Daily Slack Channel Summarizer With n8n And Claude

If you’ve ever come into work to find 400 unread Slack messages and spent 20 minutes skimming to figure out what actually matters — this workflow fixes that. It runs every morning before your team starts their day, reads every message posted in your chosen channels over the past 24 hours, and hands Claude a clean transcript to summarize into four actionable sections: decisions made, tasks assigned, questions still open, and notable links.

The real value isn’t just time savings — it’s organizational memory. Most teams lose critical decisions in Slack threads within 72 hours. This workflow pipes everything into a searchable Notion database, so six months from now you can actually find when and why a decision was made, who owned what, and what questions were never resolved. The #daily-digest channel also creates a natural entry point for async teammates in other timezones who’d otherwise have to read the full fire hose.

Claude 3.5 Sonnet is particularly well-suited here because it handles long context windows and accurately distinguishes substantive decisions from casual conversation — a distinction that simpler keyword-extraction approaches consistently get wrong.

Prerequisites

1. An active n8n instance (n8n Cloud free tier or self-hosted with the community edition)
2. A Slack workspace where you have permission to create an app with channels:history and chat:write scopes
3. An Anthropic API key (Claude 3.5 Sonnet is available on the free tier with rate limits)
4. A Notion integration token and a target database with at minimum Date, Channel, and Summary properties
5. The target Slack channels must be public, or your Slack bot must be invited to private channels

Setup Guide

1. Create a Slack app at api.slack.com/apps — add OAuth scopes channels:history, groups:history, and chat:write. Install it to your workspace and copy the Bot Token.
2. Import the n8n blueprint from the download link above. Open it in your n8n editor.
3. Configure the Schedule node — set your preferred trigger time (default: weekdays 8:00 AM). Select your timezone explicitly or it will default to UTC.
4. Set your channel IDs in the Slack nodes. Use channel IDs (starting with C), not display names — IDs are stable even if channels are renamed. Find them by right-clicking a channel in Slack → View channel details.
5. Add your Anthropic API key in the Claude HTTP Request node header as x-api-key.
6. Connect Notion — paste your integration token and select the target database. Map Date to {{$now}}, Channel to the channel name variable, and Summary to Claude’s output.
7. Test with a single channel first using the manual trigger before enabling the schedule.
8. Invite your Slack bot to the #daily-digest channel with /invite @your-bot-name.

Who This Is NOT For

• Teams smaller than 5 people — if your Slack is quiet, the digest will be trivial and not worth maintaining.
• Highly regulated industries requiring data residency controls — Slack messages will pass through Anthropic’s API. Check your compliance requirements before deploying.
• Teams that need real-time alerts — this is a batch summarizer, not a monitoring tool. For urgent keyword alerts, pair it with a separate Slack bot.
• Workspaces using Slack Enterprise Grid with strict export policies — confirm API access is permitted by your Slack admin before building.