10 Best Slack Apps for Small Development Teams
From alert aggregation to standup bots, these apps help teams of ten or fewer turn Slack into a true operations command center.
Why Small Teams Need Curated Apps Even More
Large teams have dedicated ops and on-call systems, but in small teams, everyone wears multiple hats, and the cost of information noise is amplified. The principle for choosing Slack apps is simple: it must reduce the number of windows you check, not add another source of notifications.
The recommendations below are based on our own team's two years of practical use, and all start with a free tier.
Monitoring and Alerting
The Speedtest Slack app can push website monitoring downtime and recovery events directly to designated channels, supports routing by project to different channels, and includes a snapshot of global node checks at the time of failure, saving you the step of logging into the console.
Paired with the lightweight tiers of PagerDuty or Opsgenie, you can implement a tiered strategy that only pushes critical alerts at night and full alerts during the day.
Collaboration and Productivity
Geekbot handles asynchronous standups, collecting everyone's updates at a fixed time each day and summarizing them into a single message; the Linear app syncs issue status changes to project channels; the GitHub app routes PR review requests directly to the relevant person.
Finally, don't forget the built-in Workflow Builder, which can handle many repetitive processes like leave requests and incident reports without needing third-party apps.