In this post, we’ll take a look at some of these powerful integrations and how you can use them to be more productive at work, while sprinkling in some fun.
We’ve broken them out to 10 categories, each with an accompanying suggestion(s) of apps that wonderfully enhance the Slack platform.
Continue reading, or jump ahead using these links:
Slack Integrations make an already powerful chat platform even better. Let’s explore!
About Slack Integrations
Much like Chrome’s Extensions and Gmail’s Add-ons, Slack integrations are applications that work inside of Slack, offering connections to popular software solutions that assist in your workflow.
Using other programs in conjunction with Slack simplifies tasks by unifying features and content from many different platforms. This saves a good deal of time (by not having to log into additional programs every time you want to use them), and lightens your resources (by not having to have a multitude of other programs open separately).
Slack integrations also make your work environment more collaborative, which improves productivity. That means getting things done will be faster and easier.
Do note that App permissions in Slack are set up independently by individual companies. That means installing/using certain apps may require permission/approval from the person or department that oversees your workspace environment. Additionally, Slack has different pricing tiers, so not all features are available in every plan.
Slack Essentials
Slack has a rich collection of features―Chat, Search, User Groups, Audio & Video calling, and Third Party Integrations (aka Apps)―just to name a few.
Chat is of course the main component and primary driver of Slack. You can send instant messages to public channels, private groups, or individuals, in a smartly designed ecosystem that offers a great deal of customization and flexibility.
Search enables you to quickly and easily find chats, messages, and any information in the history of your channels that you need to gain access to.
User groups enable you to send messages to select multiple people―by job title, physical office location, department―or however else your company chooses to designate teams within Slack. Essentially, they are members in a workspace who often need to be notified at the same time.
You can mention a group’s unique name—for example, @managers—the same way you @mention an individual member of your workspace.
If you don’t see the option to create or edit user groups, it means your Admin has limited the access to this feature. Read here for more information on user groups.
Audio & Video calling can also be done through Slack, and in a number of ways. Calls allow making a voice or video call to connect with anyone in your workspace.
Huddles (calls’ hip new neighbor) are more informal, and can be made in any channel or direct message. Huddles also allow screen sharing with your team.
There is a lot of documentation available on all aspects of using Slack… a Help Center, video tutorials, Blog articles, and forums. If you’re new to Slack, this detailed guide on getting started in Slack is a good place to begin.
Third Party Integrations (Apps) are arguably the most powerful feature in Slack. These provide the ability to connect to/integrate with other services that your team uses on a regular basis, and will be the focus of the rest of this article.
WordPress + Slack
Before we look at a number of useful integrations, let’s start with an essential one for you: WordPress + Slack.
This integration posts WordPress notifications to your Slack channels and facilitates better communication and collaboration within your team. It’s helpful for improving your workflow, particularly if you have a multi-author site or a remote team.
Click here for more on integrating WordPress with Slack.
Now let’s take a look at some other integrations that could supercharge your team’s productivity.
App Integrations by Category
1. Calendar
Because most businesses run with one eye always on the calendar, Slack came up with a way to further automate workflow by adding integration for calendars. There are quite a few of these, including Outlook, but we’re enamored with Google Calendar. If you’re on Slack and currently using Google Calendar, this integration could greatly boost your productivity.
Google Calendar’s integration enables you to post any calendar event to your Slack channels. You can also add upcoming project deadline reminders and calendar summaries from your Google Calendar, to the appropriate team channels.
What’s more, you can automatically post your company’s birthday or holiday calendars to the whole team, and share celebratory messages with timing that works best for each individual.
This integration will do wonders for your productivity and team spirit. You can even serve 🎂 cake! (And the last one to the party won’t get the wilting corner piece.)
Click here for more on integrating Google Calendar with Slack.
2. Social Media Accounts
Many companies are using Twitter to communicate and quickly respond to their clients and customers. As a developer, you may be tweeting responses to support questions and feature requests. Slack will organize and make this social communication a lot easier for you.
