5 Best Range Alternatives (In-Depth Look)

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In this post, we’ll list five Range alternatives, starting with our own tool: Geekbot. Geekbot is free for up to 10 participants and lets you run asynchronous meetings (i.e. standups, retrospectives, etc.) inside of Slack and MS Teams. We’ve helped over 200,000 users and teams within:

GitHub (see case study)
Zapier (see case study)
GitLab (see case study)
Shopify (see case study)
And more!

Note: Click here to learn about Geekbot and sign up for an account.

1. Geekbot: Free for Up to 10 Participants

How Does Geekbot Work? At a high level, there are 3 steps.

Step 1: Select Your Template

Geekbot offers various meeting templates, ranging from standups and retrospectives to well-being check-ins.

The benefit of selecting the “Daily Standup” template is that the questions are auto-filled (rather than you having to enter them manually).

That being said, you can edit existing questions or add new ones so that the standup fits your team’s preferences.

For example, many of our customers like to add a fourth question: “How Do You Feel?”

If a teammate responds with, “Feeling down because I’m overwhelmed with work”, that opens the opportunity to meet with them and find a solution (before they reach burnout).

Per the above screenshot, Geekbot also analyzes the sentiment of each response (“Happy”, “Unhappy”, or “Neutral”) and presents the results via a “Team happiness” graph. At a quick glance, you can gather whether your team is in a good mental space (or whether there are issues that need to be addressed).

Step 2: Customize Your Standup Settings

We created a short video that goes over the various settings you can customize when creating your standup:

That includes:

Scheduling: Select the days and times when you want the standup prompt to go out (i.e. Monday through Friday at 9:00 am).
Time zone options: What if half of your team is in Tokyo, and the other half is in Los Angeles? You could configure the standup prompt to go out at 9:00 am in each user’s local timezone.
Standup questions: Again, you can customize the standup questions to your team’s needs. For example, per our recent case study with GitHub, their Services Programs team asks 2 questions on Monday and 2 questions on Friday. (This is different from the standard of “three daily standup questions”, but it works best for them!)
Broadcast channel: Select the channel where the standup responses will be posted.
Participants: Select which users in your Slack or MS Teams workspace will receive the standup prompt.
Reminders: Each team member can optionally configure Geekbot to send them a reminder notification if they forget to complete the standup within a certain time frame.

Step 3: Complete the Standup

Each teammate receives a prompt in Slack (or MS Teams) asking them to fill out the questions:

Geekbot messages you privately for each question.

Step 4: View the Standup Answers

The answers to the standup are posted in a Slack channel of your choosing:

Geekbot shares all answers in a group chat of your choosing.

In addition, you can view the answers in Geekbot’s dashboard and select the relevant date range (which is particularly helpful when running a retrospective).

Manage the daily standup from one screen.

What if you wanted to receive the standup answers outside of Slack or Geekbot’s dashboard? (i.e. You spend most of your time in Gmail, and prefer the answers get sent there). We offer various Zapier integrations that make this possible!

Additional Features

Note that this is just the tip of the iceberg. For a full breakdown of Geekbot’s features and functionality, visit this page.

Online Reviews

At the time of writing, Geekbot has received 97 reviews and 4.9 out of 5 stars on Capterra (a popular software review site).

Here’s what several customers had to say about Geekbot’s UI/UX:

"I have used other players in the space like Standuply and felt somewhat overwhelmed... Geekbot has a far better UI/UX."

"Another aspect of the software that I really appreciate is how well-designed the user interface is."

Here’s what several customers had to say about Geekbot’s ease-of-use:

"It took me five minutes to setup and add all my little details and settings."

Interested in exploring more Geekbot reviews? Click here for the full list.

2. Standuply

3. Jell

4. Polly

5. Friday

Note: Geekbot is free for up to 10 participants and lets you run asynchronous meetings (i.e. standups, retrospectives, etc.) inside of Slack and MS Teams. We’ve helped over 120,000 users and teams within GitHub, Zapier, GitLab, Shopify, Salesforce, and more! Click here to sign up for an account.

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Frequently asked questions

What Are the Benefits of Running Asynchronous Daily Standups?

Asynchronous daily standups are quick and non disruptive — we discuss the benefits in greater detail in this post.