8 Best Slack Reminder Bots for Your Workspace
In this day and age, work-oriented platforms like Slack are essential for staying in tune with your team members and colleagues. It’s gotten to a point where much of your documentation and onboarding are done on Slack.
To supplement your Workspace and optimize it, you need to employ some bots to streamline the process, keep track of regular tasks and ddls. One good example is Slack reminder bots which can help you and your team stay on track and on the same page with deadlines and submissions.
So in this post, we’re checking out 8 of the best Slack reminder bots for your Workspace!
1: What Are Slack Reminder Bots?
Slack reminder bots are automated tools that integrate directly with your Slack workspace. This bot can then schedule or send reminders to individuals and teams to help keep track of pending tasks, scheduled meetings, and deadlines.
This way, instead of relying on a physical sticky note you might forget, the Slack reminder bot will send you a prompt reminder for any personal appointments/tasks, or your manager might send a team-wide reminder to keep everyone updated.
Here are some things a Slack reminder bot can do:
- Automated task reminders: The bot can reach out to specified team members to track the progress of upcoming deadlines and meetings.
- Scheduled reminders:: For specific tasks & meetings, you can set daily, weekly, and monthly alerts for your team.
- Personal reminders: You can use Slack bot reminders to remind you anything about your work and life.
- Customizable Timing: You can specify the exact time and date for the reminder, making it flexible for different time zones and schedules.
Slack reminder bots are powerful, but how do you choose the top reminder bots for your Slack workspace? Keep on reading the next part.
2: Top 8 Slack Reminder Bots
Slack Remind Bot | Ease of Set Up | Pricing | Best For |
---|---|---|---|
Native Reminder Slackbot | Easy | Free | Users who only require basic reminder features |
Workast | Medium |
| Project management app to keep track of tasks |
Reminder Bot | Medium |
| Regularly scheduled tasks/meetings |
Asana | Medium |
| Users who require AI-powered tools for team/project management |
Task Reminder (Link Reminder) | Easy |
| A dedicated bot to remind members about links & task tracking |
Billy (The birthday bot) | Easy |
| Keep track of team member’s birthdays and anniversaries! |
StandupBot | Medium |
| Teams that require a stand-up meetings bot w/ reminder features for meetings |
Follow Up Bot | Easy |
| Sending ‘gentle’ reminders for missed questions |
1Native Reminder Slackbot
First up we have the buil-in Slackbot Reminder, Slack’s own bot that’s available in all of their subscriptions. Slackbot is not a dedicated reminder bot since it has several general features to streamline your workspace, but it does have a few dedicated reminder features.
It’s not as comprehensive or feature-rich as other options, but if you just need a simple reminder bot you can access for free, it’s worth checking out.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Send personal reminders at specific times/dates
2. Set reminders using straightforward commands such as /remind
3. Set recurring reminders to repeat at regular intervals
4. Message or file reminders to catch up on messages when unavailable
5. Channel-wide reminders to blast to your team
Additional Features: General bot for sending notifications, reminders, and custom responses to help members answer FAQs.
Challenge to Use It: It’s a general Slack bot, not a dedicated Slack reminder bot, so it has more other features, making it harder and less flexible to set reminders and manage them.
2Workast
Workast is a project management tool that allows users to create and manage tasks, lists, and deadlines directly in Slack.
But it can also function as a Slack ‘reminder’ tool by allowing you to access customizable daily reminders of tasks and the status of tasks alerts. Another great feature is it supports a variety of integrations like GitHub and Zapier, as well as Calendar integrations with the most popular platforms including Google Calendar, iCloud, and more.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Keeps track of a variety of lists/checklists/deadlines
2. Create customizable regularly scheduled reminders
3. Also allows integration with several Calendar platforms
Additional Features: It will send notifications directly on Slack, create checklist and to-do list directly in Slack with commands, turn a Slack message into a task, etc.
Challenge to Use It: It doesn’t send task reminders to emails, so the reminder notifications can be overlooked in the vast of Slack notifications.
3Reminder Bot
Reminder Bot is an easy-to-use Slack reminder bot that sends you regular messages based on a specified schedule ranging from daily, weekly, and monthly reminders.
When it sends you a reminder, you have the chance to address the reminder and it will keep track of the status of your reminders so you know what you have to do and what you’ve already checked off the list.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Send reminders for teams to streamline tasks
2. Set up reminders to track to reach fitness goals
3. You can set the reminder as completed, expired, and ignored
Additional Features: It can remind you twice, and let partners or guardians know if it’s missed.
Challenge to Use It: It takes time and patience to log in, connect the reminder bot to Slack, and create a reminder step by step.
4Asana
If your team already utilizes the Asana platform to manage your work and projects, the Asana bot is a great integration to use. The integration with Slack allows users to directly manage tasks and projects on Asana, via Slack using actions.
