Small business running software

Productivity , Communication , Collaboration. Try Flock today! Eddie On May 12, Eddie. The goal is to work smarter, not harder—so you can focus on the work you do best. Here are the 50 best tools and software for small businesses who want to put their best work forward.

Why do you need small business tools and software? What are the benefits of small business tools and software? Communication Communication software and tools bolster teamwork and boost productivity. Incentivizes meaningful conversations Ignites thoughtful dialogue Encourages deeper engagement Drives cohesive decision-making Collaboration Collaboration software and tools fuel every facet of your business. 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.

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. 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? Flock 2.

Slack Video Conferencing 3. Zoom Email 5. Gmail 6. Dropbox Note-taking Apps Station Time Management TimeDoctor RescueTime Process Automation Calendly HubSpot Zoho Social Media Marketing Buffer Hootsuite Email Marketing ConvertKit Website Host Siteground Website Builder Wix Design Tools FreshBooks Payments PayPal Stripe Invoicing Xero Wave Tax Filing Help Scout Contract Management HelloSign Performance Management AngelList Learning and Development 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.

Slack Slack shares many of the features as Flock but it comes at a higher cost per user, per month. 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.

Flock Video conferencing is essential for globally dispersed and remote teams. Zoom Zoom is one of the more popular small business video conferencing apps on the market. Email Email is still the most widely used business communication tool. Titan Titan is modern business email that means business. Collaboration software and tools for small businesses Project Management The primary purpose of project management tools is to track teamwork and optimize productivity.

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. 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.

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. Todoist Todoist keeps everything on your plate organized and accounted for. Evernote Evernote has been around forever and is still one of the premier note-taking apps available. 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.

Shift Shift is the modern workstation for highly productive teams and entrepreneurs who want to get things done more efficiently. Station Station is a next-generation dashboard that rules all of your apps.

TimeDoctor TimeDoctor is the productivity cure-all for time wasted. Zapier Zapier is a best-in-class process automation software for busy teams. Calendly Calendly helps small businesses schedule meetings without the back-and-forth of emails. Doodle Businesses book meetings faster with Doodle.

Plans Basic: Free, upgrade as needed 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.

Social Media Marketing Social media marketing software is used primarily to monitor, manage, and analyze social interactions and automate post scheduling. 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.

Hootsuite Hootsuite is a leading all-in-one social media management tool that helps you bolster your social presence. 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.

Canva Canva is the design platform for DIY creatives. Wix Wix is a website builder that gives you the freedom to create, design, manage and develop your web presence the way you want.

GoDaddy GoDaddy offers more than just a platform to build your website, it offers everything you need to create and run an effective, memorable online business. Siteground More than 2 million registered domains use Siteground to host websites. FreshBooks FreshBooks is an all-in-one cloud accounting software for entrepreneurs and small business teams.

Xero Millions of customers use Xero as their go-to accounting software. Wave Wave is award-winning accounting software designed for entrepreneurs and the majority of its tools are absolutely free—invoicing, payments, payroll, receipts, and more.

Plans Basic: Free Payments Good payments software is the first and last line of defense when it comes to processing the money going in and going out of your business.

PayPal PayPal for business lets you accept all major forms of payment. Stripe Stripe helps power millions of small businesses in more than countries and across nearly every industry. And if you're working with a geographically-distinct team, it's a great way to keep them connected with all the relevant business banter without resorting to the clutter of email.

Read our full Slack review. Look after your money and… well, you know the rest. Adminsoft Accounts may be a little clunky to look at okay, a lot clunky and somewhat tricky to get to grips with, but it offers a massive amount of functionality that can manage most aspects of your financial business for you.

Made by a small business owner for other small business owners, it's currency independent and perfect for managing a growing customer base. You can do full stock control, purchase ordering, deal with various HR functions, manage your cash-flow and budgets — basically everything important.

We leave it here with a small caveat, though: you may have to put some work in if you later want to export Adminsoft Accounts' data and import it into a paid-for package like Sage 50, but that would be true of whatever accounting software package you were using.

Read our full Adminsoft Accounts review. Proper invoices are important. If you're demanding payment you want to look professional, you want to be quick, and you want to make it as easy as possible for your payees to get you the funds. Wave accomplishes all of these tasks within a free, cross-platform app so simple that you can even issue invoices from your phone. If you choose, you can also use it to accept credit card payments — Wave makes its money by charging a small fee on payments made, and in all other respects it is free.

You can use invoice templates to speed things up even further, and Wave can automatically hound those who are late with your money to make sure they know it's time to pay up. It covers sales taxes, gives you 'read' reports on invoices you've issued, can issue estimates and quotes as well as full invoices, and you can customize its templates to match your logo or color scheme. It's basically a one-stop invoicing shop. Read our full Wave review. Backing up your data is crucial to the security of your business.

If you've ever lost a hard drive, you'll know how catastrophic it can be. To do it right, you'll want to follow the rule of three: you should have three copies of critical data stored in at least two places, at least one of which should be off-site in case of environmental disaster.

Duplicati is the perfect choice — it's free, open source, encrypts your data before backing it up, and you can choose for your backups to go to a number of locations. That could mean a local drive, a fileserver you've set up yourself, or even a cloud service.

Launched publicly in , it currently has over 12 million users in over countries. We chose it as the best team communication software because it offers real-time messaging, feedback, and collaboration in a free, online platform. Slack was developed to eliminate the inefficiencies and delays of email communication.

