A Ricotta alternative with a free tier, on Discord and Telegram too

Who Ricotta is good for

Ricotta is a team-games app for Slack, Microsoft Teams and Webex. It runs more than twenty activities: trivia contests, picture quizzes and trivia of the day; icebreakers such as Two Truths and a Lie, This or That and Never Have I Ever; word games including Word of the Day, Daily Anagram, Weekly Connections and Hangman; and two-player games like Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4. On Slack it prices flat per workspace in tiers by user cap: Basic at $34 a month and Standard at $39 for up to 50 users, Growth at $59 for up to 200, Enterprise at $99 for up to 500, with lower rates on annual billing and a 14-day trial. Teams and Webex have their own price lists. If your company is on one of those platforms and wants a wide menu of games without per-user math, Ricotta already fits that brief.

Where Hijinks differs

A lower flat price, and a free tier

Hijinks is also flat, per organization and at a different scale. Free is $0 for 10 games a day and up to 10 players per game, with every category open. Pro is $5 a month for unlimited games and 50 players per game. Team is $15 a month for unlimited games, 200 players per game and the word games. Annual billing gives two months free. A 50-person team pays $5 or $15 a month rather than $34 to $39 on Ricotta's Slack plans.

Discord and Telegram as well as Slack

Ricotta covers Slack, Microsoft Teams and Webex. Hijinks runs the same games on Slack, Discord and Telegram, with Microsoft Teams planned after launch — useful if your company chats in one place and your community or side project in another. Our Discord quiz bot guide covers the Discord specifics.

Live, async and scheduled

Live rounds with 30 seconds per question by default (adjustable from 15 to 60), async rounds answered in a DM by a deadline, and on Pro and Team, scheduled recurring rounds and a trivia of the day. Questions come from a shared question bank, and new questions on current events are added daily; those pass an automated sensitivity screen, and any it flags wait for human review. Custom questions import from CSV on Pro and Team. Leaderboards run weekly, monthly and all-time, with category champions.

Overlapping games, with a different mix

Icebreakers (Would You Rather, Hot Takes, Most Likely To), Small Talk prompts, word games on the Team plan (Wordle, Anagram, Hangman), True/False, Rebus, Charades, Pictionary, Celebrations for birthdays and anniversaries, Virtual Coffee 1:1 intros and Know Your Team. Ricotta has more games overall, including two-player games; Hijinks adds Rebus, Charades, Pictionary and Celebrations in the same app. The icebreaker questions page shows the real prompt bank.

Side by side

Switching from Ricotta

There is no automated migration between the two, so leaderboards start fresh. Try the games on the Free tier in a test channel for a couple of weeks. Custom questions (imported by CSV) and scheduled rounds need Pro or Team, so bring your own questions over once you move up a plan, and switch your main channel when the habit sticks. Hijinks is in private beta today; the waitlist is how you get access when your workspace can install it.

Comparing more than one app? See the Water Cooler Trivia alternative and Trivia (Heron HR) alternative pages, or the guide to choosing a Slack trivia bot. All four apps sit side by side in one comparison table.