If you’re running a small business, chances are you could be doing things better. Maybe you’re creating too much spreadsheet-based data, or perhaps you’re performing time-consuming/error-prone tasks? Whatever is creating stress and reducing productivity, there are apps out there that have been designed to solve it. Andrew Wilkinson is the co-founder of Project Business App , which helps create sales quotes and estimates faster than ever before. Fast Company named Project Business App one of the most innovative business applications of the year in 2013.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs and small business owners is taking care of everything. If you’re not working on your business, you’re probably not making money. At some point you have to say “no” to all the other things like housework, kids, friends and fun — and focus on your business. I’ve been doing this for 7 years now and wish that I could go back in time and gave myself an award when I made the switch.
Why do you need small business tools and software?
Modern small business software and tools help small businesses operate more efficiently. Today’s technology enables real-time delivery and deployment of information to give small businesses immediate, reliable, and secure access to company data and information whenever and wherever you need it.
However, in order for small businesses to scale, prioritizing and optimizing teamwork is essential. Small business software and tools can be used to conquer everyday tasks from tracking employee productivity and performance to people and money management to streamlining communication and collaboration.
What are the benefits of small business tools and software?
Running a small business is a team effort. Aligning team goals with business goals will help you prioritize your short and long-term needs before making a buying decision.
As remote work and virtual workplaces continue to evolve, small business software and tools can empower your entire organization to achieve results faster by keeping your work organized, your teams in sync, and your business thriving.
Communication
Communication software and tools bolster teamwork and boost productivity. When teams practice good communication habits, they foster contagious chemistry that can impact culture, collaboration, and productivity. Never miss a beat when you’re always connected.
- Incentivizes meaningful conversations
- Ignites thoughtful dialogue
- Encourages deeper engagement
- Drives cohesive decision-making
Collaboration
Collaboration software and tools fuel every facet of your business. This is especially true for small businesses with remote teams. Modern collaboration software empowers teams to work smarter together no matter where they are.
- Creates a network shareable knowledge
- Cross-functional ideas exchange
- Ecosystem of shared resources
- Team alignment and problem-solving
Productivity
Productivity software and tools help teams work smarter, not harder. Productivity tools can also have an invaluable impact on your overall performance by powering momentum and conquering procrastination.
- Create custom digital workflows
- Automate recurring processes
- Optimize teamwork and performance
- Divide and conquer projects, tasks, and to-dos
Marketing
Marketing software can make a good marketer great with powerful tools that provide intimate insights about customers that help produce qualified sales leads.
- Automate scheduling
- Build a website
- Impacts employee performance
- Organizes tasks and to-dos
Accounting
Modern accounting software and tools help you keep track of the money coming in and going out of your business—and you don’t need to be a financial guru to get started.
- Track revenue and expenses
- Handle taxes and payroll
- Generate custom reports
- Analyze and forecast finances
Operations Management
Operations management software helps monitor employee engagement and satisfaction, and establish quality control.
- Hire, onboard, and groom top talent
- Establish accountability and align goals
- Prioritize support and streamline feedback
- Build employee confidence and team morale
What are the best small business tools and software?
Choose from 50 small business tools and software to help run your business like a pro. Click on the categories below to jump to each section. This list has been updated as of Feb. 2020.
