Smooth automation: connect Workflow Builder to your everyday tools

Workflow Builder is a visual tool that lets anyone automate routine tasks right in Slack—with no coding required. From improving onboarding at DocuSign to handling executive communication at McAfee, it’s helping millions of Slack users save time each day. And as more people transition to remote work, we’ve seen incredible growth in the use of Workflow Builder as teams adopt it to streamline their efforts.

• 175K+

  People creating workflows

• 515K+

  Workflows created

• 25M+

  Workflows launched

More than 175,000 people have already created workflows in Slack. The majority of those users aren’t the technical type, who might build a custom app to integrate Slack with other tools or services. But starting today, any Slack user can create custom workflows that connect with many of the apps your teams rely on most.

What kinds of tasks does this update take off your plate? In just a few minutes, you could create a workflow to automatically:

• Build a request form for your team’s services that not only posts responses in a dedicated channel, but also creates a task in your project management app of choice
• Send a form in Slack to every employee asking them for their T-shirt size, with real-time answers posted in a spreadsheet for mailing packages later
• Record a new lead in your CRM when you complete a quick form in Slack

To help you get started, we’ve compiled a list of our favorite apps for Slack that can be added as steps in any workflow, including PagerDuty, Polly, Datadog and Zapier.

Zapier is especially powerful because it’s a service that interfaces with many other tools and offers more than 100 new steps in Workflow Builder. Once you’ve connected a workflow to Zapier, you can add steps to create or update new items in Office 365, Microsoft Outlook, Gmail, Salesforce, Asana, Trello, Pipedrive and Airtable, among others.

How does it work in practice?

Workflow Builder operates just as it did before. A trigger, like leaving a designated reacji on a message or joining a channel, kicks off a series of automated steps in Slack—such as a custom form or a message sent to a channel or as a DM. Now you can also add steps that create new items in other apps or pull information from outside services back into Slack.

This opens countless new ways to move work forward faster. Let’s say your company already has a workflow in Slack for reporting an incident to your software development team. When that report is filed, steps within the flow can now create a new incident in PagerDuty and post a daily incident report from your performance monitoring dashboard in Datadog. After the incident is resolved, a workflow in Slack can kick off a poll from Polly, so everyone can share feedback ahead of the incident review.

Steps like these eliminate the tedious context switching required to open a web browser and create a new item in tools outside of Slack. In its place, your team members get more time to focus on their most important work.

New Workflow Builder steps are available in dozens of different apps today. If you’re looking for ideas on how to start using this feature, check out our list of common examples, all with templates ready to import and customize for your team’s needs. For developers wanting to integrate tools and services with Workflow Builder for internal use, check out our platform blog post on the subject.