Slack is a natural hub for many businesses, thanks to its powerful chat tools—but chat alone isn't enough to get things done. For all those extra features to take action on your conversations and make decisions without opening another program or tab, you need Slack's apps.

These Slack add-ons add extra features to the Slack chat you already know and love. There are hundreds of Slack apps for all kinds of purposes, from managing your calendar to getting reminders to get up and stretch your legs. The most interesting ones are the free Slack apps that convert Slack into the hub for your business. Instead of switching between Slack and other apps, these tools let you do everything from basic HR organization to team-building and project management right inside Slack.

To select these apps, we combed the Slack directory, searching for apps that added a feature that couldn’t be easily duplicated natively in Slack. To meet the criteria for this article, each app needed to be useful across a broad range of team and company types, in addition to being free. Here are our favorites.

Editor's Note: Unless noted specifically for a particular app, all Slack apps mentioned are completely free to use.

The Best Free Slack Apps

And what it's best used for:

• Arc: Google Analytics summaries in Slack

• Meekan: Schedule meetings with teammates effortlessly from Slack

• TimeBot: Manage vacation time, sick leave, and holidays

• Teamline: Keep track of team tasks and reminders

• BusyOn: Track task and activity progress for your team

• Kyber: Manage projects, assign tasks, organize meetings, add to-dos

• Must-Read: Make sure your most important Slack messages are read by your team

• Donut: Get to know your co-workers better

• Icebreakers: Introduce new team members

• Lunch Train: Plan team lunches with ease

• Flexbot: Encourage healthy habits, automatically

• GoodRipple: Spread happiness throughout your company

• Stop, Breathe & Think: Practice mindfulness at work

• Zapier: Build your own Slack bot with no coding knowledge required

Slack Apps for Business Management

Slack can be an effective way to keep tabs on the pulse of your business. Beyond updates from your team, these apps put analytics, support, and HR tools right into your Slack workflow.

Arc

Google Analytics summaries in Slack

Google Analytics provides some of the most important data about your business's website performance, but it's difficult to check daily—and far easier to forget to check at all. Arc solves this problem by generating a daily summary of your key Google Analytics metrics and sharing it in Slack.

Connect as many Google Analytics accounts as you want, then define what information you want added to your summary. Arc will then track trends in your data and point these out to you—such as whether you're getting more or fewer site visitors this month versus last month. Set up daily, weekly, or monthly summaries from your Arc dashboard to regularly check on the health of your business, then share them automatically with specific teammates or channels, or with the company at large, depending on your settings.

Better yet, Arc describes your stats in plain language, such as "your audience increased and they were more engaged vs. last month." This way, your whole team and not just your data scientists can keep their pulse on the health of your key performance metrics.

Arc Price: free for one summary, unlimited connected Google accounts, and unlimited Slack channels; from $9/month Paid plan, with 5 summaries and additional analytics data

Meekan

Schedule meetings with teammates effortlessly from Slack

Slack is where you communicate with your team, manage files, and run calls. So why not schedule your meetings in Slack too? Instead of turning to email or trying to find overlapping availability for four different coworkers, simply invite the Meekan app to any channel, then start your message with meekan to get the ball rolling.

Meekan understands human-readable requests, such as "Meekan, I need to meet with @dscrute @jhalpert and @abernard about sales stats next week." Meekan will then analyze each person's calendar to find the ideal meeting time, then suggest the best times in a Slack thread beneath the original message.

Once a few times are suggested, attendees simply vote on which time works best. When the votes are in, the command book it will confirm the meeting time with the most votes and automatically send everyone an invitation. You can even accept or decline meeting invites from Slack or reschedule them. All you need to do is integrate Meekan with your calendar of choice and you can run the rest of your scheduling from Slack.

TimeBot

Manage vacation time, sick leave, and holidays

Time off, holidays, sick leave, and out-of-office reminders…These are enough trouble when you're just managing it for yourself, let alone your entire company or team. TimeBot saves your sanity by letting employees request time off (or notify of sickness) within Slack and automatically log the time off in one step.

Employees need only type in an OOO request command to TimeBot, then fill out a few questions, such as the type of time off requested (vacation, sick leave, holiday), dates requested, and any additional notes. It's the same way you'd normally ask your boss about time off in Slack—only this time, you don't also have to add the time to a calendar.

Managers and administrators can view requests from their teams and approve within Slack. TimeBot will then alert managers if other team members are scheduled to be OOO that day to help with scheduling. Have a global or distributed team? TimeBot includes holiday reminders for over 100 countries, so you don't have to worry about miscommunication over holiday time with employees across the world.

