Nowadays, business software list may be needed if we want to run a business smoothly and properly. How we define it? It is a term referring to virtual programs we can use for our matters in work and manage them easier and faster. Let’s get through with the most commonly used programs.
There are many different types of business software which can be used to improve business. Some improve business management whereas others streamline marketing or sales. Below is an overview of the most frequently requested software’s for business management.
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.
Slack is an incredible tool for both group and one on one communication. Slack allows you to break up your conversations in “channels” making relevant information easy to find. To add to the convenience, Slack comes with an easy to use mobile-app and integrates with many other tools such as Trello, JIRA, and Twitter.
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.
Freshchat
In order to personalize the customer experience, which should be your number one priority in 2019, you have to be able to communicate with the customer across multiple channels. One way to do this while speeding up the buyer’s journey is by using live chat software.
Freshchat offers a free version of its software, which can alert users of messages, provides a mobile app for messaging on the go, social media integrations, and a priority inbox for better message organization.
20. SurveyMonkey
Finally, when all is said and done, you want to leave your customers with a survey to gain key insights into the buyer’s journey. What was it like to do business with your startup?
SurveyMonkey is a free survey software solution for businesses that want learn more about their customers and how to optimize their business going forward. Users can include 10 questions in their survey, view 100 responses per survey, track email responses, optimize surveys for mobile, and gather responses from social media — all for free.
If you are trying to organize multiple projects with tasks inside each one, then Trello is going to be one of the more user-friendly options available for your startup.
This fast Kanban tool makes it easy for project managers to capture, organize, and prioritize issues, plan sprints, attach files, and provide real-time insights around project status. The free plan provides all the functionality a small startup would need, including a calendar view, repeating tasks, and integrations.
Asana is a lot like Trello in that it’s extremely user-friendly. It allows you to set up projects, add tasks, create checklists, and assign multiple team members. Tasks can be given due dates which will trigger reminder emails, and attachments to store important documents.
Toggl connects with over 100 apps you use everyday to provide accurate and automated time-tracking for teams, agencies, and freelancers. By logging your activity, Toggl can generate reports on what you did with your time at work. This is great for analyzing your own productivity as well as showing clients proof for billable hours.
With a browser extension, mobile apps, native integrations, and connections to over 1,000 other apps via Zapier, you can make sure that none of your time is wasted, no matter where you are.
JIRA is a project management and issue tracking tool aimed at software developers and technical teams. It’s like Trello, but with all of the missing features developers need like sprint management and code deployment. It also offers reports essential to monitoring the progress and efficiency of a software team, like burndown charts and roadmaps.
Since JIRA is an Atlassian product, it has deep native integrations with the rest of the Atlassian suite, including Confluence for managing your internal knowledge base, Bitbucket for managing code commits, and Bamboo for continuous integration.
Skype for Business is available as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 package, which comes with the full Office suite (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.). Skype for Business features all of the stuff you’d expect from a product with Skype in the name: instant messaging, audio calls, and video chat. But it also has features businesses need to keep safe and compliant, like local hosting and permission control.
As part of the Office suite, it also deeply integrates with your calendar and contacts from Outlook, as well as documents from Word and Excel. Are you an existing Microsoft customer? You probably already have this! If not, it’ll set you back $8.25/user/month.
TRUiC Business Ideas Generator
If you’ve got the entrepreneurial spirit and a general interest in creating a business, choosing a business idea is easy using the TRUiC Business Ideas Generator. This is a free tool that allows users to refine their interests into a buildable startup idea.
Pricing: Free
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.
Docracy for Managing Legal Affairs
The fees alone for preparing basic legal documents can make you give up on ever creating your businesses.
And what about the cost of hiring a good attorney to help you out? That’s another one that will eat up your budget as a startup.
But hey, don’t panic, Docracy will help you out.
Docracy is an open-source website that curates legal documents for individuals and companies. The website allows for the sharing and signing of documents such as NDAs, wills, employment, and business contracts, trusts, and all other basic service agreements.
Note, you do want to have all documents you find on the website reviewed by a professional to avoid any complications that might affect your business.
CoFoundersLab
CoFoundersLab is a networking app that connects entrepreneurs to create startups together based on compatibility. The platform boasts a community of roughly 400,000 users to network and connect with as well as business resources and mentorship classes.
Pricing: Free – $19.99/month
Startup Weekend
Startup Weekend is a three-day event for entrepreneurs to engage with other creators, connect with experienced entrepreneurs, and learn about launching a startup. This event aims to give aspiring entrepreneurs an immersive look into what starting and operating a startup is like.
Pricing: Varies depending on the event
Accounting Software and Payroll Software
QuickBooks
Effective accounting is crucial to the financial health of any business. Quickbooks provides accounting software to track sales and expenses, view profit and loss reports, pay employees, and examine financial statements. With Quickbooks’ easy-to-use dashboard, all these features are intuitive and easily accessible, which makes accounting and bookkeeping for your startup easier than ever before.
