ScrumGenius is a great asynchronous standup bot that works with both Slack and Microsoft Teams.
That being said, if you’re looking for a ScrumGenius alternative, we encourage you to consider Geekbot. We have over 100,000 users, with a 4.9/5 rating on Capterra.
Plus, Geekbot is free for teams of 10 or fewer.
In this post, you’ll learn how Geekbot works, and what differentiates it from ScrumGenius and other competitors.
Note: The images we use below are of our Slack-integrated standup bot, but we also offer a Microsoft Teams integration.
How Geekbot Works
We’ve found that most customers use Geekbot to run daily standups. For that reason, in this section, we’ll guide you through creating and scheduling a daily standup with Geekbot.
First, pick “Daily Standup” from a list of our ready-to-go templates.
Note: Again, our focus (and what most customers use Geekbot for) is daily standups. But as you can see above, we do more than that. We also have templates ready to go for Slack polls, retrospectives, monthly 1-on-1s, and templates for more fun, culture building activities (like our Pizza toppings template, Today I Learned template, and so on).
After selecting the “Daily Standup” template, pick when you want the standup to go out, as well as the frequency.
For frequencies, you can pick everything from “one time only” to weekly to monthly, to the first or last week of the month.
You can also set up your Geekbot account so our bot automatically sends out the daily standup based on each team member’s timezone.
(Compare that to ScrumGenius where you have to manually pick every team member’s timezone).
This helps you manage remote teams because now you don’t have to factor in everyone’s timezone.
Say you’re managing a team where some of your developers are in Thailand, while you and the rest of your team are in Chicago. If you don’t remember to factor in everyone’s timezone, then your Thailand team is getting their daily standup questions at 9:00 pm while the Chicago team gets theirs at 9:00 am.
Once Geekbot receives your team’s responses to the standup questions, they are shared in a Slack channel of your choosing.
(Note: If you’re using Geekbot for different types of meetings, such as polls, you can keep the answers anonymous.)
But what if one of your developers forgets to fill out the standup?
When we first switched to running asynchronousdaily standups we used a web tool to collect responses. The problem was this was a passive web tool — which meant we often forgot to fill it out!
And even though Geekbot reaches out to your team directly, people can still forget to fill out their responses. That’s why we use reminders.
You can choose between two types of reminders:
- Smart reminders: With smart reminders, you’re telling Geekbot to learn your team’s reporting habits. So, if some of your developers almost always fill out their responses after lunch, then Geekbot will start following up with them around that time.
- Manual reminders: With manual reminders, Geekbot follows up with each team member who hasn’t responded based on a pre-set amount of time.
Data Driven Insights
Collecting responses to the standup questions is great. But beyond that, with Geekbot, we have several features to give you data driven insights on your team’s answers.
First, let’s look at our dashboard, where you can easily reference important metrics like what percentage of your team is participating in standups, who is currently out of office, report streaks, and more.
Then from our Activity Viewer, you can see where your last sprint slowed down or which tasks took your team the longest to complete.
This can be used to help you figure out accurate time tracking, i.e. how long a project or task can be expected to take your team.
Over time, you can also identify key topics that keep occurring in every sprint:
Conversational Analytics
We also have a feature called Conversational Analytics that helps you find the information you want quickly.
You can ask Geekbot specific questions and Geekbot uses your team’s answers to give you an answer.
For example, you can ask Geekbot, “Who worked on bug fixes since May?” Geekbot then looks at who has mentioned bug fixes and reports back to you.
This makes your job easier because now you don’t have to filter through days of responses from your entire team to get the answer.
What Geekbot Customers are Saying
Below, we look at third-party review sites to get an idea of how different teams like using Geekbot.
Capterra
We are proud to have a rating of 4.9/5 stars (based on 85 user reviews, as of this publication date).
Reviewers really respond well to the great UI and UX of Geekbot. Plus, they enjoy the opportunity to “collect more data points over time,” which will then help them run their development team.
A quick note: Alex B.’s review above has “no free tier” mentioned as a con. This review was published in 2019 when we did not have a free tier. But now teams of 10 or fewer can use all of Geekbot’s features for free.
And of course, remote teams love the fact that Geekbot will automatically factor in each team member’s timezone.
Geekbot’s Trustpilot Reviews
On Trustpilot, we have 55 reviews with an average of 4.8/5 stars (at the time of writing).
One of our most recent reviews is from a team that had to go into remote work during COVID-19, but they plan on keeping Geekbot as part of their team going forward.
This reflects something we’ve seen — when we made Geekbot, we thought our main customers would be fully remote teams (like ourselves). But collocated teams love using Geekbot, too.
They see the benefits of minimizing workflow disruption and letting their team respond to their daily standup responses when it works with their schedule.
Geekbot’s G2 Reviews
Geekbot has 4.6/5 stars based on 43 reviews on G2.
As we’ve seen in other reviews, Geekbot customers really appreciate the ability to automatically schedule standups without having to worry about factoring in every user’s unique timezone.
Plus, Geekbot’s easy-to-use interface makes it quick and simple to get started on running meetings.
Final Thoughts: Geekbot Pricing and Next Steps
Geekbot has three different pricing tiers.
First, there’s our start-up plan. This plan is free for teams of 10 individuals or fewer.
Second, there’s our scale-up plan. This plan is $3 per participant per month, and when billed annually, you can save 17%. It kicks in when you have more than 10 users on an account.
We also have an enterprise option where we can make a custom quote based on your needs.
To get started on your free plan, or your free trial if you manage a larger team, click here.