Slack Apps for Small and Growing Businesses
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When small or growing businesses want to find efficiencies in their daily operations, they turn to some of the top Slack apps for solutions.
As it happens, Slack is top of mind for a lot of newly formed organizations. These startups thrive because they are young and energetic, but also because they have the right tools at their disposal. Since its release in August of 2013, Slack has been on the desktops of nearly all startup founders, CTOs, or HR professionals. Indeed, there are over 8 million Slack users worldwide! These millions of users get to use and review the best Slack apps on a regular basis.
It would be a fallacy to say that Slack is simply a team communication and collaboration tool. With all of the available integrations, Slack is actually so much more. There are hundreds of applications that can perform a variety of useful functions on Slack.
A new user of Slack could easily start using integrations by checking out the Slack application directory. Yet, with so many apps to choose from, and so much marketing behind each one, how can you tell which are the best slack apps out there?
The following article will list some of the highest-rated best Slack apps out there. These cater to distinct team needs and are available at different price points. We will go into some detail about the functionality and the benefits of each of these top Slack integrations.
Vacation Tracker – Lets Your Teams Plan Their Leaves Right In Slack
Vacation Tracker is great because it is flexible and reliable. It’s the only Slack-integrated leave planning and tracking app you’ll ever need.
Vacation Tracker is truly a one-stop-shop for all of your vacation tracking needs.
Through this easy-to-use integration, you can keep a log of days off, whether planned holidays or unplanned sick days. Administrators can set their team’s Working Days. If your team is made up of part-time employees working only a few days a week, you can easily set that up. If your team is made up of full-time employees with set schedules, you can set that up as well!
What’s more, Administrators can program up to 25 different Leave Types, such as: Sick Days, Days allocated for conference attendance, Days of Remote Work, PTO, Paternity Leave, Jury Duty, and more. Vacation Tracker can accommodate even the lengthiest of leave policies.
Vacation Tracker is great for remote teams too. It’s got features geared towards teams collaborating in different countries, and across many time zones. For remote or collocated teams, Vacation Tracker offers weekly or daily out-of-office notifications. On the Administrator Dashboard, all current and upcoming leaves can be viewed at a glance.
For ease of use and for accurate tracking and reporting, try Vacation Tracker today. Your first 7 days are free with the no-strings-attached free trial.
Wonder – Helpful Reminders in Slack
Cut your forgetfulness and your panic attacks in half, with the help of Wonder!
Wonder is a reminder-setting tool that takes the form of a live chat. As a user, you get to talk in real-time to the app’s bot. You can tell the app to remember things for you, as the thoughts pop in and out of your head. The beauty of this tool is that it remembers information for you! When you need to revisit an idea or a reminder, you can simply pull it up. The app can also send you a reminder.
Wonder provides a messenger-style interface, where information can be dumped quickly and easily. The app can save important team information through a function called “memories”. It can bring up information you have asked it to remember in between different Slack conversations.
To be even more organized in your forgetfulness, Wonder offers a “Memories Dashboard”, to hold, update, and categories reminders for you. It really makes forgetting things fun and interactive!
nTask – The Best Slack Integration for Project Management
It’s no small feat to be named the best project management integration for Slack. Yet many users would agree that nTask is indeed one of the best Slack apps for startups.
What makes it so great? Firstly, its intuitiveness makes the app easy and fun to interact with. It allows users to manage projects in an intelligent way. Information and updates flow in a wonderfully designed way.
Indeed, nTask has helped many startups achieve successful project management through Slack. Consider nTask as a facilitator for all of your project management needs. This integration helps to manage project issues and risks. It assists in the planning and execution of professional meetings. Overall, it really offers a superior project management experience on Slack.
With nTask, teams can link and unlink project tasks with corresponding Slack channels at any time. They can also create meetings through nTask, where team members can review all the details of ongoing projects through Slack messages. This latter feature makes it perfect for remote teams as well.
Finally, project updates can quickly and easily be posted to Slack channels.
Time Doctor – Effective Time Tracking in Slack
Apps to track time are the bread and butter of any startup concerned with individual or team productivity.
Time Doctor is really a game-changer. It’s an online time tracking tool that measures the time spent on each task. It can even take screenshots and produce detailed reports of screen usage. Overall, it helps teams to carefully monitor their time spending (or wasting) patterns.
When it is integrated with Slack, Time Doctor allows managers to receive a notification whenever an employee starts working on a task. Then, once the task is completed, another update is sent via Slack. The app can also produce detailed reports about all task-related work. This is ideal for a manager of a remote team.
With this Slack integration, managers have access to an effective web-based time tracking solution right inside their regular Slack channels.
For more apps that are best suited for managers of remote teams, check out our blog post on this topic.
Dropbox – File Sharing and Cloud Storage Integration For Slack
File management is important for any organization. Although there are other options out there, Dropbox remains one of the most popular Slack integrations.
It keeps all user files in one centralized location and ensures safe data storage and retrieval. It also comes at a very reasonable monthly cost, affordable for any up-and-coming startup.
One great benefit of Dropbox is that it syncs with pretty much any device. Users can access files anywhere, anytime. Furthermore, it offers advanced security features for all of your sensitive files and information.
Teams can use the Dropbox add-on for Slack to allow for quick importing of Dropbox files into Slack. This integration permits the users to search for imported files directly in any channel. As well, it allows for instant file sharing, thereby saving precious time.
Statsbot – Easily Accessible Data Analytics in Slack
You can get more from your data analytics with Statsbot. Indeed, whether you’re a data geek, or have data phobia, this bot is one of the best Slack apps for your business.
Any database or Google Analytics account can be connected to Statsbot. Then, the bot can be programmed to send scheduled reports to the Slack channel of your choice. It’s an effective way to update your entire team on analytics that can impact their work.
Indeed, this bot automates what can sometimes be a time-consuming reporting process. With the Statsbot integration for Slack, you can get notifications for important updates in your database. You can schedule specific reports to monitor metrics at regular intervals.
This tool frequently makes the list whenever best Slack apps are discussed, because it is so instinctive and user-friendly.
That’s all for our short list of the best Slack apps for startups. For more tech ideas for startups or any type of growing business, check out the “Slack” section of our VT blog!
Kristina Ousmanova
Kristina recently left behind fast-paced life of Human Resource Business Consulting to freelance as a Content Writer. A regular Vacation Tracker contributor, she can be found working remotely from her home in Montreal, usually while eating a variety of snacks.
