Collaboration tools make it possible for teams to work together on a project from all over the world. If you’d like to start working on a project with a team that’s spread out across the country, or around the world, knowing which tools can help is essential. Here, we’ll go over some of the best collaboration tools for remote teams.
We’ve sorted through all the remote collaboration tools on the market and spoken to dozens of successful remote teams to come up with this list of the best tools for remote team communication. Whether you’re looking for chat, online project management, or video conferencing software, we’ll show you what works.
Slack: The best team communication app
Slack is one of the most widely used tools by remote teams. Remote-first companies like Zapier, Buffer, and Help Scout consider Slack their “virtual office”—a place where employees can get instant feedback and connect with their colleagues, both one-on-one and in groups.
Read about how InVision’s remote team uses Slack
One feature that stands out is the ability to install apps that automatically report on business activity, like new email subscribers or product reviews, and bots that help keep employees engaged.
When asked about Buffer’s remote team technology stack, loyalty marketer Bonnie Porter had this to say:
“At Buffer, we use a lot of tools to communicate and collaborate. The ones I use most frequently are Slack, Zoom, Buffer, Dropbox Paper, and Trello. One fun thing the marketing team has been using in Slack is the HeyTaco! Integration—it makes it fun to celebrate each other’s accomplishments (big or small) throughout the day. Who doesn’t love a taco party?!”
Zapier, on the other hand, uses Slack to communicate important status updates:
“In the age of open floor plans and constant collaboration, there is something that is rarely mentioned in today’s design world: the creative process needs quiet. Remote work is ideal for the creative process, because it easily allows for designers and researchers to have the solitude they need [….] We leverage Slack’s status+emoji feature to communicate to our teammates when we are ‘heads down’ in the creative process,” explained Julia Elman, the company’s Director of Design.
Related: How Zapier is building a remote design culture
They also use Slack to facilitate design critiques:
“Design Club is an inclusive space where anyone in the company can come to present their work for critique and provide feedback for others. This could be anything from research plans to visual designs from your product teams. We have both a Design Club Slack channel and a weekly Design Club video call where folks can sign up to receive asynchronous or real-time critique from their peers and stakeholders from around Zapier.”
InVision: The best design collaboration app & digital whiteboard
InVision is undoubtedly the most comprehensive suite of design software on the market. With a 4.5 out of 5 rating on both G2 Crowd and Capterra, and an 8.5 out of 10 rating on TrustRadius, it’s no wonder remote teams like Treehouse, Help Scout, and Trello love using it.
“InVision is one of my favorite products,” shared Nick Francis, Co-Founder and CEO, Help Scout. “The experience is flawless, little details are executed beautifully, and it keeps our remote team in sync throughout the design process.”
“InVision helps our distributed design team stay in sync,” agreed Jeremy Jantz, Product Designer, Treehouse. “We can facilitate design discussions asynchronously, track feedback from everyone on the team, and demonstrate interactions easily and efficiently. It’s the best rapid prototyping tool we’ve found.”
Some of the InVision—and Studio—team at a recent event in San Francisco
Real-time collaboration is an essential part of the design process. InVision Freehand is a digital whiteboard that allows you to wireframe, plan, design presentations, and give and receive feedback, between designers but also in conjunction with other stakeholders.
For example, Trello relies heavily on InVision for communicating with developers. “The comments are extremely valuable when it comes to feedback and questions. InVision has really become an integral part of how we work,” explained the company’s Product Designer, Adam Simms.
Trello: The best project management software
With so many project management tools to choose from, it was hard to pick just one. However, Trello stood out to us for its style, simplicity, and performance.
By visualizing what needs to get done and aggregating feedback from the whole team, Trello helps remote teams increase their productivity.
InVision + Trello: Power up your productivity
One secret to its success might be the fact that Trello doesn’t require so much information that it becomes a time suck. In other words, it’s ideal for fast-paced startups.
Trello’s simplicity makes it extremely flexible, resulting in hundreds of unique ways to use the software. For example, Help Scout’s support team uses it to keep track of product issues, updates, and requests.
“It can be hard to scroll through tons of notifications and get the gist of any new bugs or updates, so we use Trello to log bugs or anything that needs a fix, and to manage all feature requests,” explained Customer Champion Kelly Herring.
With a 4.4 out of 5 rating on G2 Crowd, a 4.5 out of 5 rating on Capterra, and an 8.2 out of 10 rating on TrustRadius, customers agree that Trello is the best project management software available.
That said, Airtable deserves an honorable mention. Airtable is a highly customizable tool for collaborative teams who love to stay organized.
“Airtable is a go-to on our team,” revealed Kim Kadiyala, Partner Manager at Zapier.
“It’s a tool that makes it easy for anyone to spin up a relational database. We use it for editorial calendars, project management, to catalog stories from our customers, and more. We joke that everything is prettier in an Airtable, but it’s also easier to store, organize, and collaborate on pretty much anything.”
Google Drive: The best file management app
Digital file management is essential for the smooth operation of any business. For remote-first companies, it’s often more important because geographically dispersed employees access files during times when their colleagues can’t be reached.
With a 4.6 out of 5 rating on G2 Crowd, 4.5 out of 5 rating on Capterra, and 8.6 out of 10 rating on TrustRadius, Google Drive takes the cake, which isn’t surprising considering that Drive integrates seamlessly with other apps within G Suite.
“At Zest, our core team spans three continents, so keeping everyone on the same page (if not the same time zone) is very important for day-to-day operations. Our challenge is not just communicating with each other internally, but also with our 14,000 (and counting) weekly active members,” explains Nichole Elizabeth DeMeré, the company’s team member responsible for community growth.
“Google Drive helps us communicate and collaborate with our Member Advisory Board of 78 members, who are currently getting more involved in our product roadmap and creation of internal web pages. It also helps us keep up with their feedback regardless of the time-zone difference. This is how we co-created Content Boost.”
nTask
nTask is one of the best project management software if you need a proper tool that is structured to take care of your remote teams collaboration. The application is entirely only. This helps project and task managers to get rid of measly desktop client installation processes. It is also all the more reason to use the program from any remote location because the project data is stored in the cloud.
With its amazing functionality regarding remote working and project management, this application is perfect for freelancers, remote agencies, and small teams that rely on project management software for their businesses to function.
All in all, nTask can become the software your team needs to become more productive and value-producing, in no time at all. Let’s take a look at the key features that this amazing application has to offer.
Key Features
- Multiple in build collaboration features for teams
- Project management modules for seamless milestone achievement
- Timesheets, time monitoring, and approval process control at both manager and worker level
- Task comments
- Multiple board views
- Data export
- Project time tracking
- Prioritizing
- Risk analytics and management
- Risk matrix & pie charts
- Task assignment
Pricing
- A Free Trial is available
- Paid Subscriptions start at $2.99/ user/ month
Monday.com
Monday.com is one of the top project management solutions currently on the market. Despite being newer than some legacy platforms, it has quickly become a favorite for those who work remotely due to its rich feature pool and overall versatility.
It’s worth noting that Monday isn’t the cheapest project management software, but what it lacks in affordability it makes up for in function. If your team isn’t too large then the pricing should still be within reach. A team of five will pay $49/month on the basic plan.
Conclusion
Collaboration tools help a remote team work better together and individually. These tools allow a remote team to communicate effectively, create a central repository for files and share data, collaborate on code, test applications, manage projects and handle workloads.