A free, open-source Geekbot alternative for Slack

What you are actually comparing

Geekbot is a hosted async standup bot. It is mature, it works, and for a lot of teams the monthly per-person fee is the right trade for never thinking about a server. Morgenruf is the same job, plus coffee chats and recognition, for nothing per seat: free on the hosted instance CloudDrove runs, or on your own infrastructure with the same MIT code. There is a longer and less tidy version of this comparison on the blog, written while switching a team across.

The decision is rarely about features. It is about where your team's answers live and whether you want a subscription that grows with headcount. The same question applies to Donut, HeyTaco and Standup & Prosper, which is what the comparison pages work through.

How do Morgenruf and Geekbot compare?

Geekbot prices checked 2026-09-26 on Geekbot's pricing page. If something here is out of date, please open an issue.

Where Geekbot wins

• Nothing to run. No server, no database, no upgrade evenings. That is worth real money and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
• Years of edge cases. A hosted product that has been at this since 2015 has met situations a younger one has not.
• Support with a contract behind it as part of the price, rather than an issue tracker and a maintainer's evening.
• A free plan for small teams. Geekbot is free for up to 10 users, so a small team pays nothing either way.
• Microsoft Teams. Geekbot runs there today; Teams support here is in progress.

If you have no appetite for running anything, you do not have to: Add to Slack puts Morgenruf on the free hosted instance in about two minutes. Most of what follows is about the other route, one container and a Postgres of your own.

Where is Morgenruf different from Geekbot?

The price does not scale with hiring

Per-seat pricing means the cost of asking your team three questions grows every time you hire. Geekbot is free for up to 10 users, then $3 per user per month, or $2.50 per user per month billed annually (prices checked 2026-09-26 on Geekbot's pricing page). A team of thirty pays $900 to $1,080 a year. On the Morgenruf hosted instance, thirty people and three hundred both cost nothing. Self-hosted, they cost the same: one small server and a database.

Your answers stay in your database

Standup answers are a running commentary on your roadmap, your incidents and who is stuck. Some teams do not want that in a third party's cloud, and for regulated ones it is not a preference. Self-hosting keeps them in your own Postgres.

Three rituals, one app

Standups, coffee chats and kudos share one deployment and one database, which is also what makes the cross-signal questions possible.

It can be read and changed

MIT licensed. If the summary format is wrong for you, the file is right there.

The things that decide it in practice

• Timezones per person, so a Toronto standup does not arrive at 19:00 in Kolkata.
• Leave that skips people rather than nagging them, and does not drag the completion figure down.
• A private nudge for whoever has not filed, instead of a public callout.
• An edit window, because people send early and remember something a minute later.
• Knowing it is working: fourteen days of completion on the card and a badge when it slips.

A standup that is quietly dying says so here before anyone notices in the channel.

What does Geekbot cost for 10, 30 or 100 people?

Worked out from Geekbot's published prices on 2026-09-26, per year. Morgenruf's self-hosted figure is the small server and Postgres it runs on, which does not move with headcount.

At ten people or fewer, both are free and the choice is about everything else on this page.

Moving across from Geekbot

There is no importer, and honestly the history is rarely what you miss. The usual path is to run both for a week: same questions, same channel, and turn the old one off once the new summary looks right. Nothing here has a contract to cancel.

1. Write down each Geekbot standup: its channel, questions, schedule, participants and timezone.
2. Install Morgenruf: Add to Slack for the free hosted instance, or run it with Docker or on Kubernetes and create the Slack app.
3. Recreate each standup: channel, questions in your own words, hour, participants.
4. Mark anyone on leave, so the first week's completion figure means something.
5. Watch a week of mornings side by side.
6. Keep whatever Geekbot history you want, then switch Geekbot off.