The collaboration tools online are very useful for businesses, especially those who work remotely or who have dispersed teams. Team collaboration becomes easier with all the online collaboration tools available. From file sharing, message boards, to project management, etc., it is now possible to make use of the Web to collaborate with others rather than using email or physical documents.
By definition, collaboration is a mutual or reciprocal activity or contribution to a common project or goals. This is applicable to all fields. For example, in the business world, collaboration is the activity between two entities that share information to achieve common goals.
Online collaboration is a great way to work with others in real-time. Since the advent of the internet, all types of communication have become much easier. Freelancers can easily communicate with clients in a variety of ways, including video conferencing and instant messaging.
Twist
Made by the folks behind Todoist, Twist makes it easy to organize and keep track of discussions with threads. Their message board-like interface is easy to use, though using threads and the inbox (they work more like email threads, not Slack threads) takes some getting used to. The upside? Fewer notifications!
Twist’s free plan
- Unlimited users, guests, messages, channels, and threads
- Access to 1 month of conversations
- 5GB storage for file sharing
- 5 service integrations
Twist doesn’t bother with audio/video conferencing or screen sharing features, they have a Wherein integration instead. For $5 a user per month, Twist Unlimited offers unlimited conversation history, file storage, service integrations, and priority support.
Wrike
If you like folders, then Wrike is the project management software for you. They nest each of the project tasks and subtasks into more and more folders. This makes it easy for your team to organize themselves.
With real-time editing and time-tracking capabilities, your team will have no trouble working together while staying productive in Wrike.
As with most online collaboration tools, Wrike isn’t perfect and doesn’t let you add multiple assignees to a project. It’s also not the most user-friendly – which makes onboarding new team members difficult.
Pricing: Free to $24.80
Filestage
Filestage is a creative project management software that allows you to review and approve content and streamline your creative workflow. The software will work seamlessly with your existing workflows by offering different (internal and external) review steps.
You can quickly get visual feedback from co-workers and clients. They can annotate videos, designs, and documents and add change requests. This will help speed up your collaborative review process and get things finished quickly.
Reviewers don’t need to sign up for an account but can comment in their browser directly. Even if you’re running huge projects, Filestage’s documentation system ensures that you can keep track of all versions and comments.
Pricing: $89 per month for 5 users
Week Plan
Week Plan is a task management software that makes teams more productive and effective. Inspired from 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and OKR (Objective Key Results) framework, Week Plan is designed to make your team more effective.
Week Plan gives you a team-shared weekly tasks calendar to give your team an overview of what’s coming up. This allows them to easily schedule their workweek and coordinate over tasks.
You also have an activity feed to keep up with your teammates are up to. This helps you keep up with your team’s progress without having to manually check on them.
Trusted by over half a million users, Week Plan also provides native integrations with Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, SMS integration and over 400+ enterprise collaboration apps via Zapier.
Pricing: $2 to $3 per week
Microsoft 365
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.
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.
Rocket. Chat’s a 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.
Asana
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.
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!
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 up that pesky file size limit to 50MB – for $4.99 per user per month.
Other collaborative tools to consider
There are many other collaboration tools worth your attention, if nothing else because of the way they apply features differently, or even add other useful features. Here we’ll look at some additional online collaboration tools that could be worth exploring further:
Visme is developed specifically for collaborative online reports, presentations, and infographics. Aside from promoting branding support and aiming to reduce design costs, analytics are provided so you can see which presentations and reports result in the most engagement, and adjust accordingly. Visme recommends itself for sales and marketing, HR and recruiting, internal communications, as well as education and in-house training. The software is specifically priced around individual, business, or educational use.
Basecamp aims to be an all-in-one collaboration and communications platform, to bring features of multiple software offerings into a single place so that it’s easier to sort through information, and, of course, keep it all in one easy to manage the place. Features include chat, message boards, to-do lists, and scheduling as well as automated check-in, as well as a single place to store all documents, files, and folders. Unlike other collaborative software that charges per user, Basecamp charges a single fee of $99.99 for unlimited users, which could make it especially attractive to larger organizations.
Wrike is more of project management and scheduling tool, that makes it easy to see where everyone is in terms of completing a project. As a standalone, it might seem quite limited compared to some of the others here, but its strength lies in its extensive range of integrations, which includes Google, Dropbox, Salesforce, Microsoft, Adobe, and Github. This means Wrike can work as a central platform tied to a number of other software apps, allowing you to cover a wider range of options and features than some standalone software options.
Monday.com is a platform that allows you to plan, track, and collaborate on projects in a visually simple manner. Drag-and-drop functionality and ease of use make this a particularly good platform for teams’ project management and general workflow management. It also integrates with Slack, Trello, Google Drive, Dropbox, and others, so you can use it a central focal point for teams to work together. As above, these integrations mean that monday.com can be used to achieve a wider working remit than the standalone platform itself.
Conclusion
How can your team work together when they are in different time zones or not in the same office? This is where online collaboration tools come in. You can use these tools to generate creative output between teams. Many businesses are trying to use technology to increase collaboration. Collaboration leads to faster innovation, faster development, faster management decisions and faster resolution of problems.