Because it is so easy to use, Slack is picking up a lot of ground. In the future, companies may work solely with it. Obviously, there are many other similar facilitators of team communication, but none yet as feasible as this one.

We hope that the five integrations we’ve talked about briefly in this article were somewhat of a novelty to you and that they will come very in handy once the number of your employees goes higher than you would have expected it to.