Slack Apps for Project and Task Management

You likely already have a project management tool or to-do list app to plan your work and keep your team on track. But it's still easy to forget about important tasks when you don't check your to-do list. A Slack to-do list app can help. Maybe you simply need a quick project update or a reminder on a task that's due soon. Instead of switching to another app, try one of these handy Slack apps:

Teamline

Keep track of team tasks and reminders

Teamline (formerly Busybot) offers you the convenience of Slack reminders with the functionality of a fully-fledged task list. Invite @teamline to any channel, then simply add the command /teamline to any message to create a task for yourself or a colleague.

You then have two options for viewing your tasks. You can view and edit basic task details and deadlines, and complete tasks in Slack under the Teamline app. If you want more details and management control over your tasks, pull up your Teamline dashboard (viewable in the right half of the above screenshot). This dashboard mirrors your Slack organization so you can view tasks by the channel in which they were created. This is especially useful for Slack channels dedicated to a particular project.

From this dashboard, you can manage every task you created in Slack in a handy "card" format. Add more details via the card's description, comment on the task, manage due dates and assignees, or add functions like labels, attachments, and (for Pro users) checklists and subtasks. Teamline will automatically remind you in Slack of any tasks you created or are assigned, so you can manage your daily task list within Slack.

Teamline Pricing: Free for all core features; $49/month Starter plan for subtasks, checklists, and a team calendar

BusyOn

Track task and activity progress for your team

Keeping track of what everyone's working on can be difficult, especially if your team is distributed across several time zones. So instead of trying to manage tasks through a bunch of direct messages, just use the BusyOn Slack app.

BusyOn gives team managers real-time reports about their team. Team members can update what they're working on with a simple /busyon xyz task message in Slack. These updates then go to the BusyOn dashboard, as well as to the designated channel.

Managers can then review and filter through activity logs and run reports via the BusyOn dashboard, or simply have BusyOn email you a daily report with the updates from all your team members. The dashboard also gives you a general overview of task analytics, to help you keep your eye on the big picture of your team's productivity.

Kyber

Manage projects, assign tasks, organize meetings, add to-dos

If Slack is your primary communication tool, you likely get dozens of task requests or project updates throughout the week. If you're anything like me, you find these requests disruptive—after all, if you don't take care of that right away, you'll forget, right?

Kyber solves this problem intelligently without taking you away from Slack. Within this Slack app, you can create and assign tasks, project task lists, and even schedule meetings, all with just a few keystrokes.

Need something from your coworker or direct report? Don't risk your request getting lost in the noise—directly assign them a task. They'll get the message as a task, and you'll be notified when they mark that task as completed.

If you're working on a project within a channel, you can create shared project task lists with attachments, sub-tasks, and team assignments—all visible to the entire channel, so your project team can keep track of everything.

Scheduling meetings is now as easy as delivering a command via /meet—Kyber will keep you up to date on replies to your meeting invitations, and will automatically sync appointments with your calendar of choice.

Best of all, Kyber compiles all direct tasks, project tasks, and meetings into a personal task list that is updated daily so you'll never miss an important Slack task again.

@Must-Read

Make sure your most important Slack messages are read by your team

If you've ever shared an important message in Slack only to have that request seemingly lost to the void among other ongoing conversations, you are far from alone. @Must-Read solves this problem by letting you flag outgoing Slack messages as urgent and delivering a digest of all your need-to-read messages.

Just have your team mention @must-read in any message that your team really needs to see. @Must-Read then adds to a customized daily must-read list for everyone on your team. Each participant can then browse all these messages in one batch so you don't have to waste time digging through Slack to find can't-miss messages.

Slack Apps for Team Building

Whether your team is remote and distributed across the globe (like our team here at Zapier), or all sitting within 5,000 square feet of each other, team building is important. It can also become a logistical nightmare, with so many different priorities and schedules. These three apps go a long way towards simplifying a few basic team building activities, so your team can grow stronger and more connected.

Donut

Get to know your co-workers better

It's important to cross-pollinate ideas in your company by encouraging regular communication between people in different departments who possess different backgrounds and expertise. For remote companies especially, though, that can be difficult.

Enter Donut, a Slack app that randomly pairs coworkers and reminds them to meet up, whether it's for coffee or just a 15 minute Slack call. For example, at Zapier, we use Donut to randomize meetings between all employees who are in the #pair-buddies channel.

Donut organizes pairings and keeps pairs from repeating until all other pair options have been used. The app will start up a group chat between two co-workers and the Donut bot, which will help facilitate a meeting by reminding you and your pair buddy to schedule a meeting.

