Have you ever found yourself in the need of an open-source tool for your startup? One that is easy to use, reliable, and available for free? Look no further. I have carefully selected the top free software for startups here. I have also included a section of premium tools for further research.
The best way to start is by going through this review that has been designed for best free software for startups.
Litmus
Litmus is a third-party email testing and analytics platform. Litmus helps validate the delivery of your email campaigns, ensuring your design and formatting choices are consistent across multiple browsers and platforms, while making sure there is little chance of campaign emails ending up in the spam folder.
Pricing
Free 7-day trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
Alternatives
20. Verify Email
Verify Email is a simple service that verifies your email marketing lists. It connects to the email server and checks if the email exists or not, which is useful if you are re-engaging old leads or contacts.
Pricing
Plans start at $14 per 50,000 email addresses tested.
Alternatives
21. Bananatag
Bananatag is a third-party email tracking platform for sales teams. It allows you to easily track all of your sales email campaigns to learn more about which leads are interacting with your campaign emails, which links they are clicking, and which leads are worth following up with. This includes Gmail and Outlook integrations, so it’s suitable for most sales teams and businesses.
Pricing
Plans start at $12.50 per month.
Alternatives
22. Good Email Copy
A simple tool from the team at Front, Good Email Copy does exactly what it says on the label — provides a repository for time-tested, effective email copy for campaign inspiration.
You can view email copy used for acquisition and onboarding campaigns from some of the most successful SaaS businesses in the world, so you know the examples have been instrumental in creating customer value and business success.
Pricing
Free.
24. Google Optimize
Optimize is a part of the Google Marketing Platform and is a comprehensive website testing tool that allows you to run tests on your website copy, layout, and call-to-actions so you can make sure your site runs at its best for each and every visitor.
Optimize natively integrates with Google Analytics, so you can immediately start to draw insights about your website and run A/B, multivariate, and redirect tests to learn what works best for your site visitors.
Pricing
Free for Optimize; Optimize 360 pricing is custom.
Alternatives
Live Chat Startup Tools
25. Olark
Olark is one of the most popular live chat applications for businesses. If offers a no-fuss approach to live chat software, and has improved its design and offering over the past couple of years.
Olark also offers an extensive integration portfolio to ensure chat leads captured on your site are sent to the right tools in your marketing stack.
Pricing
Free 2-week trial, paid plans start at $17 per month.
Alternatives
26. Intercom
Intercom is a multi-product toolset that is all about lead generation and customer satisfaction. Its products span multiple categories, including Messages (for targeting in-app messaging and email campaigns), Inbox (for teams to manage chat, email and social), and Articles (for knowledge base and Wiki publishing). All of these products are built on their core Intercom CRM platform.
Pricing
Intercom CRM is free, pricing for all apps starts at $136 per month.
Alternatives
Search Engine Optimization Tools for Startups
27. Keyword Tool
Keyword Tool lets you find complementary keywords using Google’s autocomplete engine. Use as an alternative to Google keyword research — capable of building 750+ long-tail keyword combinations with the free version.
Pricing
Free; pro plans start at $88 per month for advanced features and granular data.
Alternatives
Trello for Project Management
Team communication, collaboration, and management are the three magic pillars holding every successful startup you see today. With Trello, you get all these things and even more.
Trello is a free, flexible, simple, and easy-to-use project management software. This web-based software offers you a visual representation of all your tasks and how to effectively manage them with your team.
As a result, every member of your team knows what others are up to, and how far they’ve come. This ensures everyone is on the same page, which in turn removes miscommunication from the team.
Kanban boards are a popular choice for project management because of their streamlined and visual design. You can, however, mix and match them with online Gantt charts for a more comprehensive project overview. Find out how in our article on mixing Kanban boards with Gantt charts for better project management.
2. Zoom for Video Conferencing
Gone are the days where you can’t have a good business network without being there in person to either create it or manage it.
Video calls and conferencing have bridged the gap with networking in such a way where you can actively meet, and engage with your customers just as if you’re there in person.
There are a lot of web-based applications out there that can help you with your video calls, but none like Zoom.
Zoom is the number one service of choice for video conferencing and currently has over 300 million+ users all around the world, with an A+ rating on trusted websites like Trust Radius, G2, and Gartner.
As a startup, Zoom helps you connect better with your audience as it is built to support businesses of all kinds —including yours.
The free plan on Zoom allows you to host up to 100 participants at a time, plus you get unlimited one-on-one meetings which are quite okay for a new business.
3. Hootsuite for Social Media Management
As a new business, it’s okay to want to dream big, stay up-to-date, and want to get up on everyone’s social feed as soon as you launch.
But perhaps you think it’ll be costly, stressful, and difficult to manage.
Well, I’m here to tell you it’s not.
With just a simple dashboard, friendly interface, plus an easy onboarding process, you’re good and ready to start managing your social media with Hootsuite.
And yeah, it’s free!
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media profiles across different networks of choice. You also get to schedule your posts, track engagements, and keep track of useful analytics that contribute to your business’ growth.