The Twitter integration will post tweets at you, about you, or anything you’re interested in, to a Slack channel. This way you can track every mention and communicate with your team (within Slack) about the best way to respond. Use it for both customer and team communications.
Click here for more on integrating Twitter with Slack.
3. RSS
You probably subscribe to several WordPress and web development RSS feeds and receive real-time company or product mentions.
Worknews.io is an RSS news filtering app for business users and teams, with fine tune controls managed by you.
With Worknews.io, you can create news and Twitter searches and have the results delivered as a feed (with headlines and article links) directly to your Slack. The time, day, and channel of your refined news alert will be on the schedule of your choosing.
For efficiency, one person can set up and manage the news alerts, and all team members can see the news coming in, without having to set it up themselves.
This integration facilitates organization, team communication, and productivity.
Click here for more on integrating Worknews.io with Slack.
4. Code Management
Call it a good guess that you’re using some code management services, such as GitHub, Hubot, and/or Codeship.
Highly popular GitHub is the ultimate source code library. The good news is you can get way more organized and productive on your coding projects by integrating GitHub + Slack. This integration will post updates to slack channels for your commits, pull requests, and issues.
Click here for more on integrating GitHub with Slack.
Hubot + Slack is another great integration. Once connected to Slack, you can use it for almost everything―alerts, polls, and anything fun and spontaneous―such as taking a poll on the venue for the next holiday party.
This integration will streamline your workflow and inject more creativity into your work day.
Click here for more on integrating Hubot with Slack.
Codeship, the simple productivity platform for software teams, can now be integrated with Slack. All development notifications are sent to Slack channels to keep everyone on your team up-to-date on who is doing what, and which builds succeeded or failed.
Click here for more on integrating Codeship with Slack.
5. Project Management
Slack streamlines the project management services your teams use on a daily basis. Here are a few key integrations that improve communication and collaboration.
Trello is one of the most popular integrations to Slack. You can use it to organize and manage project tasks for your team, or for your own personal use. Either way, this integration will help you keep track of changes on cards when you’re working on a large project or in a big team.
You can stay current on key changes that need to be addressed, and keep communication relevant by attaching and linking cards to relevant conversations. It’s a tight integration for better communication and more efficient project management.
Click here for more on integrating Trello with Slack.
Asana is another powerful project management tool you may be using. Integrated with Slack, Asana will notify specific channels when a task is created, completed or receives a comment. You can also create and send task status reports or comments to relevant channels.
Click here for more on integrating Asana with Slack.
JIRA is a project management service specifically designed for software development teams. The integration with Slack essentially provides similar features as Asana: you can keep your team organized by having all updates, conversations, and information in one place.
Click here for more on integrating JIRA with Slack.
6. File Sharing
File sharing can be easy―yes, easy―with the Google Drive + Slack integration. This particular integration is actually the most popular on Slack.
It’s a breeze to use. Simply copy and paste a Google Doc URL in a channel chatbox. Slack will provide additional link information to everyone in the channel. Your team can easily collaborate with an organized file sharing system.
Click here for more on integrating Google Drive with Slack.
Dropbox is another file sharing cloud system you’re probably using. Similar to the integration with Google Drive, Slack will create a preview of any file link you paste to make it easier and faster for everyone in your channels to pull up, save, or re-share the file.
Click here for more on integrating Dropbox with Slack.
Box is another popular file sharing system that teams are using, and works similarly to both Google Drive and Dropbox integrations.
Click here for more on integrating Box with Slack.
7. Communication
Google Chat (aka Google Hangouts and Hangouts Chat), also makes for a powerful integration with Slack.
This integration accelerates team conversations and facilitates cross team collaboration. You can quickly create and attend a chat/hangout directly from a Slack channel. A number of teams from various industries are using this integration to communicate and collaborate more effectively.
Click here for more on integrating Google Chat with Slack.
