Donut alternatives: other ways to bring colleagues together.

Donut is a tool for bringing colleagues closer through their chat app. If you're looking for an alternative, the real question isn't "which tool instead?" but "what kind of connection do we want to build?" A one-on-one intro, a group moment, an onboarding ritual: these needs look alike, but they aren't met the same way. This guide walks through the options, with and without software, to help you choose.

What Donut does

According to its website, checked on September 27, 2026, Donut is a platform available on Slack and Microsoft Teams. It offers introductions between colleagues (pairing two people and inviting them to meet), onboarding flows for new hires, peer recognition, and engagement questions in Slack.

That's a useful baseline for comparison: each of those features meets a specific need, and an alternative might cover one of them without covering the others. Before you look for a replacement, write down what you actually use.

Pin down your need before comparing

Ask yourself three questions.

1. Do you want one-on-one meetings or group moments? A one-on-one conversation builds a deep bond between two people. A group moment gets a lot of people crossing paths at once, in less time.
2. Is this about onboarding or day-to-day? Welcoming a new hire is planned like a journey. Keeping longtime colleagues connected comes down to regular habits.
3. How much effort for participants? A thirty-minute coffee chat squeezed into two calendars asks more than a five-minute game you join in one click.

Your answers point to one of the families below.

Alternative 1: set up meetings by hand

A spreadsheet is enough to get started. List the volunteers, draw random pairs every two weeks, and message each pair with a question to kick off the conversation.

• Pros: free, fully customizable, no tool to get approved.
• Cons: it depends on one person, and the draw gets tedious fast once you have more than a few dozen volunteers.

Tip: avoid repeating the same pair, and deliberately mix teams and locations.

Alternative 2: group rituals

Instead of pairs, create occasions where several people cross paths:

• Mixed lunch: tables of four to six, drawn at random, once a month.
• Friday coffee: an open slot on video or in person, where anyone can drop by.
• Lightning talk: one person explains their job in five minutes during a larger team meeting.
• Interest club: a group built around a hobby (running, reading, cooking) that meets regularly.

These formats bring people together without the awkwardness of a one-on-one with a stranger, which suits more reserved people.

Alternative 3: play together

Games are a very effective way to get to know each other, because they give you something in common: you don't have to come up with small talk, you just react to what's happening. A short game gets colleagues interacting who would never have messaged each other, and gets them laughing together.

Options range from a quiz run in a meeting to games in a chat thread (question of the day, emoji polls), all the way to multiplayer game platforms built for work. Our guide to games for Slack covers the formats you can play right in a chat thread.

Kwoji, an option built around group play

Kwoji belongs to that third family. It isn't a one-on-one intro tool: it's a multiplayer game platform designed to create regular interactions between colleagues. You play in the browser, on a computer or phone, each person on their own screen, joining by link, QR code, or short code. Games are short and joining is always optional.

Kwoji isn't played inside Slack or Teams, but it connects to them to announce open games with a link to join. The free plan covers up to 200 members, with 4 games and unlimited play. One of them, Kwoji Hunt, an arcade snake game played in rounds of a few minutes, lets a big group play at the same time.

To really get to know each other, Kwoji Photo shows a mystery photo from a colleague: whose is it? It's part of the Standard plan, which unlocks all 18 games.

On paid plans, the Galaxy in the Cohesion space shows whether groups are actually mixing: it counts by group, never by individual. The Kwoji for business page covers the full offer, and our Donut comparison page puts the two approaches side by side.

Mistakes to avoid

• Switching tools without looking at usage: if nobody was joining, the issue may be the format, not the tool.
• Making it mandatory: a forced connection feels like a chore.
• Forgetting remote people: an in-office-only ritual shuts out anyone working from home or another site.
• Launching everything at once: start with one format, let it settle, then add another.

To go further, our guide to games for Microsoft Teams explains how to run a game during a meeting, and our piece on team building on no budget lists more ideas that are easy to set up.