The Asana bot also keeps you in the loop with the latest project progress with notifications on the work you're assigned to. Plus, Asana also has an AI-generated summary of tasks on Asana and even works as an AI assistant that can pull relevant info from Asana tasks directly in Slack.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Send notifications for relevant assigned tasks or that you’re following
2. Provide up-to-date reports via AI-generated summaries of Asana tasks
Additional Features: Asana integration w/ Slack allows teams to merge conversations into actionable projects, and automate workflows with Asana Rules.
Challenge to Use It: You can ask its AI questions on the tasks, but sometimes AI can make mistakes, and you will need to manually check the answers.
5Task Reminder (Link Reminder)
The Task Reminder (Link Reminder) bot helps manage your workflow by automatically generating ‘tasks’ by keeping an eye on your channels and highlighting URL ‘links’ in particular.
When you mention someone and add a URL link, Task Reminder logs this as a ‘task’ if it detects you are asking a question that requires their input. If the person you mentioned doesn’t respond, Task Reminder will keep the interaction updated on the status of the review, periodically sending reminders.
It’s a simple and effective way to keep track of ad-hoc tasks while saving you time from juggling other platforms, but it isn’t too ‘unique’.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Send periodic reminders from automatically detected links that haven’t been responded to or reviewed
2. Send you a DM when tasks are marked as Done
Additional Features: Simple task management and automatic task generation.
Challenge to Use It: It can only detect links and sets it as a reminder.
6Billy (The birthday bot)
As the name suggests, Billy is a bot dedicated to keeping track of your team members' birthdays and anniversaries and celebrating those days!
On someone’s birthday, Billy will mention it in the channel for other team members to wish the birthday boy/girl! It can also help gather people’s birthdays and notable events, generate a full list of upcoming events, and have reminders that message members privately about upcoming birthdays.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Keep track of team members' birthdays, anniversaries, and special company events
2. Send celebratory messages to keep the team in the loop
3. Also have reminder notifications for the event in advance
Additional Features: Billy is multi-lingual and supports English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. Also provides users access to a full list of events, automatic birthday/event detail collection, and delay features for weekend events.
Challenge to Use It: It doesn't offer other reminders like tasks or project updates.
7StandupBot
StandupBot is dedicated to automating and streamlining meetings in Slack. With StandupBot, you can create and manage standup meetings and status reports to save you time.
This allows your team to simply respond to the bot when they are able before the meeting window closes. The bot will automatically remind members who haven’t completed the ‘meeting’ to complete their check-in.
It also includes a bunch of reports of logged meeting details from the past, monitoring engagement rates with in-depth statistics, and AI-generated summaries of meetings.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Use AI to generate meeting summaries and remind everyone
2. Sends your team reminders to submit stand-up meeting details before the ‘meeting window’ closes
Additional Features: Dedicated stand-up meeting bot to automate meetings and check-ins w/ AI-powered summaries, reports, and actionable insights.
Challenge to Use It: It has only reminder features for meetings as it’s a dedicated for team meetings and check-ins.
8Follow Up Bot
Follow Up Bot is a simple reminder bot in Slack that takes the awkwardness out of asking follow-ups to your queries. If you send a message and mention someone, but they haven’t responded yet, Follow Up Bot will remind you of this question.
From there, you can use the Follow Up Bot to send a gentle, impersonal reminder to the mentioned member to respond to the question. This makes it a bit less confrontational when asking for progress reports or important queries, which facilitates your team’s morale and productivity.
Reminder-specific Feature:
1. Keep track of questions that haven’t been answered in a channel
2. Set reminders for mentioned members to respond
Additional Features: Automates follow-up questions with impersonal reminders while also being a way to keep track of important questions in chat without needing to look for them.
Challenge to Use It: Sometimes it fails to send reminder notifications as expected.
3: Tips for Using Slack Reminder Bots
Once you have selected the proper reminding bots for Slack, here are some tips and tricks before using the Slack reminder bots.
1. Set Recurring Reminders for Regular Tasks
To improve your team’s workflow, schedule mundane and repetitive reminders to automatically occur daily, weekly, or monthly. This helps cut out time spent on sending reminders and follow-ups manually.
2. Use Customizable Reminders
Tailor reminders to fit your team’s needs. You can select when a reminder is a simple question that can be followed up anytime, or set up ‘urgent’ reminders for hard deadlines.
3. Use Follow-Up Reminders for Accountability
Follow-up reminders are a great way to keep track of unanswered questions and pending tasks. Since it’s a bot, it’s not as confrontational while also being a source to hold team members accountable if required.
4. Automate Time Zone Adjustments for Global Teams
For hybrid and remote teams, you’ll want to make sure the bot is adjusted for their time zone. This keeps everyone on the same page since they’re working in their local time zone and not constricted by time limitations for reminders.
4: Conclusion
And that’s everything you need to know about Slack reminder bots! Hopefully, you’ve learned how influential and effective these kinds of bots can be and found a few options that can streamline your Slack workspace.
Most of the options do the same thing, so we’d suggest identifying your team’s needs and selecting the one that covers all the bases. Some options also have free trials/plans so check them out first before fully diving in!
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