Best Status Hero Alternative (Free Asynchronous Meeting Tool)

Best Status Hero Alternative (Free Asynchronous Meeting Tool)

If you’re looking for a Status Hero alternative, you may find what you need with Geekbot. Geekbot is an asynchronous meeting tool that we designed to originally help us run better daily standups. Since then — and over 100,000+ users later — Geekbot is used by all kinds of different teams to run more effective asynchronous meetings.

And while Status Hero and Geekbot overlap in some areas (such as being tools designed to let teams run asynchronous meetings or check-ins), there are key differences we will discuss in this article. 

For example, here are some highlights of what makes Geekbot unique:

  • Geekbot has a free plan for small teams of 10 or fewer. 
  • Geekbot integrates with bothSlack and Microsoft Teams at all pricing levels (Status Hero charges more for this).
  • Geekbot gives you data driven insights into meeting participation, team happiness, etc. — this is done in the form of Sankey diagrams, Gantt charts, and more.

If you’re ready to see how your team can use Geekbot, click here to get started for free.

If you’d like more information on how to create, schedule, run meetings, and get insights with Geekbot, keep reading. 

How to Run Meetings with Geekbot

We are a fully remote team that designed Geekbot to help us run more effective asynchronous Scrum meetings.

To highlight Geekbot’s versatility, we’ll take an in-depth look at how you can create, edit, and hold a daily standup meeting using Geekbot. 

Worth noting: Geekbot is not limited to daily standups, retrospectives, or other Scrum ceremonies. You can use Geekbot to send out Slack polls, hold one-on-ones, and any other type of meeting you can think of. (You can see below for a list of pre-built meeting templates that we offer, but you have the option to create a meeting from scratch.)

Scheduling

You can create a one-off standup, or set up a recurring one. 

You can easily pick the day(s) and time to send out your daily standup. 

Geekbot can send out standup notifications at the Period & Date that you choose

You can select nearly every type of period you can think of, from weekly to bi-weekly to the first week or last week of every month.

And because we know plenty of teams are working with individuals across multiple time zones, we made it easy for you to factor in everyone’s unique location. 

Notifications can be sent out to team members at their local timezone

Geekbot will take note of where someone is (based on their Slack or MS teams settings) and send them the daily standup questions at the right time. 

This way, participants working in different timezone’s don’t get interrupted with their daily standup at odd hours or in the middle of the night. 

Collecting and Presenting Responses 

Geekbot reaches out to each team member directly in a private message.

Geekbot standup questions: What did you do since yesterday? What will you do today? Anything blocking your progress?

Geekbot then takes those answers and shares them in the Slack channel of your choice. 

If you’re running a more personal meeting, you can keep responses anonymous. However, you’ll generally want your daily check-ins to be public to increase communication, collaboration, and transparency.

When team members respond to the standup, their messages get sent to the Slack channel

What if one of your team members forgets to fill out the standup?

With Geekbot’s “Smart Reminders”, you can set reminders to be automatically sent out to team members who haven’t answered the meeting questions. 

Geekbot will actually learn your team’s reporting habits, and then follow up at the time they’re most likely to respond.

Personal Reminders: Smart reminders vs Manual reminders

If you choose “Manual Reminders” instead, Geekbot will follow up at a time-frame you choose, ranging from every 30 minutes, to two hours, three hours, five hours, 8 hours, etc.

How to Use Geekbot’s Dashboard

Status Hero does offer some analytics. You can gauge mood (on a scale of 1-10, 1 being bad, 10 being great), and see participation metrics. 

But let’s take a look at the data-driven insights you can get from Geekbot.

Geekbot's Data-driven Insights

You can see key metrics from one page, including participation rate, report streak, the highlighted report (which update is getting the most attention from the team), who is out of office, and who is rebounding (who posted a report after a long absence).

You can also use our Activity Viewer to look at which activities took your team the longest. This is a great tool for retrospectives and future sprint planning — it helps you identify opportunities.

Geekbot's Activity Viewer

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 it’ll use your team’s answers to give you an answer.

For example, you can ask Geekbot, “Who has 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 has the team done in onboarding in the past two months?

Final Thoughts: Getting Started with Geekbot

We offer three different pricing plans to accommodate teams of all sizes. 

(Compare this to Status Hero, which offers different tiers with different features. With Geekbot, you get all of our features, no matter the size of your team.)

First, there’s our free plan. This is for teams of 10 or fewer. Geekbotonly charges you based on how many people actually participate in your meetings. So, if you have a team of 15, but only 8 of them use Geekbot that month, you’re not charged for the other 7 team members. 

Then there’s our scale-up plan. This plan is $2.50 per participant, per month. It kicks in when you have more than 10 users on an account. (Compare this to Status Hero, whose most inexpensive plan is $3 per participant, per month.)

Finally, we offer an enterprise option where we can make you a custom quote based on your needs. 

Related Articles

Frequently asked questions

What Are the Best Alternatives to Status Hero?

Status Hero is a check-in tool that works with email (for the basic plan) or Microsoft Teams and Slack (for the more advanced plans).
     
There are several different Status Hero alternatives available depending on what you’re looking for, from free Slack standup bots to paid tools that offer more features.
     
We recommend Geekbot as a Status Hero alternative for teams who want an efficient and easy way to hold all kinds of asynchronous meetings and polls.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *