13 of the Best Collaboration Tools for Business

If you are like me, you have, at least once, been looking for the perfect collaboration tool for your business.

Did not feel like you could find the right software?

Nor did I.

Which is why I went ahead and made some serious researches to run down the best resources and tools available out there for business to collaborate.

They are all yours today.

Enjoy these collaboration tools, and leave us your feedback.

Free Online Collaboration Tools for Business

As a starter, we will cover the free tools. We are talking about freemium solutions – meaning you can start using the tool for free, and then upgrade as you grow the usage – and entirely free solutions here.

Team Collaboration Tools

Slack is one of the most prominent team collaboration and chat tool out there. Slack is organized in channels and conversations, where you can talk with a set of colleagues/people on specific topics, share files, comment on files, and much more.

As Slack puts it, it is “your hub for teamwork”

Project discussions, important documents, free food announcements: they all live tidily together in Slack. With your team and information in one easily searchable place, collaborating online is as easy as collaborating in person.

The pro version of Slack also offers a meeting solution in order to organize group calls and video conferences with your colleagues.

Chanty is a great alternative to Slack. It is a freemium AI-powered team chat with unlimited messages for free. Great solution to boost internal communication for startups, small and medium-sized teams.

Meeting

Let’s cover the meeting solutions, in order to host and organize meetings with colleagues, partners, and clients.

Appear.in is a great web-based meeting solution.

You can sign up and register your locked room, then share the link with your team and clients.

It’s the easiest meeting solution I have found so far. You can chat, share your screen with a Chrome Extension, invite up to 4 participants for free. And they even have a mobile application.

Livestorm is another great alternative. The main software is a webinar solution but they recently spun off a meeting solution.   

It offers meeting, private rooms, chat and integrations with the webinar solutions. This is a great solution to both uses with your colleagues and (potential) clients.

Design & Document Collaboration Tools

Figma is our first tool on the list of collaboration software. It lets you design, prototype, and collaborate all in the browser.

It is a great alternative to the infinite back-and-forth designer <> project manager loop. You can think of it as a simplified wireframe/design app in your browser with collaboration features, for free.

FYI is our second software on the list. It is a tool to connect and gather all of your resources into one place, easily find and organize them. It syncs up with GSuite, Slack, Dropbox, and many more professional apps.

FYI brings all of your documents together in one place, no matter what apps or accounts they are in.

Time Management Software

Time Doctor is an accurate time tracking software that provides detailed analytics of where time is spent on the workday.

It helps you stay focused by gently nudging you when you get distracted from work. Time Doctor also provides time tracking, computer work session monitoring, reminders, screenshot recording, invoicing, reporting tools, integrations and so much more.

If you are looking for a free alternative, you can look at Toggl.com.

Project Management Softwares

Let’s move on the project management solutions.

Trello. First up, I want to cover what has become one of the landmarks in terms of project management and kanban solution. It is one of the easiest and flexible solutions I have found to manage anything.

You can literally create a board for anything you want, from a website re-design to managing your client and organizing your todo list.

The team liked it. With a strong product and name in hand, the team launched at TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2011 and the app took off from there. By July 2014, Trello spun off from Fog Creek, and the app had over 4.75 million users.

Within the next three years, Trello grew exponentially. In 2017, the company was acquired by Atlassian (famous for creating Jira and Bitbucket) and hit 25 million signups. In other words, Trello increased its user base by 426% in 3 years.

Drift Team

ClickUp is another up-and-coming contender in the Project Management space.

It offers different views: calendar, kanband, list and even GANTT, with plenty of integrations and ways to manage the tasks. The UX is polished and amazing.

Todoist is our last item on the list. As the name implies, the product is focused on organizing your todo-lists. It offers categories, filters, collaboration and calendar integrations.

A must-have for organizing your backlog of things to do.

Intranet & All-In-One Premium Collaboration Solutions

The last category of tools we are going to cover is the

intranet, or team portal. They help you stay organized and gather the information into one place.

Those are not free, but they are worth it.

Whether you want to keep track of the information with your clients or colleagues, it’s worth having a look.

Let me walk you through two promising solutions.

Woffice.io is the first item on our list. It is an Intranet/Extranet WordPress-based solution. It comes with knowledge base management, member map, and member management, project management, HR features, and many more.

The tool can even go as far as being your online hub for corporate courses and tutorials.

Although you might be afraid of using it since it’s based on WordPress, I’d tell you two things:

• You only pay once: for the license fee, and you’re good to go
• You manage the data, and you own the code. Which means that you can completely customize and extend the scope of it.

The installation is a no-brainer, and the administrators will be the only ones to know that the intranet is powered by WordPress under the hood.

Confluence is the open and online shared workspace solution from Atlassian.

It enables organizations to collaborate on project planning, meeting notes, documentation, blog posts, and plenty of additional written documents.

Great solution to gather the bits from different places.

Collaboration Resources

In order to wrap this article up, we will mention some of the best online and offline resources to  better collaborate and manage your productivity.

Basecamp’s blog is a great place to start. The founders share amazing insights into their day-to-day and how they overcome some of their hurdles.

Docsify also put together a great article mentioning some of the best tools in Marketing and for Agencies. I’d definitely recommend you to have a look.

Productivity Books

I want to mention 2 books.

The first one is Deep Work – Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. It is one of the most insightful book on distraction-free work.

Last but not least, Atomic Habits is the must-read book in the productivity space. It gives you actionable steps to build meaningful habits and gain in productivity.

This breakthrough book from James Clear is the most comprehensive guide on how to change your habits and get 1% better every day.

Wrap Up

I hope this roundup of collaboration tool for business was helpful.

If you are missing any resource or collaboration tool, please feel free to contact us or mention in the comment below!