Pricing: $7.50/month – $75/month
ADP
ADP is a business management app that makes payroll, recruiting, time management, and HR services easy using one user-friendly platform. If you aren’t sure that you’ll need all of the services ADP has to offer, however, you can also choose the ones you need and leave the rest so that you aren’t paying for any services you don’t need.
Pricing: Varies depending on business needs
Gusto
Gusto makes management employees a breeze with tools to issue payroll as well as onboarding and HR services. You can even file and report payroll taxes at both the state and federal levels. Everything you need to manage team members is easily done with this full-service app that is loaded with helpful features.
Pricing: Starts at $39 plus $6 per person per month
Design Tools
TRUiC Logo Maker
A startup’s logo is used on everything from business cards to signage; therefore, having a well-crafted logo is crucial to branding the business. Using the TRUiC Logo Maker, you can design a logo of your own with the easy-to-use generator that asks only a few simple questions to provide you with a logo that represents your startup’s brand.
Pricing: Free
Adobe Creative Cloud
Design, create, and manage your startup’s projects on one simple platform, Adobe Creative Cloud. With an extensive list of included features such as Adobe stock images, Typekit, Behance, and more, the Adobe Creative Cloud provides startups with a space to complete, share, and sync creative projects seamlessly.
Pricing: For businesses, $33.99/month – $79.99/month
Canva
Bring your startup’s dream to life with Canva, a design app that makes collaborating on creative projects with your team members simple and enjoyable. Canva is equipped with custom templates and designs as well as features to easily share and print designs professionally. Not to mention, you can pay absolutely nothing while still accessing design tools and over 250,000 templates.
Pricing: Free – $30/month/person
Startup Marketing Tools
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media marketing app that gives entrepreneurs the tools to create an effective social media marketing strategy on one easy-to-use platform. Depending on the plan you choose, you can keep 5 to 35 of your social media platforms on the Hootsuite app to manage and monitor your accounts.
Pricing: $25/month – $599/month
Mailchimp
A successful email marketing campaign can drive site traffic and grow your customer base. Mailchimp makes creating an effective email marketing campaign a breeze by providing tools to grow and manage mailing lists, view audience data, and more. Not to mention, users can design custom email templates to align with their branding.
Pricing: Free – $299/month
Yelp for Business
Every day, consumers turn to Yelp to review and research businesses. With Yelp for Business, you can communicate with these users, update your profile to include important information about your business, and utilize helpful analytics to develop advertisements that appeal to new customers.
Pricing: Free – Varied pricing depending on business needs
Website Builders
Wix
Having a website for your startup is great, but with more and more people searching the web through their mobile devices, a website builder like Wix that helps you create a website that is mobile friendly is key. With Wix, you can design, manage, and optimize your website for growth using their custom SEO plans to boost site traffic and reach new customers.
Pricing: $14/month – $39/month
Weebly
Unlike many other website builders, Weebly offers users the opportunity to create a free website with features you can upgrade to as your startup grows. For ecommerce startups, Weebly’s built-in Square software makes selling, marketing, and processing orders seamless.
Pricing: Free – $26/month
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is basically a one-stop-shop for your website building needs. Not only does the platform host websites, but you are also able to design unique, mobile-friendly websites that include marketing features as well as manage reviews and social media. If you’re hoping to keep all of your startup’s online platforms organized into one space, GoDaddy has some great options for you.
Pricing: Free – $24.99/month
Squarespace
Award-winning, user-friendly design is the hallmark of Squarespace. Users can design their website for free using their two-week free trial and upgrade the site as they go to include premium marketing features. Squarespace works for a range of startup types, whether you’re selling and marketing goods or scheduling appointments — their a la carte style allows you to choose what your startup website needs and leave the rest.
Pricing: $12/month – $40/month
WordPress
One of the most popular website builders, WordPress provides a platform for website design that suits a litany of startup types and budgets. With over 54,000 plugin tools, from analytics to ecommerce, you can absolutely create a website that meets your startup’s needs on WordPress.
Pricing: Free – $45/month
Project Management Software
Monday
Managing your startup’s projects is made much easier with software that prioritizes communication and organization. Fortunately, Monday, the project management app, is all of these things. Create projects, add tasks, outline steps, and give instruction to team members while tracking the status of projects using this app’s handy platform.
Pricing: Varies depending on business needs
Asana
With Asana, productivity is the number one priority. The project management app helps startups streamline workflow by making organizing projects easy. Team members can communicate project stats, create projects, solidify timelines, and outline necessary steps all on Asana’s platform.
Pricing: Free – $24.99/user/month
Trello
Organizers, this app is for you. Trello is an app dedicated to making project management and organization simple with in-app due dates, calendar commands, and more. Better yet, you can link Trello with other useful apps such as Dropbox and Google Docs to streamline the project management process even further.
Pricing: Free – Varied pricing depending on business needs
Legal Tools for Startups
Rocket Lawyer New Business Bundle
It’s not a secret that hiring an attorney isn’t exactly budget-friendly. However, it’s common for startups to require ongoing legal services, which can cost a hefty percentage of your budget. Rocket Lawyer provides a discount rate to form an LLC that includes incorporation service, one year of registered agent service, and a full year of legal services at half the price.