Communication Software for Small Businesses
Team Messaging
1. Flock
2. Slack
Video Conferencing
3. Flock
4. Zoom
Email
5. Gmail
6. Titan
Collaboration Software for Small Businesses
Project Management
8. Asana
9. Trello
File & Document Manager
9. Google Drive
10. Dropbox
Note-taking Apps
11. Todoist
12. Evernote
Productivity Software for Small Businesses
Workspace Organization
13. Shift
14. Station
15. TimeDoctor
16. RescueTime
Process Automation
17. Zapier
18. Automate.io
Scheduling
19. Calendly
20. Doodle
Marketing Software for Small Businesses
CRM Apps
21. HubSpot
22. Zoho
Social Media Marketing
23. Buffer
24. Hootsuite
Email Marketing
25. Mailchimp
26. ConvertKit
Website Host
27. GoDaddy
28. Siteground
Website Builder
29. WordPress
30. Wix
Design Tools
31. Adobe Creative Cloud
32. Canva
Accounting Software for Small Businesses
Bookkeeping
33. QuickBooks
34. FreshBooks
Payments
35. PayPal
36. Stripe
Invoicing
37. Xero
38. Wave
Tax Filing
39. TurboTax
40. H&R Block
Operations Software for Small Businesses
Customer Service
41. Zendesk
42. Help Scout
Contract Management
43. DocuSign
44. HelloSign
Performance Management
45. BambooHR
46. 15Five
Recruitment
47. LinkedIn Recruiter
48. AngelList
Learning and Development
49. LinkedIn Learning
50. General Assembly
Communication software and tools for small businesses
Team Messaging
Direct, one-on-one, and team messaging software has emerged as the primary means of small business communication with the ability to send and receive information, ideas, files, and more all in real-time. Messaging provides instant access to information email cannot.
1. Flock
We believe Flock is the best small business software for team communication because it’s more than just a messenger: It’s a business collaboration hub that helps you get more done, faster. Flock changes the way you connect with your team with direct and group messaging channels, video conferencing, secure file sharing, shared notes, company directories, custom team mailing lists, and more—all from a single app. Flock does everything your small business needs to communicate and collaborate effectively…and still so much more.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: $4.50 per user/mo.
2. Slack
Slack shares many of the features as Flock but it comes at a higher cost per user, per month. Compare Flock vs. Slack.
Plans
Basic: Free
Standard: $6.67 per user/mo.
Plus: $12.50 per user/mo.
Video Conferencing
Video conferencing software and tools give small businesses the flexibility of communicating face-to-face from just about anywhere—the home, the office, or a job site—across all devices. The right software and tools integrate screen-sharing, screen-recording, and video streaming capabilities that give SMBs powerful tools to conduct professional virtual meetings.
3. Flock
Video conferencing is essential for globally dispersed and remote teams. Flock gives small businesses the ability to host online meetings and webinars with video-conferencing software built right into the core messenger. Start a video call directly in a conversation channel and share your screen during a live stream or presentation. Flock video conferencing lets you communicate with anyone face-to-face and in real-time from anywhere.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: $4.50 per user/mo.
4. Zoom
Zoom is one of the more popular small business video conferencing apps on the market. Its free plan lets you host unlimited 1:1 meetings or group meetings of up to 100 participants with a 40-minute limit, and includes custom meeting IDs and screen-sharing capabilities in HD.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: $15 per host/mo.
Business: $20 per host/mo.
Email
Email is still the most widely used business communication tool. While email is not ideal for quick discussions or decisions, it does establish a thread for robust dialogue, specifically when communicating with multiple internal or external stakeholders. It’s absolutely vital for SMBs to have a professional email address that represents your business and your brand.
5. Gmail for G Suite
Gmail’s professional counterpart gives SMBs a customized email address and access to Google’s full suite of business products and admin tools that help consolidate and optimize your organization’s communication.
Plans
Free 14-day trial, then $6 per month
6. Titan
Titan is modern business email that means business. Get a professional email address to match your website’s domain name without having to pay a bunch of money for a bundle of add-ons you don’t need. Build your brand and your business on the back of Titan.
Plans
Free 30-day trial, then $1.50 per user/mo.
Collaboration software and tools for small businesses
Project Management
The primary purpose of project management tools is to track teamwork and optimize productivity. Small businesses rely on project management software and tools to ensure that teams carry a balanced workload and tasks get completed on time.
7. Asana
Asana is an essential small business tool that teams use to stay focused on the goals, projects, and daily tasks of a growing business. The ability to view all of your projects in calendar view, list view, or board view, and assign tasks with due dates to multiple stakeholders is a beautiful thing. Asana’s aesthetically pleasing user interface and versatility are a few reasons why it’s one of the more popular project management tools on the market.
