April 17, 2026
Best Slack apps for employee onboarding in 2026
Slack onboarding apps compared: Doozy, Donut, BuddiesHR, Polly, GreetBot and more. Features, pricing, and what each one does for new hires.
By Doozy Team
Pricing figures are accurate as of April 2026. Check each vendor's site for the latest rates.
Getting onboarding right in Slack means more than dropping a new hire into a welcome channel. The best teams use dedicated apps to automate introductions, deliver training content, send reminders, and track progress, all without leaving the platform your team already lives in.
This list covers the Slack apps most useful for onboarding in 2026: what each one does, who it's for, and how pricing stacks up across the category.
1. Doozy
Doozy is the most complete onboarding tool built for Slack. Where most apps handle one piece of the puzzle, Doozy covers the whole journey: automated welcome sequences, buddy introductions, quizzes, training tracks, and surveys, all running natively inside Slack.
What it does well:
- Tracks let you build multi-week onboarding sequences with messages, quizzes, and tasks that trigger automatically when a new hire joins a channel. Build it once, and it runs for every new employee without manual effort.
- Introductions automatically connect new hires with teammates, buddies, and managers on day one.
- Quizzes let you check knowledge retention after training, useful for compliance or product training delivered as part of onboarding.
- HRIS integrations with BambooHR, Rippling, HiBob, Workday and others mean you can trigger onboarding automatically when a new hire is added to your HR system, and collect feedback along the way with built-in pulse surveys.
Pricing: Flat-rate pricing by workspace size, not per user. This is a meaningful difference. Most Slack apps charge per seat, so costs scale with headcount. Doozy stays predictable as you grow.
Best for: People teams and HR managers who want a single tool that handles the full onboarding workflow in Slack, from day one welcome to week four certification.
2. Donut
Donut is the best-known onboarding buddy app in Slack. It focuses on the social and relational side of onboarding: connecting new hires with colleagues, setting up buddy programmes, and scheduling one-to-ones with managers.
What it does well:
- Onboarding buddy matching: pairs a new hire with a more experienced employee for their first few weeks
- Automated introductions and coffee chat scheduling
- Manager one-to-ones and milestone reminders
- Works entirely inside Slack DMs and channels
Where it falls short: Donut is connection-focused, not training-focused. There's no way to deliver content sequences, quizzes, or guided learning paths. If you need to onboard someone into a role that involves product knowledge, compliance training, or certification, you'll hit the ceiling quickly.
Pricing: Free plan with limited features. Paid plans start around $49/month depending on team size, billed annually. Per-user costs increase as headcount grows.
Best for: Teams that want to improve the social and cultural side of onboarding, particularly buddy programmes and manager introductions.
3. BuddiesHR
BuddiesHR is a modular suite of Slack apps covering recognition, coffee chats, celebrations, surveys, org charts, standups, and vacation tracking. Several of these are relevant to onboarding, particularly the random matching (Alfy) and birthday and anniversary tools (Billy).
What it does well:
- Alfy: connects employees through scheduled coffee chats, useful for helping new hires meet colleagues in the first weeks
- Clappy: peer recognition and kudos, which helps new employees feel welcomed
- Pulsy: pulse surveys for gathering new hire feedback
- Each module is independent, so you install only what you need
Where it falls short: BuddiesHR covers the culture and engagement layer, not a full onboarding workflow. There's no equivalent to Tracks, quizzes, or automated content sequences. It works best alongside a dedicated onboarding tool.
Pricing: Around $2 per employee per month for all apps, or individual apps at lower rates. This is per-seat pricing.
Best for: Teams that want lightweight culture tools to supplement their onboarding process, particularly coffee chat introductions and peer recognition.
4. Polly
Polly is one of the most established polling and survey apps in the Slack ecosystem. For onboarding specifically, it's useful for gathering feedback at the end of week one, running 30-day check-ins, and building recurring pulse surveys to track how new hires are settling in.
What it does well:
- Polls, surveys, and multi-question forms that run inside Slack
- Scheduled and recurring surveys, useful for consistent check-in cadences
- Advanced analytics with trend tracking over time
- Workflow automations for triggered feedback collection
Where it falls short: Polly is focused on data collection, not content delivery. You can ask new hires how they're finding onboarding, but you can't use Polly to deliver training, introductions, or automated sequences.
Pricing: Free plan with 25 monthly responses. Paid plans start around $49/month with higher response limits and additional features. Enterprise pricing available for larger teams.