Pricing: $349.99 + State Fee
Startup Productivity Tools
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is the full Google package, including every tool offered such as Gmail, Calendar, Meet, Chat, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms, and Sites. So, basically all of the Google office tools your startup needs, including a custom business email account. For teams that could use a little help collaborating, productivity is optimized by having all business tools in one place.
Pricing: $6/user/month – $18/user/month
OmniFocus
Do you depend on a well-crafted to-do list to manage your team’s projects? If yes, OmniFocus is the productivity app for you. With a focus on time management and organization, OmniFocus helps startups and their team members stay on top of important tasks and get things done.
Pricing: Starts at $49.99
43. RescueTime
The internet is a super useful tool, but it’s also the host of several work distractions such as social media and news. RescueTime helps users manage their time via detailed reporting about screen time, such as the site and applications used and the time spent on each. Based on these findings, you can set time limits for apps and websites or even restrict them to keep you on task.
Pricing: $78/year or $12/month
Todoist
Another app that is best suited for dedicated to-do list makers, Todoist does just that. Create to-do lists to organize projects and tasks to keep productivity high and organization steady. You can also add tasks to the calendar, delegate tasks, discuss and track projects, and more on Todoist’s easy-to-use platform.
Pricing: Free – $5/user/month
Outsourcing Tools
Upwork
Are you thinking of hiring freelancers for your startup? Upwork makes finding contractors in almost every field — from web design to copywriting — super simple. With their rating and reference system, you can feel confident about your short-term hires by diving into their skill level, background, and reviews from other clients.
Pricing: Free – $849/month
WriterAccess
Find the writers your startup needs with WriterAccess, a platform that helps businesses source freelance content creators through casting calls, AI-powered matching software, and advanced search tools. Even the vetting process is easy, with star ratings and customer reviews to muse over before hiring a new writer.
Pricing: $39/month – $99/month
Fiverr
Fiverr is a freelance service platform that makes hiring contractors more affordable with projects starting at $5 a job. On Fiverr, you can find freelancers in a variety of fields. Whether you are looking for drop shippers or web developers, Fiverr’s proven business experience and customer success management will make you feel confident hiring from their app.
Pricing: Starts at $5/job
Google Docs/Sheets/Slides/Forms
A Free alternative to the MS Office suite, the office tools offered by Google help startup owners to create and share word documents, excel sheets, presentations and forms, and share them with their team members without having to send the edited files again and again. Its accessibility options further ensure only selected people can view the files, and you can also see who made what change to the file, as well as the entire edit history.
Hemingway
Hemingway is an online word editor that lets you analyze the readability of your content. It also tells you the changes you should make to your content to make it more readable by telling you which sentence needs what kind of fix. Grammarly also does the same with its paid version. The added advantage of Grammarly’s paid version is that it also verifies the originality of the content with its plagiarism checker.
Canva
Canva is an online graphic design tool used for generating social posts, blog graphics, Twitter headers, Facebook ads and the likes. The website holds a library of around a million fonts, photos, as well as icons. Users can select a design template or opt to create one from scratch using drag-and-drop features. Uploading, adding and creating images is quite an easy task with Canva. The basic account is free of cost. Additional graphics and photos uploaded by freelance designers can be used for just $1 each.
Hyperise
It is well-established that the human brain processes an image way faster than text. Hyperise is a SaaS tool that lets you add hyper-personalized layers to an image which captures visitor attention and improves conversion rates. With Hyperse, you can use your website visitor’s IP address or a prospect’s email address to build an enriched profile that includes the website logo, company details, website screenshots, user profile images, etc. to personalize your image or landing page with such information.
Shoptimizer
Shoptimizer is a fast WooCommerce theme from CommerceGurus built around the twin objectives of speed and conversions. Research has shown that even a one-second delay results in a 7% reduction in conversions, and Shoptimizer scores incredibly well across all the major speed benchmarking services. It includes theme options to automatically minify its stylesheet and load ‘critical CSS’ which has a dramatic impact on load times.
The key pages load almost instantly and the theme feels very responsive as a result. CommerceGurus have added a number of conversion features also, including a distraction-free checkout option, trust badges beside key call-to-action buttons, and a call me back option. When it comes to designing your own pages, the light, and lean Elementor page builder is deployed, allowing users to easily create beautiful layouts. There are also numerous theme options within the customizer which allows buyers to quickly change fonts, colors, and settings and see the results instantly.
Cloudways
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting provider that is built for online businesses. Based in Malta and serving a diverse global audience, Cloudways is all about simplicity and freedom. From the choice of five industry-leading cloud providers to 50+ 1-Click platform operations, Cloudways ensures that visitors do not have to face slow loading websites and security issues. Platform features include free SSL certificates, IP whitelisting, unlimited staging sites and a high-paying affiliate program.
Conclusion
We have all seen the startups popping up everywhere claiming to be the next big thing. Whether you are thinking about starting your own business or you are already in business, you do need to use software for getting your startup set up.