The free version of Hootsuite allows only a single user and social media accounts. That’s more than enough to get you started on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin or perhaps Instagram — pick your favorite three.
Read on: See a few more tips on how to boost your content marketing team’s productivity.
4. Calendly for Schedule Management
Nothing kills a business faster than missed, or late appointments with prospects.
It doesn’t matter if it’s scheduling work shifts, events, conference calls, or meetings, without the proper management, it all falls apart.
And yeah, it’s never easy keeping track of everything especially if you don’t have an assistant to help you out.
This is where Calendly comes in to streamline the whole process while taking the load off your back so you can use your time for something better.
Calendly is a free, and easy-to-use, online appointment scheduling software. It pretty much takes care of scheduling your appointments, events, and meetings based on your availability.
It doesn’t matter if the person booking time with you doesn’t use Calendly, you’re still good to go.
Calendly also comes with simple integration to your favorite apps such as Zoom, Gmail, Salesforce, Hubspot, Stripe, intercom, PayPal, Zapier, and so much more.
Many of us are dependent upon our GCals and Outlook Calendars to remember all our appointments and plans. If you find it hard to tear yourself away from your online calendars, you can instead try integrating it with your other startup tools.
Read on to see to how to sync Outlook and Google with Ganttic’s resource planner. Or find out how to tun your Google Calendar into a Gantt chart.
5. Mailchimp for Email Marketing
New business? new to the email marketing game? Mailchimp’s got you covered.
One of the big questions on the lips of most startups is “how do we keep our businesses in the minds of our customers/audience?”.
With over 100+ answers to the question, email marketing is in the top 3 —and no better way to do email marketing than with Mailchimp.
Mailchimp comes packed as an all-in-one email marketing platform for every business you may find yourself in.
With the free version allowing you to send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers, you’ve got yourself and your brand a good newsletter to keep your audience glued.
Some of its best features include beautiful templates, easy personalization, advanced analytics, retargeting, built-in photo editing, and so much more.
6. Slack for Instant Messaging
It’s always a hassle when you have to go back and forth with emails, calls, texts, and all sorts of ways to communicate with your team.
Heck, you sometimes might get lost in the conversation and have to start all over.
Well, enough of that, Slack solves all those problems for you.
Slack is a messaging tool that allows teams to manage their conversations easier and better across multiple platforms and devices. It creates workspaces for everyone on the team to have private group discussions, messages, file exchange, apps, tools and so much more.
For the most part, Slack is free and covers most of the things your startup will need to function properly —some of which include a 5GB file storage limit, and 10 custom, or app integration.
7. Enloop for Business Planning
Every startup pretty much knows what it wants first hand —whether it’s remodeling their existing process or starting a new one.
But getting from point A to point B in a startup requires a well thought out plan and strategy for there to be any success, to begin with.
You obviously might not have the budget to hire someone to help you out, and even doing it yourself might be tedious, which is why you need a tool like Enloop.
Enloop is a simple, easy, and free-to-use online business plan writing software.
With Enloop, you can easily create a detailed, and professional-looking business plan that comes with a 3-year financial forecast reporting, account analysis, real-time performance score, and business plan score to save you time on trial and error.
Ganttic for Resource Planning
Building and running a startup requires proper management of available resources. Things such as financing, people management, equipment distribution, facility management, and others involve a steep learning curve that shouldn’t be handled lightly.
On the other hand, a resource planning tool will come as an advantage to help you schedule and plan all your resources to get the best possible outcome.
Ganttic is a resource planning and project portfolio management software that does an equally great job for scheduling people, projects, facilities, and equipment.
You can create schedules simply by dragging and dropping tasks. Customizing Ganttic to your needs is easy thanks to its flexible interface.
The software is good for scheduling and reporting, tracking milestones, and capacity utilization. You can sync Ganttic with Google Calendar and leave notes in the app to collaborate with your team.
Ganttic offers your startup a free option. If you have less than 10 resources, then you can take advantage of Ganttic for free, forever. Once you start growing and your business increases, you can choose exactly the kind of plan that works for you.
Plus, with costs way less than the average software, you’ll be able to save even more money when you do upgrade.
Canva for Graphic Design
Having a powerful, professional and visually pleasing digital presence has never been more important than now.
From the type of images, icons, social media campaigns, flyers, and banners you use for your brand, they all speak a whole lot more than you can imagine. All these put together dictates how people look and feel about your brand when they see it pop up on their phones, laptops, or TV screen.
If the goal of your marketing strategy is to look professional and eye-catching, then Canva is what you should be using.
Canva is a great graphic design platform that enables you to create visual content easier, faster, and better. With its ready-made templates and few clicks of a button, you can create social media profile headers, flyers, banners, logos, infographics, marketing ads, blog graphics, and so much more.
With the free version of Canva, you can get by on your budget marketing and make your digital presence stand-out in a sea of startups.
And you’ll be called a pro at the office too, I promise.
Conclusion
As a true startup it means that you have to spend a lot of time and energy not just on developing your company, but also on managing the day to day tasks. To help you with these operations, this review was prepared for startups.