Plans
Basic: Free
Premium: $11 per user/mo.
Business: $25 per user/mo.
8. Trello
Like Asana, Trello lets you work more collaboratively with boards, lists, and cards that help you to visually organize and prioritize team projects like a pro should. Small businesses use Trello for a lot—from product planning to content strategy to budgeting. There’s not a whole lot that Trello can’t do to improve the way your small business works and collaborates.
Plans
Basic: Free
Business: $10 per user/mo.
File & Document Manager
Data management and file-sharing systems are essential to small business operations and team collaboration. File sharing software backs up all of your important files and documents in the cloud and syncs them across all your devices—all the while keeping a record of relevant and shareable data accessible throughout the entire company.
9. Google Drive
Google Drive is the most popular cloud-based small business file management and sharing software, and it’s absolutely free. You can create, store, and share all types of files from documents to slide presentations to spreadsheets to images and edit them collectively as a team in real-time. Google Drive even lets you sync your files across all your devices and share them publicly or privately with external stakeholders.
Plans
Basic: Free, 15GB
G Suite: $6 per month, 30GB
Google One: $2 per month, 100GB; $3 per month, 200GB; $10 per month, 2TB
10. Dropbox
Dropbox has long been known for its blazing-fast sync speeds ideal for larger, more unique file types often used by developers and designers. Plus, its best-in-class user experience and a plethora of add-ons like watermarking, tiered-admin roles, and file recovery give Dropbox the edge for product development and creative teams.
Plans
Individual Plus: $10 per month, 2TB
Individual Pro: $17 per month, 3TB
Teams Standard: $12.50 user/mo., 5TBTeams Advanced: $20 user/mo., Unlimited
Note-taking Apps
Note-taking tools ensure everyone on your team is fully engaged and on the same page—literally. Digital note-taking tools integrate across many productivity platforms and are the most resourceful way to keep all relevant information together and accessible. Attach notes to a message or email, or convert them into tasks or to-dos.
11. Todoist
Todoist keeps everything on your plate organized and accounted for. Get a clear overview of your workday and your schedule, and prioritize projects so you’ll always know exactly what to work on next. Never lose track of an important task or to-do again.
Plans
Basic: Free
Premium: $3 per user/mo.
12. Evernote
Evernote has been around forever and is still one of the premier note-taking apps available. Save web pages, bookmark articles, and clip PDFs to the app, or use a pre-made template to build a business plan, a to-do list, or a full-blown research report.
Plans
Basic: Free
Premium: $8 per month
Business: $15 per user/mo.
Productivity software and tools for small businesses
Workspace Organization
Organizing your digital workspace for optimal focus and productivity and less context switching has become the new standard for employees who moderate multiple accounts across various applications. Aggregating content and information from these apps in a centralized dashboard is where Google Chrome’s web browser falls short and these workspaces shine.
13. Shift
Shift is the modern workstation for highly productive teams and entrepreneurs who want to get things done more efficiently. Shift lets you manage all of your apps, extensions, social media accounts, and email accounts in one beautiful desktop application. It’s the kind of productivity software that changes everything by keeping everything you’re doing right in front of you.
Plans
Basic: Free
Advanced: $99 per year
14. Station
Station is a next-generation dashboard that rules all of your apps. The “smart dock” as it’s dubbed, groups all of your apps, tabs, and open web pages in one place to let you context switch and multitask across different accounts, faster. Like Shift, it also comes with a focus feature that lets you turn off notifications so you can concentrate on getting things done.
Plans
Individual: Free
Teams: TBD (as of Feb. 2020)
Time Management
Time management tools help you keep track of time spent throughout the workday. This helps teams optimize effort and productivity with a deeper understanding of how profitable certain projects truly are. After all, time is money when it comes to small business growth.
15. TimeDoctor
TimeDoctor is the productivity cure-all for time wasted. TimeDoctor not only tracks the total amount of time spent on your work, but it also provides an analytical breakdown of how much time is spent on each project, client, or task. Time Doctor is accurate to the second, so you can easily bill clients or pay employees based on tracked time.