Best for: Teams that want regular, recurring feedback from new hires throughout the onboarding period.
5. GreetBot
GreetBot is a simple, lightweight welcome bot. When a new user joins a Slack workspace or specific channel, GreetBot sends them a customisable welcome message automatically.
What it does well:
- Automated welcome messages triggered by channel joins
- Customisable message templates with variables for name, channel, and workspace
- Can send messages to the new user directly and to a team channel
- Minimal setup
Where it falls short: GreetBot does one thing. There's no sequencing, no introductions, no quizzes, no tracking. It's useful as a very first touchpoint, but not as a complete onboarding solution.
Pricing: Free for basic use. Paid plans available for advanced customisation and multiple workspaces.
Best for: Teams that want a quick, zero-configuration welcome message for new channel members without building anything more complex.
6. Deel Engage
Deel Engage is Deel's talent management suite, covering goals and OKRs, performance reviews, learning, surveys, and career development. It's positioned as an integrated system for the full employee lifecycle rather than a Slack-native onboarding tool.
What it does well:
- Goals and OKRs with progress tracking across company, team, and individual levels
- Performance and career review cycles with built-in AI drafting tools
- Learning and development modules alongside pulse surveys and check-ins
- Part of the wider Deel HR platform, so it connects naturally if you're already using Deel for payroll or compliance
Where it falls short: Deel Engage is a web-based platform with Slack notifications, not a Slack-native experience. If your team's workflow lives in Slack, new hires will spend most of their onboarding time in a browser. The scope has also shifted toward ongoing performance management rather than day-one onboarding.
Pricing: Bundled as part of Deel's platform. Check Deel's pricing page for current rates, as standalone Engage pricing is not listed separately.
Best for: Companies already using Deel for HR or payroll who want to consolidate performance management, learning, and surveys in the same platform.
7. ChiefOnboarding
ChiefOnboarding is an open-source onboarding platform with a Slack integration. It takes a sequenced approach: pre-onboarding pages, staged content delivery, and separate workflows for IT, HR, managers, and buddies.
What it does well:
- Pre-onboarding pages that brief new hires before day one
- Sequences deliver information in stages rather than all at once
- Separate portals and task lists for different stakeholders
- Open-source: self-hostable for teams with engineering resource
Where it falls short: The Slack integration sits on top of a separate platform rather than running natively. New hires receive nudges in Slack but complete tasks in a browser, which adds friction. Self-hosting also means upfront setup work for most teams.
Pricing: Free (open source, self-hosted). Cloud hosted plans available.
Best for: Engineering-led teams that want a highly customisable, open-source onboarding platform and are comfortable with self-hosting.
HRIS platforms vs Slack apps: do you need both?
HRIS platforms like BambooHR, Rippling, and HiBob are built for paperwork and compliance: contracts, payroll, benefits, and employee records. They're essential, but they're not designed to make a new hire feel welcomed or up to speed in their first weeks. Slack apps fill the human and engagement layer of onboarding: introductions, training content, knowledge checks, and ongoing feedback. The two categories work better together than either does alone. Doozy integrates with major HRIS platforms, so a new hire added to your HR system can automatically trigger their Doozy onboarding sequence in Slack, no manual setup required.
How to choose
The right tool depends on what your onboarding is actually missing.
| Problem | Tool to try |
|---|---|
| No automated welcome or introduction on day one | Doozy, GreetBot, or Donut |
| New hires don't know their colleagues | Doozy Introductions, Donut, or BuddiesHR (Alfy) |
| No way to deliver training or check knowledge | Doozy (Tracks + Quizzes) |
| No way to gather feedback from new hires | Doozy Surveys or Polly |
| Tasks fall through the cracks across HR, IT, and managers | Doozy, Deel Engage, or ChiefOnboarding |
| Per-seat pricing is getting expensive as you scale | Doozy (flat-rate) |
Most teams end up layering two or three tools because no single app covers every dimension. The exception is Doozy, which handles introductions, training sequences, quizzes, and feedback in one place, making it the easiest to manage and the most cost-predictable as headcount grows.
Get started with Doozy
If you want to automate your onboarding from welcome message to week-four certification, Doozy is the place to start. You can build your first onboarding Track in under an hour, or see how the full feature set compares to Donut in the Donut vs Doozy comparison.
Written by Doozy Team
The team behind Doozy — the employee experience platform for Slack. We write about onboarding, learning, and team engagement.