Today, believe it or not, any project manager and team member can satisfy almost all their needs and even automate repetitive duties using Slack and the best Slack apps. There are thousands of Apps in the raw; however, you may find yourself a bit lost in a Slack integration list. Some are good enough and worth applying daily, but some look pretty valid but unpolished inside.
So what do we do now?
We are looking for a free and, at the same time, reliable Slack App for remote Project Management:
- Geekbot – asynchronous meetings
- Standuply – scrum processes automation
- Trello – team task management
- Todoist – task creation
- Revealbot – online marketing
- Freshdesk – customer support
- Arc Analytics – analytics and monitoring
- Disco – team motivation
- Timetastic – leave planning
- Lucidchart – mind maps
- TrackingTime – time tracking
We do believe you found your happy medium here.
Best Free Productivity Apps
We will describe some of the best Slack Apps mostly picked from our 100+ Best Slack Apps and Integrations list. These Slack tools underwent all kinds of product checks to ensure they’re top quality despite being free. The list consists of tools for different processes in project management for remote teams. Let’s go through their bullet points below.
1. Geekbot
Running meetings takes a lot of time from your time, and being remote and in different time zones can be a hassle to find the right team. More than 170k people use Geekbot to have fewer meetings while keeping everyone informed and happy.
Geekbot allows you to automate daily standups, retros, and more workflows right within Slack or Teams. It is trusted and used by companies like Gitlab, Github, Netflix & Zapier to stay highly effective.
Geekbot helps with:
- Continuous Improvement
- Daily Syncs
- Remote Collaboration
- Team Bonding
- Team Updates
- Team Well-being
Geekbot offers a free plan for teams of up to 10 members and a 30-day trial for bigger teams.
2. Standuply
Automation of repetitive processes with standup bots turns Slack into an efficiency powerhouse. Currently, high-performing Agile team members keep a standup bot up their sleeve (or in their Slack workspace). But there are already a lot of well-made Slack Standup bots designed purely for Slack, in particular, Standuply, which is doing its best to be among the best.
Standuply offers:
- Asynchronous standups & retro meetings and more Agile processes at employee time zone
- Agile charts calculation, report statistics in Slack channel
- Multi-admin access
Why has Standuply been considered the best Slack app? Because It is more than a basic Slack bot. Standuply is an all-in-App Tool that is loved by thousands of teams for its unique features.
3. Trello
Some of the most popular task trackers are already on the Slack productivity apps list. Therefore, we picked the most intuitive and user-friendly. We won’t say Trello is the king of its kind, but it is certainly one of the most used Tools.
Trello offers:
- Quickly create a task in Trello board from a message in Slack
- Join Trello boards
- Share information with your team and get feedback on a project by sending Trello cards
Anyway, whether you use Trello as a task tracker or any other service, it’s crucial to link it with Slack to keep your team communication and collaboration apps connected.
4. Todoist
Todoist is the best free Slack app integration to organize your small tasks for a workday. By the /todoist command, you create a new Todoist task within Slack messages. We can reasonably call Todoist a flexible Slack app since it is beneficial for absolutely any specialist.
Todoist offers:
- Create new tasks in the Slack message
- Add the date and time, labels, and the project name
- Delegate and complete tasks from the Slack account
Although Todoist advertises itself as a free Slack App and teams productivity tool, it includes paid plans with more features available.
5. Revealbot
Revealbot is an ad manager for Facebook and Instagram campaigns in Slack. The aim of the service is advertising optimization. You get alerts about changes in CTR and CPC, view your stats, or schedule reports inside Slack conversation. Also, the Revealbot Slack app can be used for Google Adwords as well.
Revealbot offers:
- Build automation
- Create complex Rules by grouping conditions with AND/OR operators
- Compare metric to metric over the same or different timeframes
Get alerts and custom reports right in Slack from Facebook ads and Insights, Instagram, Snapchat ads, Google ads, Google Sheets, YouTube, and Twitter. A free month’s trial is included.
6. Freshdesk
So, Freshdesk, by Freshworks, is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system that helps small and medium-sized enterprises organize and automate sales, marketing, and customer service workflows.
Freshdesk offers:
- Create and update tickets from Slack messages
- Post ticket notifications to relevant Slack channels automatically
- Deliver customer support in Slack direct message
Make it fast and easy to delight your customers and team members within Slack.
7. Arc Analytics
If your team uses Google Analytics and other metrics of Google Workspace, this Slack integration App will greatly save you time as you can receive all data in Slack. Arc Analytics is free and easy to use for anyone who needs to automate metrics sharing.
Arc Analytics offers:
- Pre-built and custom reports
- Flexible delivery
- Custom comparison ranges
Despite Google Analytics, this Slack App gives access to metrics from Google Ads, Google AdSense, Analytics 360, e-commerce, and more.
8. Disco
Disco is an excellent Slack integration to make it easy for employees to engage and reinforce team culture. Disco should be on a Tools list because remote teams usually struggle with a lack of engagement and motivation. So, Disco is an easy-to-use Slack app that helps employees to celebrate with each other inside the tool.
Disco offers:
- Kudos & value tagging
- Appreciation dashboard
- 10 key employee engagement drivers
All features are available for any Slack user in a free trial. However, Disco also provides paid plans for businesses and enterprises.
9. Timetastic
Timetastic is a simple but worthy Slack App for leave planning and absence tracking. A quick daily update to confirm who’s off work today saves the manager’s time. It can seem a trifle, although it affects project management greatly.
Timetastic offers:
- Leave requests and notifications
- Annual leave booking
- Google Calendar and Outlook365 for instant calendar updates
A free trial is also available with no credit card required.
10. Lucidchart
Lucidchart is a collaboration tool for creating flowcharts, mind maps, network diagrams, org charts, and mockups. With many features and the best Slack integrations, it has visuals to help you work effectively and discuss tasks and projects. Just type “/lucidchart” in a Slack channel to create a new diagram and invite team members to collaborate on projects. You can also share data directly with the Slack team from the Lucidchart Slack app.
Lucidchart offers:
- Create new Lucidchart documents with Slack Shortcuts
- Slack notifications for Lucidchart documents
- See preview thumbnails of Lucidchart documents in the Slack interface
The entire team benefits from intelligent diagramming as it makes it easier to create and plan projects.
11. TrackingTime
It’s a task-based time-tracking app that helps you manage projects, track working time, and measure a team’s progress. TrackingTime has several integrations with other services. You can track time and see your team’s stats right inside Slack.
TrackingTime offers:
- Start and stop tracking projects in Slack
- Flexible reporting engine
- Monitor your team’s workload
Be updated with your team’s projects, TrackingTime allows you to know which project each person is working on.
Conclusion
As you can see, many free tools are in the Slack app directory to automate and improve your task management. However, you should have noticed some overlap between these tools. You may find yourself distracted by too many notifications and Slack apps wanting your attention.
Today Agile remote teams tend to choose just a single all-in-one App they love and use daily in Slack or Microsoft Teams. So, the best solution is to make a choice for a collaboration tool that includes all project management processes your team wants to automate.
Interesting related article: “What is an Application/App?“