Free Team Collaboration Tools are the mind mapping tools of the 21 st century. They are used by team leaders to convey their ideas, brainstorm, organize their thoughts and create the strategic plan for their companies. Once they have completed that task, they can then easily share these ideas with their teams for review, revision and implementation.
Free Team Collaboration Tools for Individuals and Small Teams – A complete set of products designed to help teams create products, written documentation and project plans quickly and efficiently, with the flexibility of working collaboratively, regardless of where everyone is connected.
Trello
Every business needs a task management platform, like Trello.
Trello is a digital collaboration tool that gives you a visual of all the projects or tasks your team is working on. It also shows you who is working on them and how much they’ve accomplished.
It works like a virtual whiteboard filled with post-it-note-like cards stacked in lists that can be moved across the board from a project’s phase to the next.
The layout focuses on the team’s view so that whoever checks a Trello board can understand the status of a project or task without having to email anyone for updates. Collaborators can assign themselves to any project or task they’re involved in.
Moreover, Trello is completely customizable. It allows users to build and customize their board according to their preferences and processes, not being tied to a predetermined structure.
But what makes Trello even better for startups is that its core product is free, regardless of location or industry.
Buffer
Over the years, social media has become a powerful marketing tool, and nowadays, a business that doesn’t have a solid social media presence might as well not exist.
In come Buffer, a team collaboration tool for carefully crafting timed posts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
With one free account, users can manage one Twitter, one Facebook and one LinkedIn account with up to 10 pre-scheduled updates. For $65 per month, you can manage eight social accounts, send out 2,000 scheduled posts, and have a second-team member help manage the process.
Which option you choose will depend a lot on the industry your business operates in, and whether you conduct most of your business online or offline.
However, every brand, no matter the industry or size, should harness the marketing power of social media, and Buffer’s free account is the best option to start out with.
Skype
Skype is one of the most popular and widely used communication tools in the world. It became so popular, that in 2011, Microsoft acquired it for a hefty $8.5 billion.
And contrary to what people expected post-acquisition, Skype has remained a free app.
Skype allows both audio and video calls, sharing your screen during video calls, and it can also call and text regular phone numbers and Skype users outside your company.
Another cool feature of this app is that, while offline, it still allows you to read and search past messages, as well as type in new messages which will be automatically sent when your internet connection is restored.
Should one or more team members miss a call, you can record your Skype calls to keep everyone in the loop.
For startups and smaller teams that need to be able to keep track of messages and communications, Skype is an excellent option. It works on virtually every device.
join.me
If you’re looking for a less expensive desktop sharing/webinar app, like GoToMeeting, then join.me is your best bet.
Starting at just $10 per month, join.me makes screen sharing and video conferencing a snap. It’s easy to start and easy to join.
There’s no software to download or special equipment needed. Everything is online, making it perfect for presentations, sales demos, and ad hoc get-togethers you need to get work done.
So, whether your team is under the same roof or across the country, join.me instantly brings everyone together to share an idea, collaborate on a project, or close a big deal.
With join.me’s admin console, directory, and app integrations, your team can easily take online collaboration to the next level. On the cheap.
Google Suite
Google’s suite of products is probably the most accessible and widely used collaboration platform, by individuals and businesses alike.
You get free, super-useful tools like Google Docs, Sheets, Calendar or Mail, that pretty much everyone in the world knows how to use.
With Docs and Sheets, you can create, store in the cloud and share documents and Excel files/tables, allow other people to view or edit these documents and have access to them at all times.
You just need a connection to the internet.
You can also customize the calendar and share it with your team members and even set up notifications via email for those events that are of higher importance.
All the tools in the Google suite of products are easy to use, and everything gets stored in the cloud, so you won’t have to worry about losing important work documents or projects.
Asana
Asana’s delightful usability has made it the Slack of project management. In a nutshell, Asana is a tool that makes it easy for remote teams to track projects, tasks, and progress.
It gives you everything you need to stay in sync, hit deadlines, and reach your goals.
Try Asana and you’ll instantly see how incredibly intuitive and incredibly powerful it is. You can use it to manage basic to-do lists or complex team projects or map out each step of your largest projects.
Whether your remote team is building a product, running a marketing campaign, setting company goals, or planning a mission to the moon, Asana will help you plan, manage, track, and launch initiatives that get results.
Asana’s basic plan is free. But there’s nothing basic about it.
It’s perfect for individuals or teams getting started with project management. It includes unlimited projects where you can add as many tasks and attachments as you need.
Tap My Back
Many times, the biggest challenges to managing people remotely are the things you do naturally when working side by side in the office, such as providing work recognition and real-time feedback.
Luckily for remote teams, there’s an app for that: Tap My Back.
With Tap My Back, you can provide your team with real-time appreciation and continuous feedback no matter where they work or what time zone they’re on. You can track your employee’s mood, feedback, and engagement.
Tap My Back uses an automated check-in system that gives people on your team the ability to share how they feel on a continuous basis, so you can keep your fingers on the pulse of your organization.
Sounds amazing, but is it cheap?
Yep, it starts at just $2.50 per user, per month.
Podio
A mobile-friendly collaboration tool
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Easy-to-use interface+Quality mobile apps+Wide range of integrations
Podio describes itself as a flexible and customizable online platform for work and communication among teams. In other words, it gives you a way to organize large stacks of work and to delegate tasks between employees.
Just like many of the other business collaboration apps out there, Podio provides you with the tools to share files, view the status of ongoing projects and get feedback on the things you’re currently working on. These functionalities are combined into an easy-to-use interface.
Podio is also equipped with quality mobile apps for when you’re out and about, and need to use your smartphone or tablet, and it has an impressive amount of integration with third-party services and apps including Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote and Zendesk.
Wrike
Wrike is a scalable desktop and iOS/Android mobile team collaboration platform designed to streamline interdepartmental communication, improve employee productivity, and clarify team member tasks and responsibilities.
Its free plan for up to 5 users includes basic task creation, real-time progress updates and activity streams, board and spreadsheet views, and customizable open-source templates/dashboards.
Users can drag boards to reorder specific tasks according to timelines or priority, and the activity streams are designed to mimic social media feeds for ease of use. Users can create specific activity stream filters to avoid having to comb through irrelevant information to find notes/updates on projects they have been assigned.
While Wrike integrates with Google Hangouts, Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, as of this writing, it does not have a native video calling feature or chat messenger tool (though users can leave comments and tag co-workers on Wrike boards.) In order to make a video call, share screens with others, or use chat messenger features, users will need to connect their preferred tool to Wrike.
Wrike also offers several paid add-on features like Wrike Integrate and Wrike Resource.
The free version of Wrike also includes:
- Organize activity into tasks, folders, or projects
- Task, folder, and project commenting/user tagging
- File sharing and up to 2GB of file storage
- Real-time Live Editor
- Mass Actions for tasks (bulk tasks status updates)
- Task filters according to status, assignee, deadline
- Table (spreadsheet) view
- Cloud storage integrations
- User inbox for notifications
- Google Drive, Outlook, Office 365, Dropbox integrations
Best For: Wrike is best for startups/micro-businesses that have a large amount of smaller daily tasks that don’t generally require a high amount of collaboration, but that are dependent on the task status of other team members’ projects. Popular use cases include product development, event planning, marketing departments, and IT teams.
Conclusion
Free team collaboration tools to plan projects and tasks in real-time. Teams can discuss client work, chat about what they’re working on, and share files from inside the application.