Once your collaboration tools are chosen, you can start working with them right away. You will not have to spend days to learn how they work, months to figure out what they are capable of, or even years to master any of them. When you free up time for your real job that will allow you to develop competences that bring real value to your company. Give it a try now.
Collaborating on a project with remote teams is one of the perks of the Internet Age. With several great tools for remote collaboration, you can work from anywhere at any time on projects with people from around the world. Below are some examples of the offerings available to help make your project-based collaboration successful.
Flock
With Flock, team members can exchange messages, share files, host video conferences, manage to-dos, and set up calendar events all from one easy-to-use app. Flock integrates with popular business tools such as Google Calendar, Google Drive, Asana, MailChimp, and Twitter, making it easier for team members to stay on top of things without juggling a dozen different apps.
Flock’s free plan gives your team:
- Unlimited team members and one-to-one messages
- 10 public channels for group conversations
- Unlimited 1:1 video calls
- 5GB storage for file sharing and 10K message history for quick search
- Built-in productivity apps such as shared notes, polls, and reminders
- Unlimited integrations for third-party services, such as Asana, Jira, or Google Drive
Need more room? Flock PRO unlocks enhanced admin controls, group video conferencing, unlimited channels, guest accounts, more file storage, and access to priority support. At just $4.50 per user per month, we think it’s a steal, but our free plan is pretty generous and well, free. It’s your call.
Microsoft Teams
Initially an exclusive for businesses with Office 365 subscriptions, Microsoft Teams has since launched a free plan for small businesses. We love its innovative features such as inline translation for messages and the ability to record meetings with automatic transcriptions. Also a plus, its deep integrations with OneDrive and Office 365 services.
Image: Microsoft
Microsoft Team’s free plan
- Up to 300 users
- Unlimited messages, channels, and search
- Unlimited audio and video meetings with up to 250 participants
- 10GB of team file storage + 2GB per user
- 140+ apps and service integrations
For advanced collaboration features such as meeting recordings and automatic transcriptions, you’ll need to pony up for an Office 365 subscription. Office 365 Business Essentials costs $5 a user per month and the full-featured Office 365 Business Premium will set you back $12.50 a user per month.
Discord
Discord bills itself as an all-in-one voice and text chat for gamers, and it’s clear why. In addition to the usual private and group DMs, Discord offers a new way of collaborating in real-time: Voice channels. Think of them as always-on radio channels to talk to your team. Loved by gamers, voice channels can also be an easier, less stressful way to collaborate remotely on shared documents. More importantly, Discord offers unlimited voice, video, and text chat—all for free!
Image: Hacker Noon
Discord’s free plan
- Unlimited users, messages, text and voice channels, and file sharing (individual file size < 8MB)
- Unlimited video conferences with up to 10 participants + screen sharing
- A cool Text-to-Speech function that reads out what you type!
Discord Nitro Classic lets you upload a GIF avatar, use custom emojis everywhere, and ups that pesky file size limit to 50MB – for $4.99 per user per month.
Rocket.Chat
If on-premise software is a must, look no further than Rocket.Chat’s open-source team collaboration app. Easily deployed to on-premise or cloud servers, Rocket.Chat is free with zero restrictions on core functionality. It’s your server! Just one caveat: If there’s trouble, you’re probably on your own – the free plan doesn’t come with any web, email, or phone support, so be prepared to hunt through pages of technical documentation for any fixes.
Image: GitHub
Rocket.Chat’s free plan
- Unlimited users, messages, channels, video calls, and file sharing
- It’s open-source, customizable, and you own all your data (again, it’s your server)!
- Inline message translations
Rocket.Chat offers cloud-based deployment plans with 24/7 email support at $2 a user per month.
Microsoft 365
Share and edit documents, now with messaging
TODAY’S BEST DEALSVISIT SITE
REASONS TO BUY
+Familiar software+Collaborative editing+Teams provides UC+Cost-effective bundling
Microsoft Office may not be the first platform you think of when it comes to collaboration, but this now runs at the heart of the Microsoft 365 cloud-based office suite.
This is important because Microsoft Office remains the most used and therefore important office suite out there, and while there are competitors such as OpenOffice and Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) they still haven’t caught up to the same level of functionality and ease of use.
Therefore as Microsoft Office is likely to be at the heart of many businesses, the move to Microsoft 365 offers a number of advantages, not least the ability for teams to collaborate directly on the same set of documents. This could be anything from work shifts in an Excel spreadsheet, to a presentation in PowerPoint, to client reports written in Word.
Added to this is that Microsoft Teams now comes bundled with a number of Microsoft 365 packages, allowing for Unified Communications integrated with the traditional office software.
What makes Microsoft 365 more attractive is that as a cloud-hosted platform it can be used not just with Windows, but also Mac, Android, and iOS.
Pricing depends on whether you are buying for personal or business use, with fees starting from $6.99 or $8.25 a month per use, with business use requiring pre-paid annual plans.
However, one little advertised alternative option is Microsoft 365 Business Basics, which offers most of the same software packages and options as above, but only comes in at $5 per month per user when paid annually. This makes the entire package extremely cost-effective, especially when compared to standalone UC and collaboration software prices.
Overall, Microsoft 365 doesn’t simply offer a great office suite, but one that is also firmly designed for collaboration and sharing with teams.
Asana
Organisation to the max
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REASONS TO BUY
+Project tracking+Handy integrations
REASONS TO AVOID
-Other apps have better comms features
Asana has been around since 2008, making it a veteran in the collaboration arena, and companies such as Intel, Uber, Pinterest and TED all use it as their core method of communication.
It’s been designed as an easy way for companies to track the work of employees and to get the best possible results. Using the platform, you can create to-do lists for ongoing projects, set reminders for upcoming deadlines and send requests to colleagues. Team members can also assign comments to posts within the app.
You can organize all your projects in a list or board format, and there’s a search function so you can locate past work quickly. In short, Asana is a very effective way to stay super-organized and facilitate conversations when it comes to updates on how work is progressing.
Samepage
Companies looking for the most complete free team collaboration tool — or those that have more communications needs than most — should strongly consider Samepage.
In addition to free audio and video calls with screen sharing features, Samepage’s native task management software features allow team leaders to schedule and track the progress of multiple projects simultaneously.
It also boasts excellent integration with tools like Salesforce, Slack, Google Drive, and even social media integration via Facebook and Twitter.
With a free plan this comprehensive, the vast majority of companies likely will not need to pay for a SamePage plan, though there are paid options available.
Samepage’s free plan includes:
- Unlimited chat and message search history
- Unlimited number of users and guests
- Screen Sharing
- File sharing and editing
- Group audio and video calls
- Group texting
- Up to 2 GB of storage
- Unlimited pages and folders
- Surveys
- Calendar
- Ability to create/assign tasks
Best For: Samepage is best for small teams that need a free team collaboration solution with such robust features that they may be able to avoid ever needing to upgrade to a free plan, and teams with a near-constant need for collaboration.
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.
Conclusion
The process of collaboration is becoming increasingly important with the advent of new financial services in the industry. The collaboration software must have features that are different from the general features required in most other business software. It must be user friendly, easy to adopt with minimal training, have low implementation costs with minimal hardware demands, possess good security provisioning making it safe for sensitive data sharing, be durable to withstand inconsistent network environments, provide offline access to collaborative data when Internet is not available, work well with mobile devices, It should have easy-to-use interfaces so that users can easily share information and synchronize data between different offices