Donut Alternatives for Slack and Microsoft Teams

What Is Donut?

Donut is an employee experience platform that runs inside Slack and Microsoft Teams. Its best-known feature, Intros, randomly pairs people in a channel for informal chats — the original random coffee bot for most teams that have ever run one.

It has since grown well beyond that. Donut now covers Watercooler topics, Celebrations for birthdays and work anniversaries, Journeys for onboarding and training sequences, and peer recognition through Shoutouts with a rewards store. It integrates with Google Calendar and Zoom, and syncs from 50+ HRIS platforms on paid tiers.

Donut reports 20,000+ teams using it, including Buffer, Gelato and GitLab. That's real, and it matters: it's the most battle-tested option here by a wide margin, and it is not a product anyone should switch away from casually.

The free tier covers one Slack channel for Intros, Watercooler and Celebrations, with Intros limited to 24 users per round. Paid Standard and Premium tiers are priced by active user count — check their pricing page for current figures, as they change.

Why Do Teams Look for a Donut Alternative?

Four reasons come up repeatedly, and only one of them is really about Donut being deficient.

You hit the 24-user ceiling. The free tier's Intros cap is per round, so it bites the moment your program succeeds. Team 25 signs up and you're making a budget decision you weren't planning on.

You want coffee chats, not an engagement platform. Donut's paid tiers bundle Journeys, Celebrations, recognition and a rewards store. If you genuinely want all of that, it's good value. If you want random pairings and nothing else, you're paying for surface area you'll never open.

Pairing doesn't know your org chart. Random means random. A graduate paired with a director two levels up doesn't get a relaxed chat — they get a nervous half-hour they prepare for like an interview. This is the most common reason these programs quietly lose participants, and it isn't specific to Donut; most tools in this category pair by channel membership, not reporting lines.

You're not on Slack or Teams at all. Some organisations run on email, and every Slack-native tool is a non-starter.

The Five Options Compared

1. Stay with Donut

Choose this if: you want Celebrations, onboarding Journeys or recognition alongside coffee chats; you're on Enterprise Grid; you need HRIS sync; or you simply want the option with the longest track record and the largest install base.

It's worth being blunt: if Donut is working and the price is tolerable, switching tools to save a few dollars per head is a bad trade. Migration costs you the participation habit you spent months building, and habit is the hard part of these programs — not software.

2. Macarons

Choose this if: you're on Slack, you want random pairings and nothing else, and you want the cheapest predictable per-seat price.

Macarons is deliberately narrow — a chat roulette for Slack that pairs channel members for virtual coffee. You control the frequency and the group size, it ships predefined and custom icebreakers, and individual users can control their own participation. $0.99 per user per month, with a 30-day free trial and no credit card.

The trade-off is scope. Slack only, no Microsoft Teams, and none of the surrounding programs. For a lot of teams that's exactly the point.

3. coffee-roulette.com

Choose this if: your organisation doesn't run on Slack or Microsoft Teams.

coffee-roulette.com is a standalone web tool. Employees register availability, its algorithm matches people based on the days of the week they have in common, and introductions go out by email. That day-matching approach is genuinely useful for organisations with shift patterns or heavy part-time working, where "who's actually free on the same day" is the real constraint.

Pricing is roughly AU$0.99 per employee, charged each time they're matched — usage-based rather than per-seat, which is unusual and works out cheaper for infrequent cadences.

No Slack or Teams integration, so the invitation lands in email rather than where your team already talks.

4. coffeeroulette.org (Free Generator)

Choose this if: you'll handle the messaging yourself and just want the pairing done properly.

coffeeroulette.org is a free browser tool. Paste in your participant list, and it generates random pairs. It can import previous pairings so it avoids repeating matches — the one part of manual coffee roulette that's genuinely tedious to track.

There's no scheduling, no delivery, no participation history and no integration. It's a generator, not a program. But it's free, needs no account, and for a coordinator who's happy to paste the results into a channel, it removes the only annoying step.

5. TeamBlend

Choose this if: the hierarchy problem is the one you're actually trying to solve.

TeamBlend reads your org chart before pairing, and uses it to deliberately avoid manager-report matches and steep hierarchy gaps while still crossing department boundaries. It delivers through Slack, Microsoft Teams or email, tracks participation across rounds, and takes about five minutes to set up.

Being straight about where we are: TeamBlend is in free early access. No credit card — and no customer case studies yet either. Donut has 20,000+ teams and years of production use behind it; we don't, and pretending otherwise on a page like this would be worth less to you than the comparison is.

So the honest recommendation: if org-chart-aware pairing is the specific thing you need, we built for that. If you need a proven platform today, Donut is the safer call, and this page will still be here.

How to Switch Without Killing the Habit

If you do move, the failure mode is losing participants in the gap.

1. Finish the current round first. Don't cut mid-cycle — people with a scheduled chat will just not have it.
2. Announce it in the same channel people already opted into, once, without ceremony.
3. Re-collect opt-ins rather than importing the list. You'll lose some people. You'd have lost them anyway, and the ones who re-opt-in are the ones sustaining the program.
4. Keep the cadence identical. Change one variable at a time. If you switch tool and cadence together, you won't know which one caused the drop.
5. Run the new tool for three rounds before judging it. Round one is always the noisiest.

New to This?

If you're still deciding whether to run a random coffee program at all, start with the fundamentals rather than the tool comparison: What is coffee roulette? →

Is there a free alternative to Donut?

Yes. coffeeroulette.org generates pairings free in the browser, though you send the introductions yourself. Donut's own free tier also covers one channel with Intros for up to 24 users per round. TeamBlend is free during early access.

What's the cheapest Donut alternative?

Macarons at $0.99 per user per month is the cheapest predictable per-seat option. coffee-roulette.com's per-match pricing can work out cheaper on a monthly cadence. A spreadsheet is free and works fine under about 50 people.

Does Donut work with Microsoft Teams?

Yes. Donut supports both Slack and Microsoft Teams. Macarons is Slack-only; TeamBlend supports Slack, Teams and email.

What is Donut's free plan limit?

One Slack channel for Intros, Watercooler and Celebrations, with Intros capped at 24 users per round, up to 3 messages in one Journey, and 12 default Watercooler topics.

Do I need a tool at all?

Under about 50 people, no. A spreadsheet with a random sort and a second tab logging past pairings does the job in fifteen minutes a round. How to run coffee roulette manually →