10 best ChatOps tools to streamline devs’ work in 2024

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2. Hubot

GitHub, Inc. wrote the first version of Hubot and chose to describe Hubot as a customizable life-betterment robot. Written in CoffeeScript on Node.js, Hubot is open-source, scriptable, and a standardized way to share scripts. Hubot can be deployed on Heroku. When it comes to UNIX and Windows, you must perform additional steps, such as installing a Node.js package. On Azure, you will need to install azure-cli via npm. 

In summary, here's what Hubot offers:

1. Core scripts; for posting images, translating languages, and integrating with Google Maps.

2. Repository of community Hubot scripts and packages to add to your robot. 

3. Lita

Lita, the robot companion for your chat room, is a chat bot written in Ruby with persistent storage provided by Redis that uses a plugin system to extend to different chat services and provide new behavior to automate your business. It is free and open source. There are several plugins you can install for Lita or write your own. Use chat as the primary interface for business operations, and simple to have Lita perform commands. 

4. Mattermost

Mattermost is an open-source platform for secure collaboration written in Go and React that runs as a single Linux binary with MySQL or PostgreSQL. You can deploy a Mattermost Self-hosted instance in minutes via Docker, Ubuntu, or tar. In addition to the web interface, Android, iOS, Windows PC, macOS, and Linux clients are also available for download. 

Mattermost' strong points include:

1. Team messaging, task and project management, and workflow orchestration in one place

2. Integrated with the tools you rely on, from Jira to GitHub to PagerDuty.

5. Eggdrop

Eggdrop is an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) bot. It sits on an IRC channel and performs automated tasks such as protecting the channel from abuse, allowing privileged users to gain op or voice status, logging channel events, providing information, hosting games, etc. It runs on Linux, BSD, SunOs, Windows, Mac OS X, and Friends and has IPv6 support. 

Here's what you can do with Eggdrop:

1. Module and Tcl scripting support, with which you can make the bot perform almost any task you want. 

2. Link multiple Eggdrop bots together to form a botnet.

6. CloudBot

CloudBot is a simple, fast, expandable open-source Python IRC Bot that runs on Python 3.6 or higher. You can install CloudBot on UNIX (Linux, etc.) and Windows. It sits on an IRC channel and performs automated tasks while looking like a user. The Cloudbot is expandable and can be scripted to perform more tasks. 

7. Lazlo

Lazlo is an event-driven ChatOps automation framework for Slack in Go. Unlike the prototypical IRC bot that responds to text, Lazlo starts at runtime and stays resident in memory. Outwardly, Lazlo acts like a bot, but internally Lazlo works as an event broker for launching plugins, essentially an alternative chatbot platform in Go. 

Lazlo in a a couple of bulletpoints:

1. Message callbacks, Event callbacks, Timer Callbacks, Link Callbacks, Question Callbacks 

2. Write powerful modules in Go and extend Lazlo by writing simple plugins that use Hubot-like syntax in Lua.

8. Gitter

Gitter is an open-source chat and networking platform and chat room system written in JavaScript and designed for individuals. It is available in all modern browsers as well as apps for desktops. You can create, organize and grow your communities and invite others to join. Simply, it’s messaging for people who make software. 

About Gitter:

1. Integrated with your team, projects, and your code. 

2. Free chat rooms for your public repositories

9. Errbot

Errbot is an easily extensible open-source chatbot written in Python that allows you to start scripts interactively from your chatrooms. It runs under Python 3.6+ on Linux, Windows, and Mac. After the initial installation and security setup, Errbot can be administered by just chatting to the ChatOps.

About Errbot:

1. Extensive plugin framework

2. Conversation flows to track conversation states from users.

3. Webhook callbacks support

4. Built-in administration and security

10. StackStorm

StackStorm is an open-source extendable platform for integration and automation across services and tools. StackStorm helps you compose operational patterns as rules and workflows or actions and stores it as code. Stackstorm can automate and streamline nearly any part of your business. 

What makes StackStorm stand out?

1. Auto-remediation, security responses, troubleshooting, and deployments

2. Integrates with your Existing Infrastructure

Choosing a ChatOps tool

ChatOps tools gather all the required collaborators in one integrated place, providing a channel for easy collaboration while capturing the history of every work. 

Incorporating ChatOps tools into your digital work environment will enhance the developers' work. Multiple collaboration channels, the ability to share files, push notification management, video conferencing, access to conversation history, easy integration with other tools, and a well-structured chatbot framework are the features you should look for in a ChatOps tool. 

With several options and the additional features offered, the choice rest with your team and the needs specific to your team. 

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