Collaboration Apps are web-based tools that help you to brainstorm, organize projects, share ideas, create presentations—all through your smartphone or tablet! From thought-capturing tools to document scanners, presentation makers, task list managers, and database organizers to deadlines and schedules—Collaboration Apps make it easy for you to work together.
Collaboration apps bring individuals together to work on a common document. These apps can be used by a single person to draft a document, or multiple people to edit the same document. They are free and may be used for any purpose you choose, including commercial use. Collaboration is a necessity for small businesses, and we remove the most barriers to collaboration. Our collaboration tools are cost-effective and easy to use.
Collaboration applications are a dime a dozen. But the number of tools on the market doesn’t have to get in your way of finding the best collaboration tool for your team. As long as you know what to look for, it won’t be complicated. Here are the best collaboration tools for keeping people connected and ensuring that your process runs smoothly.
What Are Collaboration Tools
An online collaboration tool enables a more coordinated workflow by providing a unified collaborative platform for team discussion, file sharing, online storage for documentation, task assignments, and real-time project collaboration. At their heart, collaboration tools are all about aligning people.
Collaboration software comes in many forms. You’re probably familiar with Slack, a common collaboration online tool with a focus on group messaging. And you’re undoubtedly familiar with widely-used Google collaboration tools (Drive, Docs, Sheets, Hangouts) or perhaps Microsoft collaboration tools
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.
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.
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.
Slack
Unlike some of the other options on this list, Slack has it’s own built-in 1:1 audio/video calling features and chat messenger, making it one of the go-to team collaboration tools for over 10 million daily users.
Though primarily used as a chat messaging app, both the free and paid versions of Slack offer numerous features and app integrations that can quickly transform it into a highly customized communication and task monitoring tool.
Users can create public and private groups and direct chat messaging channels according to the topic, department, project, and more. Within those conversations, users can tag each other, upload files in multiple formats, react with emojis, and reply to messages directly in a thread.
Users can also upload polls to chat, create shortcuts, set reminders, and update their status in Slack. Muting and starring messages make it easy to ensure that you stay on top of all messages while not being disturbed when necessary.
Slack’s free plan allows users to:
- Create an unlimited number of channels
- Integrate up to 10 apps
- Store/Search the past 10,000 messages
- Enable two-factor authentication
- Share files and store up to 5 GB
As of this writing, screen sharing and annotation in Slack are only possible with paid plans, but both features are native to the app itself. Our list of Slack alternatives provides options that offer screen sharing and annotation in free versions. In order to share screens within the free versions, users will need to integrate tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Best For: Slack is best for remote or in-house small teams that primarily communicate via chat messaging and create channels per department, team, or even project. Teams that operate in a primarily collaborative environment that need to be able to communicate with each other instantly — but without email — will also enjoy Slack.
Microsoft 365
Share and edit documents, now with messaging
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.
Conclusion
Collaboration is fundamentally more accessible, effective, and enjoyable. A new generation of tools allow people to co-create, participate, share, and communicate in entirely new ways without relying on IT departments
There are a lot of collaboration apps online to choose from, which is good. But sometimes, this can be hard because of the many choices. With this post, you get ideas of the best collaboration tools that you can use for your business.