It's not a naive question at all! The 2 biggest differences I can see: - Errbot being chat service agnostic, also makes it feel a bit "non-native" for Slack. F

It's not a naive question at all! The 2 biggest differences I can see: - Errbot being chat service agnostic, also makes it feel a bit "non-native" for Slack. For example, you cannot say "@mybot deploy webapp to production", but you have to say "!mybot deploy webapp to production". slack-machine can work that way as well (with command prefixes like ! or %), but it also responds to actual mentions (@mybot). There are more differences like that, where Errbot tries to be agnostic of the chat service it's running against, but that also means it has to cater to the lowest common denominator in terms of integration with a chat service. slack-machine can for example add "reactions" to messages, which Errbot cannot. - slack-machine seems more feature-rich. Errbot seems to be focused only on commands that are triggered by sending certain chat messages. slack-machine lets you listen to any type of event Slack emits. Examples could be: someone joins a channel, a reaction is added to a message, a message is pinned. slack-machine also has built-in scheduling to trigger plugin functions on a cron-like schedule (Errbot has something similar with pollers, but it's not as flexible as a cron schedule) For me it was a clear design choice to focus only on Slack, so the bots you build with it feel as "integrated" as possible with Slack. You can really leverage all that the Slack API has to offer.