The 3 best anonymous feedback Slack Apps - Incognito for Slack

If you’re reading this, you’ve already taken one of the most significant steps in improving your company culture by deciding to embed it into the hub of your communications, Slack.

At this point, you’re contemplating if any simple app will do the trick and let you shoot over an anonymous message. But there are a lot of points to consider.

An anonymous feedback tool isn’t just about receiving feedback, it’s about responding to employee feedback so your team feels heard. Without this, you risk your team feeling like their thoughts are going into a black hole as leadership ignores them.

If you’re thinking this far ahead, you’re probably looking for a platform that fits into and becomes a fine addition to your employee feedback culture.

In this article, we’ll evaluate the top 3 Anonymous employee Feedback Slack apps together. Incognito Apps, OpenSay & abot all have a lot to offer but sifting through the details and trying to determine the best option is time-consuming. We’ll save you a few hours of research by doing this for you and taking you along the journey with us.

To make a fair comparison, we've defined the key criteria we’ll be judging each application on below:

1. How easy are they to pick up and play?
2. Which anonymous feedback platform focuses on making your team feel heard?
3. Adoption: Which anonymous employee feedback app will your team use in the long run?
4. Which anonymous feedback app should you use for Q&A during Townhalls and all hands?
5. What their customers have to say about them
6. Innovation: Which Slack employee feedback app is growing and improving the fastest?
7. Pricing

How easy are they to pick up and play?

Your entire team is going to be using the platform so it needs to be an app that is easy to pick up and use.

Product onboarding:

Immediately upon downloading the three apps, we can see which anonymous employee feedback app focuses on the user experience.

• Abot sends screenshots and a few paragraphs to show you how to use their app.
• OpenSay sends clearer directions but also overwhelms the user with too much text
• Incognito shows 4 simple buttons for the user to test out the platform. As we try out the 4 buttons we’re offered “1 free month for becoming an Incognito expert” and even a complimentary onboarding session for the leadership team and the rest of the team.

Ease of use:

How easy is it to share an anonymous message?

Both OpenSay & Incognito Apps make it easy for employees to share feedback by typing in a simple command “/Incognito” or “/anon” in the slack chat bar.

However, Abot requires employees to go on to the physical app in order to submit their feedback. This can be inconvenient for employee feedback.

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Safety:

Immediately upon downloading the app we noticed that both OpenSay & Abot allowed their teams to post anonymously in any public Slack channel.

After speaking to a few users, they found this could increase the chances of something inappropriate being said.

Whereas Incognito creates a special 🔒 #private-leadership-channel for your team to post in their anonymous feedback. Users also have the option to post in public channels (after admins set this up)

Which anonymous feedback platform makes your team feel heard?

All apps let you reply to anonymous feedback to make the team feel heard.

However, even with this feature, it is easy to overlook some feedback in your anonymous feedback box and forget to reply. Incognito goes the extra mile and uses AI to scan “high value” messages and reminds you to respond to them on Friday.

In addition to this, they’re the only app to have a “ Employee Feedback Wall” on their Dashboard, which lets admins reply and organize feedback to ensure users hear back from the leadership team.

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Adoption: Which anonymous feedback app will your team use?

With anonymous feedback, you’re introducing a new way for your teams to be able to interact with you. Your team is empowered to speak up and voice meaningful feedback that otherwise would have gone unheard.

Unfortunately, as employees, we spend over 4 hours per week and 9% of our year switching between apps. It’s natural for teams to forget and stop using a platform that you invested in.

Out of the three apps, we noticed Incognito has a feature called “Feedback Fridays” which is a customized reminder with a friendly GIF that goes out to your team on a frequency and day that you prefer. This helps keep feedback top of mind for your team.

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Along with free quarterly customer catch-ups with Incognito’s people scientist team, we felt they have the right formula to set you up for success in the long term.

Which anonymous feedback app should you use for Q&A during townhalls and all hands?

Let’s face it. Constantly hounding your teams to share questions before a meeting is painful for you and the entire team.

Employees are worried about voicing their honest feedback because they are concerned about feeling judged or they simply don’t like to speak up in front of large crowds.

What if you could create a natural way to make your team curious, spark creativity, and inspire them to ask questions?

That’s where it’s important to let your teams ask anonymous questions in a public Slack channel. All apps (abot, opensay & Incognito Apps) allow you to do this successfully.

However, if you’re worried that someone may say something off-topic or simply want to prepare an answer to a specific feedback before it goes into a public channel, then it’s probably a good idea to check out Incognito Apps for their moderation feature.

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What their customers have to say:

For this comparison, we looked at the most popular software review company online - G2.

For both OpenSay and Abot we were unable to find any reviews online.

With Incognito we found a 5-star G2 review rating with 13 customer reviews.

Innovation: Which Slack employee feedback app is growing and improving the fastest?

As you read through this article you may have picked up a consistent theme. Which app is pushing the boundaries of anonymous feedback further and which one fits into your feedback culture better?

Although abot is a great app (and the first anonymous feedback app to hit the Slack App Store), we noticed that it often falls behind OpenSay and Incognito Apps.

The primary reason for this is that this company is a weekend project for the founder who has “stopped investing more time in it”.

When looking at the dedicated team behind OpenSay & Incognito we can see that Opensay has 1 employee (the founder) while Incognito has 7 employees. This has heavily influenced their rate of innovation.

Pricing:

All platforms come with a free tier and free trial to get started immediately. However as you continue to use the platform you may decide you want to access more functionality.

For 99 users the paid plans for each platform are:

abot - $99/mo

Incognito Apps - $159

OpenSay - $99/mo

Which anonymous feedback Slack app is right for you?

Ultimately, the right app for you comes down to how you want to use it.

If you want to simply send an anonymous message, you could pick any and it will get the job done.

However, if you’re planning on embedding this Slack app into your feedback culture with both employees and leadership teams, our recommendation is to select Incognito Apps.

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