For those seeking to enhance their tech team's productivity, consider integrating Slack and GitLab. These two robust tools, when combined, can optimize your team's workflows and facilitate collaboration across the board. With Slack and GitLab integration, your team can benefit from improved communication and streamlined processes, helping to ensure that everyone stays on the same page.

In our latest article, we've done the research for you and compared the top Slack and GitLab integrations currently available. We've looked at Axolo, Code Dog, Eleminder, Zapier & Integromat, the open-source GitLab Slack integration from Nazhryn, and the official Slack GitLab integration.

Our article and table provide a breakdown of each integration's features, benefits, and drawbacks, allowing you to make an informed decision that suits your team's needs. Discover how these integrations can help your team work smarter with our guide.

Here is a 6 minutes YouTube video recap of this article:

1. Axolo

Focusing on collaboration across the whole engineering team, Axolo is not another pull request notification bot. It's been designed to engage about code easily and resolve pull requests in the most efficient way possible.

😍 What we love:

Axolo makes a temporary Slack channel for every GitLab merge request, it will invite reviewers and assignees to the channel, notify them of relevant events like code comments, comments, GitLab actions, deployments and finally it will archive the channel once you close or merge the request.

GitLab CI Slack notification

Axolo recently added support for GitLab CI. How does it work? Axolo will send a summary of your jobs (builds or deployments) when a merge request pipeline is completed to the relevant Slack channel. It will look like this:

Axolo User Experiences

2480+ developers online

Jacob

Axolo is an incredible tool for connecting PRs with our everyday engineering discussion on Slack. It integrates seamlessly and makes it so as a manager, I never lose track of my engineers' work. For my engineers, it allows them to collaborate without losing a thread in different contexts. Overall it keeps us moving swiftly throughout the sprint and continuously reviewing and merging code!

Read more Axolo reviews ->

Dan

Axolo has made it easier to hold developers and QA engineers accountable for reviewing and merging pull requests on a timely basis. Our average PR time-to-merge was 2.40 days before Axolo, this has been reduced to 1.51 days after only using it for 2 weeks.

Read more Axolo reviews ->

Anubhav Malik

We used to send each other our GitHub PR links on Slack to ask for a review. Having Axolo made it a zero-effort thing. Having discussions on Slack is much more natural and Axolo does a great job doing it. The support is amazing as well! Arthur and Sydney proactively reach out to ask if we're facing any issues and even released one feature request within hours!

Read more Axolo reviews ->

Try Axolo for free

2. Code Dog

Code Dog App is a well-made Slack app that is easy to configure and will send you direct messages for sleeping pull requests or actions that need your attention. You can set up a daily reminder for stand-up to remove any current blockers. The price is 18$/ month.

👍 What we like:

Easy to configure and straight to the point.

👎 What should be improved:

It's a one-size-fits-all. One channel for everything might make it hard to follow for some engineers in your team. It would be nice to notify the right people only.

3. Eleminder

We’ve talked about Eleminder in one of our previous articles in the top 5 pull request and Slack integration. Eleminder is a simple and straight to the point pull request review reminder. It will remind a channel about pull requests that are awaiting review. It can also notify pull request review requests and comments. To set it up on GitLab you will have to manually add a GitLab Webhook.

👍 What we like:

Free and simple bot.

👎 What should be improved:

Concerning CI/CD, Eleminder only integrates with CodeShip + Circle CI integrated.

4. Zapier and Integromat

Zapier and Integromat are integration platforms you can use to link to apps together. They both have GitLab and Slack in their integrations. You can configure Zapier and Integromat to send messages to a specific Slack channel whenever there is a new merge request.

Check what you can do on Integromat: Integromat Slack GitLab integration page

Check what you can do on Zapier: Zapier Slack GitLab integration page

👍 What we like:

Highly configurable, you can choose to have three steps processes in case you want to filter out some merge requests.

👎 What should be improved:

Shallow integrations, no information on deployments and GitLab CI/CD. It can be also expensive.

5. Open source GitLab Slack integration from Nazhryn

Screenshot of the configuration file

GitLab-Slack from Nazrhyn is a JavaScript open-source service that receives hook notifications from GitLab and posts information to a Slack webhook. It takes a bit of time to set up but once done it can notify a channel about commits, branches, tags, issues, merge requests, and wiki pages.

👍 What we like:

Open source, you can trust it and also contribute to it.

👎 What should be improved:

Last updated two years ago. The setup takes a bit of time and can scare away some companies.

6. Official Slack GitLab integration

The official Slack GitLab integration allows you to manage issues, (show, search, move, find, comment, close), deploy environments, and run commands for specific projects.

Check out the documentation on GitLab

👍 What we like:

Good to handle issues for a repository from your Slack.

👎 What should be improved:

This integration is very limited. It takes a while to set up and you can only handle issues. It’s also hard to remember all the Slash commands and can be lengthy to mention the project every time.

Choose the best Slack and GitLab integrations for enhanced productivity and collaboration

If you work in a tech team, using Slack and GitLab together can boost your productivity and teamwork. There are many options to choose from, including Axolo for collaboration, CodeDog for easy setup, and Eleminder for free pull request reminders. If you want more customization, Zapier and Integromat are highly configurable, while Nazhryn's open-source integration is reliable.

The official Slack GitLab integration is also handy for managing issues. By using these integrations, your team can work more efficiently and effectively by streamlining your workflow and communication.