Plans
Basic: 14-day trial, then $10 per user/mo.
16. RescueTime
According to ResueTime, only 10% of people say they feel “in control” of how they spend their workday. But focusing for a long period of time on a single task or project can have a massive competitive advantage. RescueTime helps you identify how you spend your time, what you spend it on, and when you’re most likely to perform your best work.
Plans
Basic: Free
Premium: 14-day trial, then $6 per month
Process Automation
Process automation helps teams execute the recurring processes within a common or customized workflow. Even the most complex cross-functional and repetitive processes — like employee onboarding and scheduling — can be automated with ease and in real-time thanks to process automation software and tools.
17. Zapier
Zapier is a best-in-class process automation software for busy teams. Connect more than 1,500 of your favorite business apps and tools so you can focus on your most important work. Zapier automatically moves necessary information between applications with a central command. Stop wasting time on repetitive tasks—automate them—so you can do more of the work you love.
Plans
Basic: Free
Starter: $20 per month
Pro: $50 per month
18. Automate.io
As the tagline says – “Automate like the Fortune 500”, Automate.io is an easy-to-use & affordable solution for integrating cloud apps & services to create simple one-to-one integrations or complex workflows.
Users can now automate sales, marketing, and business processes in minutes and save 40+ hrs/week.
And the most interesting part? It doesn’t require any IT help and users can integrate their apps without coding through a drag-and-drop interface.
Plans
Basic: Forever Free Plan
Startup: $49/mo
Growth: $99/mo
Scheduling
Small businesses use shared calendar tools for time-management and scheduling.
19. Calendly
Calendly helps small businesses schedule meetings without the back-and-forth of emails. It works with existing Google, Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud calendars and automates tasks with Salesforce and Zapier. Set buffer times between meetings using seamless timezone detection so everyone’s on the same page.
Plans
Basic: Free
Premium: $8 per user/mo.
Pro: $12 per user/mo.
20. Doodle
Businesses book meetings faster with Doodle. Quickly schedule 1:1s with outside parties without guessing or inquiring about availability. A first-come, first-served open block for appointments lets guests see and respond to your changing availability without you having to constantly update them.
Plans
Starter: $4 per month
Pro: $6 per month
Team: $30 per month
Marketing software and tools for small businesses
CRM Apps
Customer relationship management (CRM) software and tools manage all of your company’s touchpoints with existing and potential customers—and so much more. A robust CRM solution can help companies stay connected to goals that drive profitability.
21. HubSpot
Hubspot’s CRM software brings marketing, sales, and customer service tools together under one roof with popular features like lead generation, analytics, and automation. It puts everything you need to know into a central hub for stakeholders to access. Run a full-blown inbound marketing campaign and share key insights on revenue, traffic, and prospecting. The basic version is free forever, but you can upgrade for advanced features as you scale.
Plans
Basic: Free, upgrade as needed
22. Zoho
Zoho CRM is another popular CRM solution for small businesses that brings companies and customers together via one integrated platform giving marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service an intuitive lens into every customer. Build pipelines and help sales acquire more leads with marketing automation tools and omnichannel workflows that streamline customer journeys at scale.
Plans
Basic: 15-day trial, then $12 per user/mo.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing software is used primarily to monitor, manage, and analyze social interactions and automate post scheduling. Aggregate your social media feeds across multiple accounts and stream them via a single dashboard on a range of devices.
23. Buffer
Buffer lets you build your social following and grow your brand by planning, scheduling, and publishing social media content that drives engagement across all the popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Plans
Pro: 7-day trial, then $15 per month
Premium: 14-day trial, then $65 per month
Business: 14-day trial, then $99 per month
24. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a leading all-in-one social media management tool that helps you bolster your social presence. It drives deeper engagement more with customers by automatically scheduling and sending round-the-clock social media posts, comments, and replies.
