Traditional daily standups have been in place for quite a while. But lately, Slack daily standup bots seem to be the talk of a lot of towns. And for the right reasons. What are the reasons exactly?
First, Slack is a user-friendly platform. This means it is easy for team members to participate in daily standups in Slack with minimal guidance.
Second, Slack daily standup bots easily integrate with Slack, which most organizations already use. This integration makes it convenient for them to have daily standups without needing to switch to a different tool or platform.
Third, the responses to standups conducted using standup bots in Slack are accessible to the entire team. This means they can view the responses any time they want and be accurately informed about each other's progress.
These are all important reasons why Slack daily standup bots seem to be dominating the daily standup scene today.
Now, don’t you think trying out a free Slack standup bot would be a great idea to explore these benefits for your team? As your team grows, you might just decide to upgrade to the paid plans of these free standup bots.
So, get ready for Slack's most popular bots.
1. Sup Bot
The first on our list with a rating of 4.9 on Capterra is Sup Bot. Sup, a robust asynchronous standup Slack or Teams bot, is feature-rich and versatile. It offers its Pro features at a flat rate of $19 per month, and its Premium features at $29 per month. You can find more details here. Let’s now catch up with its range of features.
Add to Slack
Add to Teams
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Sup allows you a choice between interaction types for your standups: dialog, and chat-based.
So, if you're looking for the right standup format for your team, you can choose between a form-like format where all the questions are listed or a conversational standup where they can format their responses. Either way, they can easily submit their answers using Sup.
b) Access control
Using the stated feature, you can restrict and add users who have access to creating and managing standups.
If the above toggle is turned off, anyone on your team can create standups for the team. However, if this toggle is turned on, you can restrict who can create standups and add only those users who you think should be granted access to do the same.
Additionally, you can also restrict access at the follow-up level. You can choose if everyone, or follow-up members, or only you have access to view and edit the follow-up, as shown below.
c) Custom timezone
Sup also allows you to set a different timezone for your follow-up than the default workspace timezone using the custom timezone feature. It allows you the freedom to do this at multiple levels: the workspace level, the follow-up level, and even the user level.
d) Data and analytics
Sup, among other offerings, also shares important insights about your team. Under its stats section, you can view the team member who feels most accountable for their work, the day that you can expect your team to be most productive, and the day you can expect a slack in their work, among other insights.
To offer you statistics tailored to your needs, Sup also allows you to request a custom stat for your standups.
e) Customizations
Sup also offers you a number of customizations to create a standup as per your requirements.
It allows you to run asynchronous standups on Slack with the freedom to tailor your standup questions. What exactly does it offer? The ability to:
- Edit your questions.
- Add or remove questions.
- Reorder your questions.
- Make questions mandatory to answer.
In addition to these, you can also select the answer type as text, number, options, date, or user, as shown above.
You also get to have a pre-submission as well as a post-submission message for your stand-ups, as shown below. You can even choose to disable the post-submission message.
f) Custom reminders
An important offering: Sup allows you to send a custom reminder. What are they? Custom reminders are different from scheduled reminders in the sense that you can manually send reminders to your team members right when you want them to submit the standup answers. So, you don’t have to wait for your team members to receive an automated reminder and then respond to the standup.
In addition to the above, you can also customise reminders to send them a specific number of times after a specific duration of time, as shown below.
g) Mood tracking
You can understand how your team is feeling by using the mood-tracking feature on the standups. What does it do?
- It receives mood responses anonymously, so your team members can answer how they are truly feeling without the fear of being judged.
- It shares a mood score out of 5 with an indicative emoticon on the daily standup summary on Slack.
- It provides you with a weekly mood summary on the last working day of each week on Slack.
- It offers a graphical representation of the average mood over time for the current week, the past week, the current month, and even the past month on the Sup dashboard.
These allow you to get a deeper understanding of your team’s mood and help you make decisions regarding the right day to start a project and the right day to have a team-building session.
h) Disabled stand-ups on holidays
Sup, along with its follow-ups, comes with other core features as well. One of them is its holiday management feature. Combining these two core features, it disables all its stand-ups on approved holidays of individual team members and all public holidays.
2. Simple Poll
The second app on our list is Simple Poll. As its name suggests, it's quite simple to use. With a Capterra rating of 4.7, it charges you $49 per month for its premium features for a team of up to 24 members.
Simple Poll comes with a standup template with one standup question. You can also find response types to customize your questions the way you want to. It also provides you with the ability to edit the question right on Slack.
Additionally, Simple Poll allows you to send scheduled reminders and make responses anonymous.
It has a poll that focuses on mood tracking, although it does not have a mood-tracking feature incorporated right into its standups.
3. Standuply
Another great option for your Slack daily standup bots is Standuply. With a rating of 4.7 on Capterra, Standuply comes at a price of $1.5 per month per user for its Team package and $3.5 per month per user for its Business package.
In addition to conducting asynchronous text standups, you can also conduct asynchronous audio and video standups on Standuply. But if you are looking for the easiest and most non-intrusive way, asynchronous text standups are the way to go.
Standuply also comes with ready-to-use standup templates and allows you to customize your standup questions.
4. Daily Bot
Daily Bot, the fourth tool on our list, is rated 4.8 on Capterra. It demands $2.10 per month per user for its Essentials Package and $3.60 per month per user for its Advanced Package.
It has a mood-tracking feature integrated with its standups, although you can only activate it if you have at least three participants in the standup.
Another great feature of this standup tool is that you can schedule the standups in user timezones.
5. Polly
The last Slack daily standup bot on our list with a Capterra rating of 4.6 is Polly. You will need to pay $2 per month per user if you decide to upgrade to its Team Package.
It conducts standups on Slack in a dialog box format. It offers scheduled reminders but falls short if we talk about custom reminders. With its short polls, it also offers remote pulse check-ins.
The best thing about Polly is that it allows you to access admin settings for your standups right on the Slack messaging platform.
All said and done
It is your budget and your team's needs that determine which Slack daily standup bot will be the best for you. This article only attempted to offer you a better look at options that fulfil your needs and the price you would have to pay for them. Now it is your task to go over the whiteboard and list the features your team needs from a stand-up bot. Next, go over this article and find the one that suits your team the best.
