Alternative to
Donut Slack App
Virtual Water Cooler
Before the Pandemic and the rise of remote work, people would often meet accidentally in their office at the water cooler. The term "water cooler talk" describes the casual chat colleagues have when randomly meeting at the water cooler for a mini break.
Such accidental encounters enable informal information exchange (and spread of office rumors). But more importantly, water cooler talk fosters personal connections between members of different departments, allows work-friendships to evolve and generally improve team-spirit.
When your team is working remotely or is simply distributed across different buildings or cities, you miss out on regular hallway encounters.
Luckily, there are apps to allow regular chats with random co-workers, even for distributed or remote teams. In fact, having a virtual water cooler can be even better than a real one. A virtual water cooler app like Macarons will make sure team members are matched equally and randomly, and they send regular reminders. You can reduce the building of cliques and better integrate more introvert team members, when you let an app generate hallway encounters.
Donut is one of multiple virtual water cooler apps for Slack.
However, we think Macarons is a great alternative to Donut.
Macarons vs. Donut
Donut is an all-purpose meet-and-match app for Slack. While Macarons has a strict focus on random chat roulettes, Donut offers a broad variety of socializing automations. This, however, comes at the price of complex setup and configuration — in addition to a higher monetary price tag.
If you have a large people-and-culture team who want to set up and maintain routines for lunch roulettes, CEO lotteries, introduction matching and peer-learning groups, then Donut might be the right choice for you.
If you just want to get started with random coffee meetings and don't want to spend time with account management and configuration, Macarons is a much simpler and cheaper alternative to Donut.
| Macarons | Donut | |
|---|---|---|
| Unlimited roulette channels | ||
| Customize match group size | ||
| Built in icebreaker library | ||
| Custom icebreakers | ||
| Simple setup & zero config | ||
| Individual pause and skipping settings | ||
| Price per user | $0.99 | $2.00 – $4.00 |