The software lets users create channels that can be organized around a topic, team, project, or even a client. Channels can be public and open to all users of a Slack account or private and accessed by invitation only. Besides communicating in real-time, Slack offers tons of integrations letting teams share files, create polls, schedule meetings, and connect to third-party project management, cloud storage, and productivity tools.

The platform offers free, one-click voice and video calls and even lets users spin-off discussion threads to keep larger conversations focused and uncluttered. No more sorting through emails or written notes hoping to find that one valuable piece of information. Slack lets users search for a conversation, mention, or user and share or bookmark it no matter how long ago it took place. Businesses that only need a single workspace, one-on-one video calls, and only a few app integrations can get by with a free Slack account.

The free account also limits searches to 10, messages:. Pro Plan. Freshteam was developed in by Freshworks, a developer of communication, sales, and marketing tools since The software allows businesses to manage hiring, onboarding, time-off, and employee information. We chose it as the best hiring software because it helps small businesses hire new employees in an easy-to-use and affordable online platform.

Users get access to job description templates and can post positions on free job boards, including LinkedIn, ZipRecruiter, Glassdoor, and Adzuna. Freshteam helps users create custom workflows so they can track candidates from application, to interview, to hiring.

The software can also automatically convert emails into applications and add senders as applicants. Finally, Freshteam lets users create a mobile-friendly career page and share job postings on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Once an employee is hired, Freshteam sends her all the paperwork she needs to sign electronically as well as employee handbooks, other internal documents, and a welcome letter. Sprout Plan. Blossom Plan. Garden Plan. Formerly Google Suite, Google Workplace is a collection of online office tools, including email, document creation and management, cloud storage, calendars, chat, video meetings, and more.

We chose it as the best document management software because it offers secure, branded, cloud-based document creation, storage, collaboration, and sharing. Google Workspace is a great option for small businesses that want to create an efficient, collaborative, cloud-based work environment without having to pay for expensive software or worrying about everyone having the same computer.

Because every tool in the Google Workspace platform is a Google product, users can move seamlessly from app to app. Businesses can start by creating a branded email address using Gmail, one of the most popular mail apps on the marketplace.

Other tools include Google Calendars for team scheduling; Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for creating documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with real-time collaboration; Google Drive for cloud storage; Google Chat for team messaging; and Google Meet for video meetings. Aside from the integrations between each app, Google Workspace also lets users connect to hundreds of third-party platforms, including Zoom, DocuSign, Salesforce, Trello, Asana, and many more.

Although anyone can get access to all Google Workspace apps by signing up for a free Gmail account, Google Workspace paid plans allow businesses to create business email addresses, get more cloud storage, and increase security.

You just need to connect multiple apps so that different teams can work together productively. Scoro is an all-in-one business management software designed to bring your teams, projects, sales, and reports together at a centralized place. With Scoro you can manage work more efficiently and be organized in every aspect of your business.

It is extensively used in consulting, marketing, management, and other technical industries. It is like your entire business within your palm of hands. Odoo is an all-in-one business management software that offers a range of business applications which forms a complete suite of enterprise management applications.

It covers CRM, eCommerce, accounting, inventory, sales, and project management. Odoo apps are perfectly integrated with each other, allowing you to fully automate your business processes.

Netsuite is a unified business management suite being used by more than 40, large, mid-sized, and small fast-growing businesses. It offers comprehensive functionality with industry-specific support for a broad range of industries means NetSuite works the way your business works. Timecamp is a one-solution-fits-all business management solution that comes with a time tracker with computer activities, productivity monitoring, attendance tracking, integrations and more.

TimeCamp offers you an intuitive interface to get your team on board effortlessly. If you are looking for a software that offers a complete suite of management, collaboration, and communication tools, then Bitrix24 could be the ideal choice for your business. It is a complete business management software that takes care of your tasks and projects to document management along with real-time communication tools from video conferencing to group chat.

Apptivo delivers a wide array of functionalities in customer relationship management CRM. It also helps your business to grow with project management, invoicing, and timesheet capabilities. If your business process has some specific needs, it can be easily customized. HoneyBook is an all-in-one business management platform and company management system.

From first contact to booking your ideal client, HoneyBook makes it easy for you to capture leads, manage projects, automate workflows, send contracts and invoices, and get paid. JIRA is a workflow mapping and project planning software that is designed to help software development teams of all sizes and industries. Kanban boards, burnout charts, project reporting tools , etc are some of the popular capabilities of this tool that support teams at various stages of the development lifecycle.

Also, it integrates with various developer tools and is available as a cloud-based or on-premise solution. Trello is a web-based project management application that is designed to fit every unique need and work styles. From sales and marketing to HR and software development, Trello helps teams to customize its functionality to meet their specific project management needs. Favro is an all-in-one project planning and collaboration software that is designed to help teams stay on the same page.

The features and functionalities of this software solution scale across any business or team. It improves flexibility and visibility across projects by bringing teams in one place. Connecteam is a leading business management software solution, designed for deskless teams and Enterprise companies.

Taking care of your business operations has never been easier with robust features that can be managed while on the go and at any time. From time tracking to job scheduling, automated checklists and forms, one-on-one or group chat, surveys, digital training and onboarding, efficient task management, and so much more is available on a sleek and easy to use interface.