Dailybot Alternatives: Comparing 6 Daily Standup Tools for 2024

The daily standup meeting has proven itself an invaluable tool for teams looking to keep everyone aligned. However, in the age of remote work, virtual teams, and asynchronous collaboration, there are all kinds of reasons why teams are making way for the asynchronous daily standup.

Dailybot is one of the best-known simple tools in this space, but there are several alternatives worth considering that suit different teams and use cases.

What is Dailybot?

Dailybot is one of the best-known off-the-shelf daily standup tools for agile software development teams.

It aims to make agile ceremonies like daily standups and retrospectives simple for distributed and remote teams by asking standup questions and gathering updates from team members individually, and asynchronously. It’s an alternative to having a live short meeting as a daily standup where each team member delivers their status updates in real-time.  It also has a number of handy add-ons, like pomodoro timers and watercooler prompts.

But lots of teams end up looking for alternatives to Dailybot. Why? Well…

• Asynchronous daily standups are still imperfect by nature – time-consuming, human-driven and imprecise
• Some teams are looking for less generalist daily standup software which can be used for a range of other purposes
• They might seek greater depth in project tracking and tool integration

Many teams, especially those familiar with Dailybot, might wonder about other tools in the market that cater to the same or adjacent needs. Let's pick through some of the very best.

1. Stepsize AI

We built Stepsize AI so that people and teams at every level of your organisation can keep track of everything happening around them, effortlessly.

We think Stepsize AI does standups better than standups do!

Stepsize AI tracks your projects across all your communication platforms, including Slack, Jira, GitHub and more. 

Every day, Stepsize AI summarises what’s important from what happened the previous day. It observes every activity, update and decision and works out what matters.

Every week (or every sprint), Stepsize AI creates powerful summaries of what’s happened, including blockers, opportunities and project progress so that stakeholders at any level can stay up-to-date.

That all happens automatically.

How does it do that? 

Well, Stepsize AI develops a memory of your teams’ projects, activities and goals. Not only can it observe and categorise activity, but it can also reflect on it. That makes it able to identify what really matters to you and your team.

That makes it not only able to update you on what’s happening, but to answer even the most complex questions with precise, insightful answers.

Discover how Stepsize AI can help your team

2. Range

A tool that replaces stand-ups with check-ins, ensuring all team members are in the loop.

Features:

• Has its own app interface
• Surfaces useful information from tools like Gmail and Zoom

My View: Especially useful for teams using multiple communication tools. Range ensures clarity and uniformity, making it easier to manage distributed teams. Some may like Range’s separate web app, others may see it as tool proliferation. It’ll depend on your team’s own preferences.

Check out Range here.

3. Geekbot

Geekbot offers daily standups in Slack and Teams users an easy way to hold asynchronous daily scrums, including daily standups.

Features:

• Quick integration with Slack and Teams, delivery via Slack bot
• A range of templates including daily sync, team bonding and team wellbeing
• Sentiment analysis, if that feels useful

My View: If Slack or Teams is your primary communication tool, Geekbot is a good fit if you think the asynchronous standup is for you, though there’s little to separate it from Dailybot. Personally, I’ve never found most of the templates useful, rather a distraction, but only one or two of these need to feel valuable to make it worth it.

Check out Geekbot here.

4. Jell

A performance-focused tool, Jell integrates with a range of tools including Slack, Teams, Google Workspace and Trello. 

Features:

• Tracks Objective and Key Results (OKRs)
• Allows visibility into individual and team performances

‍My View: Ideal for performance-driven teams, though the tool perhaps lacks the visual finesse found elsewhere. It streamlines OKR tracking, although teams preferring a more relaxed approach to standups might not find it fits culturally.

‍Check out Jell here.

5. Standuply

An agile-focussed tool that tries to modernise asynchronous agile ceremonies by integrating with Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Features:

• Automates various parts of the agile workflow
• Allows voice, video, and text responses

• Store knowledge in the Standuply Q&A system

My View: Best suited for teams already using Microsoft Teams and Slack who want to tighten up and streamline agile and scrum ceremonies. It offers a solid alternative to the tools mentioned, aiding in streamlining standups and retrospectives.

Check out Standuply here.

What next?

Product engineering teams often exist in a beautiful state of chaos, and we’ve learned so many techniques that make this feel normal and achieve alignment.

They include synchronous methods like meetings, asynchronous methods like a Dailybot daily standup or sending Slack messages, and trawling through systems of record to find what you need (like Jira, GitHub, and the like).

But all this still takes up 30% of our time, at best.

In this new golden age of LLMs, it’s now possible to radically improve the amount of time we’re spending on alignment.

That’s why we built Stepsize AI.

Stepsize AI observes everything that happens across all the tools you use in product engineering, reflects on it and uses it to generate accurate, powerful updates. 

You can get these on a daily basis at the team level, on a weekly or sprintly basis at the stakeholder and manager level, and more.

I’d love to get your thoughts on Stepsize AI. You can check it out here.