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slackapi/python-slack-sdk
Slack Developer Kit for Python
The official Slack SDK for Python, maintained by Slack themselves. It covers the full surface area of Slack's APIs — Web API, webhooks, Socket Mode, OAuth, SCIM, audit logs — with both sync and async variants. If you're building a Slack bot or integration in Python, this is the starting point, not a choice.
First-party maintenance means it tracks API changes quickly and the method coverage is complete. The sync/async split is clean — WebClient and AsyncWebClient share the same interface so you can switch without rewriting logic. The OAuth module handles the full installation flow including token rotation, which saves a week of work. Socket Mode support means you can run a bot without exposing a public HTTP endpoint, which is genuinely useful for internal tools behind a firewall.
The RTM API is still in the package despite being deprecated for years, which creates noise for newcomers trying to figure out which connection method to use. The Block Kit model builders in slack_sdk.models are incomplete and under-documented — you'll hit cases where you need to fall back to raw dicts anyway, making the abstraction feel half-finished. For anything beyond simple message posting, you're pushed toward the separate Bolt framework, which is a reasonable separation but means the SDK alone doesn't get you far with slash commands or interactive components. The integration test suite requires live credentials, so there's no easy way to run a meaningful test locally without a real Slack workspace.