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Table Of Contents

Slack Integrations You Won’t Be Able To Live Without

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Table Of Contents

With so many Slack integrations to choose from, how can you pick the right ones?

First of all, you need to assess your team’s needs. Second of all, you can read up on the apps that have become essential to other teams. The following article details the apps that we have been using on a daily basis. We can’t imagine working without these apps.

All kinds of teams are using Slack. And all kinds of teams have all kinds of needs. Therefore, we don’t claim that what has worked for us will certainly work for you. You have to try these Slack integrations for yourself to see how they fit in with your team’s Slack use.

Luckily, a lot of these integrations offer free trials or demos! So you have no excuse to not at least test them out. Enjoy!

Slack Integrations We Can’t Live Without

The following ten Slack integrations are part of our daily roster. These apps can all be found on the Slack App directory. 

1. Vacation Tracker

This HR Slack integration makes it easy to submit, approve, manage and view vacation requests.

Team members can book and manage their vacation requests through the Vacation Tracker Slack bot. There is no longer a need to remember another HR tool or login.

Moreover, it’s really easy for a team member to request a vacation, a day off, or a half-day. Users can activate the Slack app with the slash command “/vacation” in any channel. Only the user and his administrator or approver will be able to see the pending vacation request.

The Vacation Tracker chatbot will help your team plan upcoming holidays and will keep track of everything. Your team can also request sick days, conference days, and up to 24 individual leave types.

Whenever your team members request time off, your team administrators receive a notification in Slack, which allows them to approve or deny the request. They can also click to go to the dashboard to get an overview of all upcoming vacations before making their decision.

2. Trello

A great number of teams that use Slack also use Trello. With this Slack integration, teams can collaborate on their to-do lists without changing tabs.

This is also ideal for meetings, when you might want to assign teammates to tasks, add new comments to a card or change a due date.

To authorize Trello for Slack, type in /trello help and log in to your Trello account.

3. Giphy

We don’t know about you, but our work lives would be so much more boring if we didn’t have GIFs to add to our conversations.

With the Giphy Slack app, users can type in the slash command “/giphy” and any word or phrase to describe a mood or emotion. The app has GIFs for almost any word combination.

GIFs are great for remote teams, who don’t interact face to face and can’t see team members’ expressions. GIFs can also boost morale. They are a great way to discover your team member’s sense of humor.

4. Google Drive

Google Drive makes file sharing between teammates so much easier. If your company uses Google Drive, you will be able to drop your files directly into Slack.

To share, you simply paste the shareable link from Google Drive to Slack, and the file will be imported. If you haven’t yet connected your Google Drive to Slack, then what are you waiting for?

Just like with Tettra, file linked to Slack will be easily searchable.

5. Simple Poll

You can create basic polls right within Slack, with Simple Poll.

It’s a super user-friendly polling application. Anyone on your team can make polls and can respond. Figuring out which answers got the most votes takes seconds.

The Simple Polls app can be activated by a simple slash command. Users can type /poll “Poll question?” “Option1” “Option2” “Option3” for a poll to be created and sent out by the Simple Poll bot. No specific name will be linked to the poll to keep it anonymous.

The Simple Polls’ bot adds emoji numbers to the options so that your team can easily respond by clicking the numbered emoji of their preference.

6. Tettra

Tettra can help you share and to organize important company knowledge in an internal database.

Important team updates, policies, company news, and various document updates – all of these can be filed on Tettra. Your whole team can have easy access to all of your organization’s important documents in one place, as you continue to scale.

Its user-friendly design and features will help keep your team in the loop. For instance, let’s say an employee wanted to consult the organization’s time off policy. All they have to do is use a slash command to search all of the material stored on Tettra.

7. Troops

With Troops, your team can manage and get an overview of the sales pipeline inside of a Slack conversation.

Troops is a Slack integration that is specifically made for sales teams. Salespeople can manage, and report on their sales pipelines.

As we know, these teams are notoriously always on the road. With Troops, the whole staff can be updated on meetings with leads, potential deals, and close dates.

The tool’s bot is equipped with an artificial intelligence algorithm that notifies the sales personnel when tasks need to be acted upon or updated. These alerts are chat-based within Slack.

8. Marker

Marker can be an incredibly useful tool for QA people. This Chrome extension allows users to send annotated screenshots directly to Slack chats.

The process of taking screenshots of an issue, bug, or error message should not be so long as to deter someone from bringing it up. Marker simplifies this rather manual and tedious process.

Marker lets you take a screenshot, annotate it with letters, symbols, or emojis, and send it directly to a chat or team Slack channel. It also attaches the URL of the page from which the screenshot was taken, making it ultra-convenient to identify what needs fixing.

9. Statsbot

Statsbot allows you to get updates on certain specific metrics on-demand.

Especially, when you need a particular result quickly, without having to go through an entire sign-in process in a separate browser. This is a must-have tool for meetings.

Statsbot integrates with a few different analytics tools and monitors your metrics constantly. You can ask Statsbot about these metrics at any time right inside of Slack, by mentioning @Statsbot: followed by a data point you wish to keep track of.

10. Tomatobot

Named after the Pomodoro Technique, a productivity technique where you work for 25 minutes, followed by a five-minute break, this app helps to boost productivity.

Challenge yourself or your team members to see if this technique works for you. To begin using Tomatobot, put in the slash command /startwork. You will receive a message when it’s time to take a 5-minute break. To finish, use the command /completed.

How do we keep it simple, despite all of the available options?

You might not want to overwhelm your Slack app with a bunch of integrations. So you want to make sure you are selective about the Slack integrations that your team will be using on a daily basis.

In fact, you can see which apps and Slack integrations your team is currently using. In the Slack App directory, you can find the “Configure” button at the top right. You will get a list of the apps along with who’s added them and who has permission to use them.

Kristina Ousmanova
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.

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