Looking for a Slack app for team building, employee engagement, games or icebreakers? Here's an honest look at what each of the seven best options does well — and which kind of team each one fits.
Full disclosure: we build Laughter Circle, one of the apps on this list. We've tried to be fair to everyone — each app here is genuinely good at something different.
The short version
Laughter Circle — teams that want a physical, genuine moment of connection — not another quiz.
Donut — random 1:1 introductions across a large organization.
Trivia — quick competitive games — trivia, word puzzles, GIF battles — without leaving Slack.
CultureBot — automating the People Ops basics: birthdays, anniversaries, shout-outs, watercooler prompts.
HeyTaco — making appreciation a daily habit through playful peer-to-peer recognition.
Polly — instant polls, pulse surveys and feedback loops without leaving the conversation.
Ricotta — scheduled trivia contests and icebreaker questions that run themselves.
The 7 apps, one by one
1. Laughter Circle
That's usThe shared laugh break
Laughter Circle does something no other Slack app does: it gets your team laughing out loud together for 2–5 minutes. The bot posts a laugh break into a channel your admin picks, on the days and time your team chooses, with a button that opens a guided session in the browser. Ten AI guides — each with their own voice and unmistakable laugh — lead the exercises, and two buddy guides laugh along with you by default. No meeting, no camera, no performing. Anonymous by design: only aggregate participation is measured, never who joined.
Best for:Remote and hybrid teams who are tired of calendar-based team building and want something short, physical and genuinely shared.
Donut pairs teammates for virtual coffee chats on a recurring schedule and nudges them to meet. It's the classic answer to 'people in different departments never talk to each other' and works well for onboarding buddies and cross-team intros.
Best for:Larger companies where the main problem is that people simply don't know each other yet.
Trivia turns any channel into a game show: scheduled quizzes, word games and picture rounds with leaderboards. It's easy to start and gives competitive teams a fun reason to show up in a channel.
Best for:Competitive teams who enjoy games and want a low-effort recurring activity in a channel.
CultureBot is a broad toolkit: it celebrates birthdays and work anniversaries, sends watercooler conversation starters, collects peer shout-outs and runs health checks. It keeps the small rituals of office culture alive in a remote setting.
Best for:People Ops teams who want to automate culture rituals and recognition across the whole company.
HeyTaco lets teammates give each other virtual tacos to say thanks, with leaderboards and rewards. It's simple, cheerful and surprisingly effective at making gratitude visible in day-to-day work.
Best for:Teams who want to strengthen a culture of appreciation rather than run scheduled activities.
Polly is the polling workhorse of Slack: quick votes, standups, pulse surveys and feedback forms, with results right in the channel. It's less about play and more about giving every voice a low-friction way to be heard.
Best for:Managers and People teams who need fast, structured input from the team.
Ricotta schedules trivia games, 'this or that' questions, word chains and icebreakers into your channels automatically. Set the cadence once and the channel stays lively without anyone having to host.
Best for:Teams who want a set-and-forget stream of light games and prompts in their channels.
Most of these apps aren't rivals — they solve different problems. Recognition apps like HeyTaco make gratitude visible. Polls like Polly make voices heard. Games like Trivia and Ricotta keep channels lively. Donut introduces people who've never met. CultureBot keeps rituals on rails.
What none of them do is create a shared physical moment. That's the gap Laughter Circle fills: 2–5 minutes of laughing out loud together, no meeting, no camera, no performing. If your team's problem is distance rather than silence, that's the one to try first.
The laugh break, inside Slack.
Laughter Circle for Slack is coming soon.
Be one of the first teams to try Laughter Circle for Slack.
The full experience already works in your browser: pick one of ten AI guides, take a guided laugh break, and feel the difference for yourself — before you ask your team to.
Laughter Circle for Slack