Icebreakers

Introduce new team members

When an employee first joins your company, it's easy to lose sight of the person amidst all the paperwork. The Icebreakers app gives employees a low-pressure way to introduce themselves and build connection with new teammates.

When a new team member joins your company's Slack, the Icebreakers bot will automatically reach out to them with conversational questions that prompt them to share some fun facts about themselves. Their answers will then be posted in the appropriate channel, so team members can welcome your new employee and strike up conversations on common interests.

Existing employees can also join in the fun, and the Icebreakers details on your employees are easily searchable by other team members, which promotes a more personal connection among employees, especially for remote teams.

Lunch Train

Plan team lunches with ease

If you've ever been the guy trying to plan a lunch outing with your colleagues—or worse, the guy overlooked for the lunch outing—you know what a bear it is to plan and execute a lunch with multiple people and their preferences.

Lunch Train changes everything. With this Slack app, you can easily alert team members, or even an entire channel, about your lunch plans. Just tell Lunch Train the location and the time you plan to leave, and it will do the rest. Invitees can respond directly to Lunch Train, so you know exactly who's coming (so you don't leave Stanley behind or miss an opportunity to carpool with Michael in his Sebring).

When it's time to go, Lunch Train will remind all attendees that it's time to leave for lunch. It will also remind you, the organizer or "conductor." Need to delay by a few minutes? You can do that with the press of a button, and Lunch Train will inform your colleagues, so no one leaves without you. And with lunch outings now so easy to organize, you'll now have an excuse to go out to eat more often.

Slack Apps for Team Happiness & Wellness

A healthy team is a happy team—and a happy team is a healthy team. And both happiness and healthiness contribute to overall productivity for your team. But when work gets busy, it can be hard to remember to take care of ourselves. These Slack apps are here to gently keep your health and team happiness on track.

Flexbot

Encourage healthy habits, automatically

It's hard to remember to practice healthy habits on even our best days—let alone during a stressful week at work. But our busiest weeks are when we most need to those reminders to sit back, meditate, and drink some water.

Flexbot is your Slack-mom, here to remind you to take care of your health throughout the day by stretching, breathing, and staying hydrated. Flexbot takes on the role of wellness coach with well-timed reminders and guided exercises designed to help reduce both mental and physical stress.

Best of all, your Flexbot is personal to you, not a channel-wide bot. It responds to your conversation and tailors its reminders and prompts based on your preferences. While it may not singlehandedly change your lifestyle, Flexbot is a great way to start on the path to healthy habits at work.

GoodRipple

Spread happiness throughout your company

Good feelings and positive thinking are contagious. Spread the love with GoodRipple, the Slack app that helps you create an environment of goodwill throughout your company. Sometimes, in the heat of a stressful week, it can be difficult to think positively about your coworkers—GoodRipple solves that by prompting you with questions like "who helped you out today?" or "who will be authentic no matter what the situation?"

Simply respond to these prompts with a coworker's username, and they'll be sent an anonymous note of encouragement. It's a small gesture, but even the smallest gestures of thanks can make a big difference in a coworker's day, and improve the attitude of the whole team!

Stop, Breathe & Think

Practice mindfulness at work

Stop, Breathe & Think is one of the best guided meditation apps on the market—and now it's available on Slack. What does guided meditation have to do with work, you might be wondering? I'll let ScienceDaily answer that one:

Mindfulness and Meditation are increasingly recognized as essential to creating calm, creative work environments that help people work at their personal best. They have become key tools in leadership, management and productivity, and for coping at work.

The Stop, Breathe & Think Slack app facilitates this from within your workspace. Chat conversationally with the app and give it details such as how you're feeling mentally and physically in order to receive tailored meditations and breathing exercises that you can do right from your desk.

Want to encourage your entire team to make mindfulness a priority? The Stop, Breathe & Think app can also run in channels, and keeps a running team leaderboard to encourage a little healthy competition.

Add Your Favorite Apps to Slack with Zapier

If none of these apps provides the function you're looking for, why not build your own? With Zapier, you can build a Slack app from the software you're already using—and you can do it without using any code. Sign up for a free Zapier account, and choose an app from our library of 750+ popular apps to trigger your new Slack app.

Learn how to build different types of Slack apps with Zapier, or browse our most popular Slack integrations, for inspiration:

Want to become a Slack superuser? Check out these other posts on Slack:

• How to Build a Slack Bot in 5 Minutes

• Slack Everything: How to Turn Your Team's Communication App Into Central Command

• 12 Ways to Stay Productive in Slack

• 25+ Hidden Search Features in Trello, Slack, Evernote, and More