Plans
Pro: 30-day trial, then $29 per month
Team: 30-day trial, then $129 per month
Email Marketing
Email marketing tools are used to automate and schedule promotional campaigns mainly for products and services. Marketing teams also use these tools to maintain relationships with customers and clients. Email marketing supports a wide range of digital marketing initiatives and is a way to supplement social media marketing and content marketing campaigns.
25. Mailchimp
According to Mailchimp, email marketing averages $52 ROI for every dollar spent. Its industry-leading email marketing tool is part of an all-in-one platform designed to help grow your business faster and increase revenue. Mailchimp is fully customizable and integrates seamlessly with many of the marketing tools on this list.
Plans
Basic: Free
Essentials: $10 per month
Standard: $15 per month
26. ConvertKit
Send emails that pop with ConvertKit’s fully customizable templates and embeddable forms lets you collect email addresses directly from your website and turn your readers into subscribers. Tag subscribers based on their interests, activity, and more to help you segment your audiences and send the right message to them at the right time.
Plans
0-1k subscribers: $29 per month
1-3k subscribers: $49 per month
3-5k subscribers: $79 per month
Design Tools
From logos to websites to blog posts to email templates and social media pages—design can distinguish your brand from the competition. Whether you have a single graphic designer on your team or a full creative staff, modern digital design tools allow for varying levels of expertise and functionality.
27. Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe Creative Cloud is an industry-leading digital design suite with a collection of desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX and more. Many professional designers view Adobe as the standard for digital design software.
Plans
Individuals: Starts at $10 per month
Business: Starts at $34 per month
Students & Teachers: $20 per month
Schools & Universities: $15 per month
28. Canva
Canva is the design platform for DIY creatives. Beginner level designers and marketers can utilize stunning, premade templates that make it easy to turn content ideas into professional designs using Canva’s drag and drop features. Whether you need a photo collage or a social media mockup, Canva makes it possible for anyone to create amazing designs.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: 30-day trial then $10 per month
Enterprise: 30-day trial then $30 per month
Website Builder
A website builder is an all-in-one tool that builds websites without the need for manual coding. A good website builder includes some type of drag-and-drop functionality which allows you to build web pages and structure featured layouts easily. Many website builders incorporate a user-friendly interface that integrates with third-party tools and plugins that dramatically optimize the performance and enhance the functionality of your website.
29. WordPress
According to WordPress, 35% of all websites on the internet use its platform. Choose from more than 54,000 plugin tools—from online stores, image galleries, search and analytics tools, payment platforms, and more—that help showcase your products, services, content and more.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: 30-day trial then $10 per month
Enterprise: 30-day trial then $30 per month
30. Wix
Wix is a website builder that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence the way you want. Whether you’re promoting your business, showcasing your work, opening your store or starting a blog—you can do it all with the Wix website builder.
Plans
Personal: $13 per month
Unlimited: $17 per month
Pro: $22 per month
VIP: $39 per month
How Does the Type of Business Affect What Software is Needed?
It is important first to identify what kinds of software will be most suited to your particular business needs. The operation of a small business works has vastly different needs to that of a larger corporation. Furthermore, each industry holds its own unique and essential requirements to ensure smooth business operation. A business with a large employee base will need a more comprehensive payroll software than a smaller business operating on the efforts of only a few individuals, while a business with a large base of clientele will need an accurate time tracking application to keep detailed documentation of which work is being done for which clients. Identifying and understanding what kind of business software is going to be most effective in adding value to your business practices is essential in making smart executive decisions.
Specific industry needs are also important to consider. The goods and services offered by your business will have a huge impact on your software requirements. Keeping a comprehensive track of client interactions or stock rotation can be more or less important depending on specifically what it is that your business is selling, and the market in which you are operating.
CONCLUSION
Do you own a small business? If so, you know what’s it’s like to have to juggle all the different aspects of running your small business such as marketing, accounting and customer service. Below are some of my favorite tools that help me run my business and streamline processes so I can spend more time growing my business.
When it comes to running a business, using the right technology can be the difference between success and failure. While some tools come with a high price tag, there are also many great options that are both inexpensive and effective. You can’t go wrong by having the right tools available to you.