Top 3 Productivity Software for Your Business

Productivity software allows you as an individual or team to do your tasks more efficiently. These tools include email management, task management, time-tracking, reminders, note-taking, online collaboration, and many other operations you need to perform. Tools like these help save one of the most important resources involving work – time. They can also help increase your productivity by helping you do more with your time. As a result, you can save with your other resources, such as money, manpower, and more.

Depending on the productivity software you choose, you will reap the following benefits:

1. Increased efficiency for daily tasks
2. Maximize productivity
3. Keeping track of different schedules
4. Easier real-time tracking of progress and deadlines
5. More fluid collaboration
6. Keeps everyone in the team updated
7. Easier and more organized file-sharing
8. Easier reports management
9. Organized invoicing
10. Cross-application integration
11. Cross-platform compatibility
12. Improved work quality
13. Increased employee satisfaction
14. Increased customer satisfaction

Productivity suites include a set of programs such as word, spreadsheet, and presentation programs that you can access using one main application. Most of these suites include emailing, instant messaging, calendar/scheduler, collaboration, and reporting tools.

Here are our top 3 choices for productivity suites based on the software’s reliability, project management features, compatibility with different OS, third-party integrations, mobile access, and other useful features. The following are also the most widely-used productivity suites with similar features.

1. Google Workspace (formerly G-Suite)

Developed by Google, the Google Workspace has probably almost all the features every business, whether big or small, needs. They have email services; chat and video-conferencing tools; file storage; productivity and content creation tools like Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Drawings; forms; sites; calendar; data protection. Google Workspace also offers different subscription plans for your different needs and budget.

Google Workspace plans are at $4.20 per user per month for Business Starter, $9.60 per user per month for Business Standard, and $18 per user per month for Business Plus. You can try any of their plans for free for 14 days.

2. Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365)

Another equally efficient productivity suite trusted by many users is Microsoft 365. Depending on your budget and your needs, you can enjoy its programs and tools. These include email; instant communication; video conferencing; storage; online sharing and collaboration; programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Publisher; calendar; mobile access, and security and threat protection. They also offer different subscription plans for different types and sizes of businesses.

Microsoft 365 offers plans for home, business, enterprise, and education. For business, they have the Business Basic that costs $2.50 per user per month, the Business Standard for $10 per user per month, the Business Premium for $20 per user per month, and the Microsoft 365 Apps for $8.25 per user per month. All their plans have an annual commitment and do not include taxes. You may also avail of their free trial for one month.

3. Zoho Workplace

Zoho Workplace productivity suite is also worth looking into. It has a wide variety of online tools like word-processing, presentations, spreadsheets, video-conferencing, calendar, note-taking, email, collaboration, project management, CRM (customer relationship management), and invoicing tools, among others. Zoho also offers affordable subscription plans for different business needs.

You may try Zoho Workplace with their 30-day free trial or subscribe to any of their plans ranging from $12 per user per month up to $45 per user per month. All costs are exclusive of taxes and are billed annually.

As the name project management implies, these tools help make management and collaboration easier between you, your team members, and your clients/partners as you work on a project. These tools are helpful when you have remote workers and other people involved. Instead of exchanging emails over tasks and updates, you can easily and efficiently communicate using project management tools.

1. Asana

Asana is one of the most widely-known project management tools for a reason. It allows you and other team members to do a variety of project-related tasks in one place. You can track different work, such as tasks and workflows, as well as communicate and collaborate with team members. Other helpful features include automatic notifications, automatic updates, calendar, reports, forms, custom templates, and compatibility with different mobile devices like mobile phones, tablets, and laptops.

Asana offers free trial, free package for up to 15 users, and paid subscription of $21 for 5 users per month.

2. Liquid Planner

Liquid Planner is one of the best management tools you can use to efficiently work on a project with your team, your partners, and your clients. It allows you to collaborate with other users, schedule projects, track time, upload and share documents, and manage your resources in just one place. It also supports integration with other tools and apps, such as Google Drive, DropBox, and online calendars.

Liquid Planner offers 14-day free trial. It’s paid subscription plan starts at $45 per user, for a minimum of five users.

3. Trello

Trello is an intuitive productivity tool that makes it easier for you to organize, coordinate, and track work among your team through its boards. While it may fall short as project management software, it is a very efficient collaboration tool that is very easy-to-use, customizable, flexible, and with both desktop and mobile access.

The great thing about Trello is that it offers free subscription for teams for its very basic services. This makes it advantageous for smaller, more-short-lived projects, or for trial purposes. Their paid subscription with more features and power-ups begins at $9,99 per user per month, billed annually.

These team communication apps make collaboration a lot easier and more efficient for your team by allowing instant messaging, calls, and video conferencing for meetings. Instant messaging software allows for real-time interactive communication within the team. Important features include screen-sharing, file transfer, message search, and integrations.

