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.
Range Alternatives
- Geekbot
- Standuply
- Jell
- Polly
- Friday
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:
Step 4: View the Standup Answers
The answers to the standup are posted in a Slack channel 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).
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:
Here’s what several customers had to say about Geekbot’s ease-of-use:
Interested in exploring more Geekbot reviews? Click here for the full list.
2. Standuply
- Visit Standuply’s site.
- See their reviews on Capterra.
- See pricing and sign up for a free trial.
3. Jell
- Visit Jell’s site.
- See their reviews.
- See pricing and sign up for a free trial.
4. Polly
- Visit Polly’s site.
- See their reviews.
- See pricing and sign up for a free trial.
5. Friday
- Visit Friday’s site.
- See their reviews.
- See pricing and sign up for a free trial.
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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- Why We Built a Microsoft Teams Standup Bot and How It Works
- Daily Standup Excel/Google Sheets Template (Downloadable Spreadsheet)
- Best Remote Team Meeting Software (Downsides of Video Conferencing and Why You Should Go Asynchronous)
- 12 Best Scrum Tools for Project Management in 2021 (Jira, Asana, etc.)
- Geekbot + Trello Integrations
- Our SaaS Startup’s Bootstrapped Journey: How Geekbot Went From ZERO to $1m
- How Geekbot Makes Remote Work Easy
- 7 Examples of Asynchronous Team Communication at Work