Intercom tracks how your customers are interacting with your products. If you’re using Intercom, consider integrating it with Slack to easily stay on top of conversations with your clients or customers.
Integrating Intercom with Slack sends updates to a channel when you receive new messages, a team member or user replies to a message, new users are created, notes are added to a conversation, or when conversations are assigned. Respond to leads super fast from the app you already have open all day.
Everything is well structured and organized in a single platform to make communication with your users much easier.
Click here for more on integrating Intercom with Slack.
The GoToMeeting integration enables you to start and attend a call or video meeting right in a Slack channel, just like it does with Google Chat. It facilitates fast and easy communication.
Click here for more on integrating GoToMeeting with Slack.
8. Customer Support
Your customers and clients mean everything to you. Here are some Slack integrations that enable you to provide the best support to them.
Help Scout integration allows you to post events from Help Scout (new chat received, new conversations, customer replies, etc) instantly to the channel or person of your choice. You can even map different mailboxes to different channels. Each event will have a link to the conversation in question and an @mention of the person assigned when possible.
This integration enables faster response times to your customers and more efficient management of support tickets.
Click here for more on integrating Help Scout with Slack.
Zendesk is another customer support app that posts notifications on support ticket statuses when integrated with Slack. This integration posts notifications to your Slack channels when support tickets have been updated.
Click here for more on integrating Zendesk with Slack.
9. Marketing
Integrate MailChimp to receive subscription notifications and marketing campaign statuses, as well as emails opened, links clicked, new customers, new orders, and more. You can also create campaigns and custom events, and find or create subscribers.
It’s even possible to include additional MailChimp tools to the Slack integration, for example: get direct messages in Slack about Perfect Tense (spelling and grammar errors) in your Mailchimp campaigns.
Click here for more on integrating Mailchimp with Slack.
The Autopilot integration is quite a powerful marketing integration. Autopilot provides you with detailed sales & marketing analytics, and everything you need to know about your customer’s journey and interaction with you. The Slack integration notifies your team of key metrics and actions as they happen.
The integration will post notifications to your channels regarding sign ups so your team can collaborate on helping new users get started on using your product. You can also search through Slack to find out how specific users came to sign up or purchase your product.
This integration will keep your marketing and support teams organized and in sync. It can also optimize your marketing efforts and strategies in that everything you need to know is now stored and easy to find in a single platform.
Click here for more on integrating Autopilot with Slack.
10. Analytics and Performance
If you’re using GoSquared to track traffic metrics on your site, the GoSquared integration could help you analyze and respond to any important changes to your website.
After integrating GoSquared, you will receive a notification whenever the total number of visitors to your site is higher or lower than your specified threshold. With this information, you can quickly respond to the high peak of traffic, and identify any potential issues that may cause your site to crash.
Click here for more on integrating GoSquared with Slack.
Another great web analytics and diagnostics tool is Pingdom. With the Slack integration, you can quickly respond to metrics that are important to the health of your site. Communicate and collaborate in real time with your team to identify and resolve any issues.
Click here for more on integrating Pingdom with Slack.
When Slack(ing) Pays Off
Slack is a highly useful platform, combining a smart-looking UI with a hearty repertoire of easy to use features baked in. You can chat live, send pictures and files, make calls (audio or video), search and/or bookmark comments, get reminders (for meetings or specific tasks), and create as many channels as benefits your company. And this is really just scratching the surface.
Add to that existing functionality the ability to connect directly with over two-thousand (and growing) additional software and service apps, and you’ve got an extremely valuable tool at your disposal.
Slack’s many integrations allow you to boost your productivity by communicating and collaborating with your team in real time about everything you do. Integrating the services your teams use on a daily basis in a single platform has real potential for saving you time and money. It can also provide a much needed and appreciated avenue for creativity and a little lighthearted fun in your workplace.
And let’s face it… the happier and better informed your individual employees are, the more productive your company can be as a whole.
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy.
[Originally Published: November 2015 / Revised: November 2021]
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