If you are not subscribed to a productivity suite or team management software with an instant messaging tool, here are our top 3 productivity software for communication and instant messaging:

1. Slack

Slack if a cloud-based platform that offers instant messaging and file transfers. It is considered as one of the best productivity software for chat-powered teams. Slack offers customizable settings and a variety of options. It also offers integrations with other useful software like OneDrive, Google Drive, Asana, online calendars, HubSpot, Salesforce, and more.

You may use Slack for free for an unlimited period of time, You may also subscribe to their paid plans to access more powerful features starting at $6.67 per month.

2. Flock

Flock is a business messenger and communication software that can help increase your productivity and efficiency, whether you have a small or large business. Apart from the basic chat features it offers, you can do conference calls, video meetings, file shares, live updates, voice notes, and polls, among others. Flock also lets you create guest chats, make direct or group messages, make and share to-do lists, and create a channel-based mailing. You can also integrate Flock with other applications like Trello, Google Drive, and DropBox.

Flock offers a free starter plan for teams with up to 20 members offering basic features. For over 20 members, you can subscribe to their Pro plan for $4.50 per user per month with enhanced features. If your team exceeds 100 members, you may ask a quote for their Enterprise plan.

3. Telegram

Telegram is a free, cross-platform, and cloud-based messaging software for personal or business use. It is focused on speed and security with end-to-end encrypted calls, optional end-to-end encrypted private chats between two users for smartphone chats, and client-server/server-client encryption for cloud-based chats. Telegram allows for text and voice messages, voice and video calls, animated stickers, as well as sharing of images. documents, contacts, user locations, and music.

The best scheduling/calendar tools must be simple, easy-to-use, customizable, can be synchronized with other apps, and have collaboration and sharing features. While Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar, and Apple Calendar are commonly used and loved tools for this category, the following also deserve to be considered.

1. Calendly

Calendly is an appointment scheduling tool with a great user interface. It features automated scheduling, online booking, group scheduling, appointment reminders, and calendar sync with mobile access. Users find it easy to use and convenient to share. Calendly may be integrated with Office 365 and Outlook calendars, as well as other apps like Stripe, Zapier, and Salesforce.

You can go for Calendly’s free subscription or opt for a paid subscription. Their plans start at $8 per user per month for more useful features.

2. Calendar.com

More than just being a calendar, Calendar allows you to create and manage your appointments efficiently. It allows you to connect with other apps so that other scheduled appointments from various projects may be added to your calendar. Calendar.com can also protect you from scheduling conflicting meetings. Finally, it features analytics to help you analyze how you spend your time so you can maximize it and help you become more productive in the future.

Calendar.com offers free Basic program for smaller teams with minimal scheduling needs. Their paid subscription begins at $6 per month per user, billed annually.

3. Fantastical

Fantastical is a favourite calendar app for IOS and macOS users. It is easy and convenient to use, quick, and intuitive. Fantastical allows you to create reminders using speech and simple text phrases with multiple language support. It also features a dashboard where you can easily access and add notes to all your reminder and events.

Fantastical offers free plans, as well as paid plans starting at $3.33 per month with free 14-day trial.

Time-tracking tools help you determine what your team does during work time. It helps you understand how you and your team are spending your time, eventually helping with your productivity. When searching for a time-tracking tool, it is important to look at the ease of use; features (versus your needs); customer support, and pricing.

Here are the top 3 productivity software we recommend when it comes to time-tracking.

TimeBee

TimeBee is a time-tracking and employee productivity-measuring software. It offers features such as screenshots, billing and invoicing, distraction alerts, insightful reports, and website and app monitoring. TimeBee classifies time into productivity brackets on the online timesheets, giving employers highly accurate time records. It even continues to track time even when there is no internet for uninterrupted efficiency.

TimeBee offers a free demo on its website and a 14-day free trial to let employers test the solution before implementing it for their organization.

Clockify

Clockify is a popular time tracking tool that allows users to track work hours, projects, and productivity. It offers features like time tracking, project management, reporting, and team collaboration. Clockify can be used for both individual freelancers and teams in various industries to effectively manage their time and tasks.

Time Doctor

Time Doctor is a time-tracking tool with a neat user interface aimed at remote teams. It is a great tool to track time, monitor employees, track activities, take screenshots, track apps and URLs, and automate payroll. There are over 60+ integrations you can use with Time Doctor to make your work more efficient.

Time Doctor is available in Basic, Standard, and Premium plans for $7, $10. and $20 accordingly per user per month. It also offers a 14-day free trial for their plans.

Microsoft OneNote, Google Keep, and Zoho notebook are some of the best note-taking software that you can get on their own or as part of the productivity suite. Apart from these tools, the following note-taking apps are also worth looking into:

Evernote

Evernote is an impressive note-taking tool that lets you create notes in different formats. These include text notes, images, voice memos, documents, scanned hand-written notes, clips from the webs, and more. Evernote makes it easier for you to manage your projects, to-do lists and ideas efficiently so you do not miss a thing. You may organize your notes using virtual notebooks and manage them using tags and shortcuts. Notes can also be shared via email and can be synchronized with your other devices, including PC, mobile phone, and tablet.

You can use Evernote for free with its Basic plan. It also offers paid plans for more features starting at $7.99 per month.

Simplenote

If you want a note-taking app that is quick, easy-to-use, and most of all, free, then Simplenote is worth looking into. It may lack the features of other paid note-taking apps, but it can help you create notes easily and effectively without any fuss. You may create tags for easy search, as well as use Markdown format for more efficient viewing. Simplenote also lets you sync your notes with your other devices and share them to others for collaboration.

Notion

Notion is another note-taking app that is great for team collaboration. You may even consider it as a project or task management app. Every note you create in Notion is considered a page. You can add blocks in the pages, like simple texts, images, video, audio, web bookmarks, files, and code snippets. There are also available templates you can use for your pages. Other features of Notion include drag-and-drop capabilities, sidebar, customization, and comments on notes,

Notion subscription plans begin with the free Personal plan. The paid plans with free trials are available at $4 per month for Personal Pro and $8 per user per month for Team accounts.

A useful email management software helps organize your inbox to ensure you don’t ruin your productivity with clutter. It helps you manage and filter your messages and email tasks efficiently. These tools may be added to any email platform you are using, such as Outlook and Gmail.

1. Boomerang

Boomerang is an email management app that works with Gmail, Outlook, as well as iOS and Android for mobile devices. Among its helpful features include 1) Inbox pause so you do not get interrupted with more important tasks at hand; 2) email reminders to help you get back to those who have not responded to your emails; 3) scheduled sending to allow sending emails at optimal times; 4) snooze messages to make sure you do not miss to act on important emails, and 5) read receipts that allow you to know whether your message has been read or ignored by the recipient.

Boomerang offers free basic and paid plans for both Outlook and Gmail. It starts at $4.99 per month, billed annually with a free 30-day trial.

2. SaneBox

SaneBox is a great productivity tool for organizing your emails. With its SaneLater feature, unimportant emails are moved from your inbox to the SaneLater folder, which you may access when you have the time. This way, important emails in your inbox does not get buried by unimportant ones. You can also create custom tabs and folders for different types of emails with SaneBox. Other helpful features include followup reminders and snooze emails.

SaneBox pricing includes three different rates for its three different subscriptions.

3. Hiver

Hiver is a very useful email management tool for teams. It allows for collaboration with its shared inbox feature. You can create email tabs and delegate emails according to groups or individuals. Other useful features include notes; alerts when someone is already responding to an email; roles and permissions; email activity timeline; email templates; and shared drafts.

Hiver offers four subscription packages starting at $7 per user per month, with 14-day free trial.

We made a separate section for top 3 productivity software for email marketing. While email management tools focus on increasing productivity by reducing email clutter, email marketing tools focus on making your email marketing strategies more efficient. We look into features like marketing automation (bulk sending), contact list management, email templates, performance tracking for certain marketing campaigns, and more.

Our top 3 choices for email marketing are Sendinblue, Active Campaign, and MailerLite. Other noteworthy email marketing tools include HubSpot Sales, Constant Contact, Pardot by Salesforce, and Drip.

1. Sendinblue

Sendinblue is great for small to medium-sized businesses with a wide range of email marketing and SMS personalization and automation. It also offers transactional email features and autoresponders. Sendinblue has also put more features on the table with CRM solutions for better productivity.

You can use Sendinblue for free with unlimited contacts and up to 300 emails per day. You may also subscribe to their feature-packed plans starting at $25 per month.

2. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is another email marketing software popular with small businesses. It allows you to easily send unique and functional emails for your different campaigns. ActiveCampaign is affordable and easy to use even for beginners. Other useful features include automation tools, opt-in forms, analytics, third-party integrations, and built-in CRM solutions.

ActiveCampaign offers four subscription plans for your different needs starting at $9 per month paid yearly.

3. MailerLite

If you are looking for a very simple and straightforward email marketing software, MailerLite might be a wise choice for you. It offers email automation, drag and drop editing tools, dynamic content, contact tags, contact segmentation, landing pages, pop-ups, and over a hundred applications and social media integrations. MailerLite is also easy to use and very affordable.

MailerLite pricing is pretty straightforward. They offer a free plan for your first 1,000 subscribers with up to 12,000 emails per month. Paid plan starts at $10 per month with 1,000 subscribers and unlimited emails. Price increases as your subscribers also increase in number.