40+ Best Online Tools to Run your Small Business

40+ Best Online Tools to Run your Small Business

As the owner of a small business, you find yourself juggling with many responsibilities every day. Without the right tools, it can get overwhelming. Not a day goes by that I wish someone founds a super apps for businesses. Over the years, I have zeroed down on a bunch of tools that can help small business owners (especially the ones who have an online business) stay on top of their work. I have tried to keep this list small and smart, with several tools existing and new ones entering every year. This list is meant to help you get on with the job of managing your day-to-day job of growing your business rather than wasting time and avoid silly mistakes on finding the right tools to manage the laundry list. So let’s get on with it.

Here are the Best Online tools to run your Small Business in 2024

1. Sender — Email and SMS Marketing Software

Sender is an email and SMS marketing platform ideal for small businesses and startups.

The software’s key features include email automation and advanced segmentation. With these, you can easily create and schedule personalized email campaigns that reach the right audience at the right time.

Sender also has a drag-and-drop email builder with responsive templates. This way, you can create professional emails that look great on any screen without any coding.

Understanding what’s working and what’s not is the key to improving your email campaigns. With Sender’s detailed analytics and reports, you can monitor your campaign’s performance and adjust accordingly.

In addition to emails, Sender lets you reach customers through text message campaigns. You can run both email and SMS campaigns without switching between apps. As a result, customers get an omnichannel experience that boosts engagement and, ultimately, sales.

You can access all the main email features with Sender’s Free Forever plan. For more advanced features like SMS campaigns, you can purchase its paid plans starting at $15 per month.

2. SendX – email marketing tool

SendX is an email marketing tool that guarantees high deliverability rates without compromising on the volume of emails sent. It offers a wide range of features to make email marketing easy for businesses of all sizes.

The platform’s most important features include a user-friendly interface, customizable templates, and advanced segmentation options. Businesses can easily create, schedule, and send professional email campaigns using SendX’s drag-and-drop editor, and target their audience based on factors like behavior and engagement. Additionally, SendX offers automation tools like drip campaigns, autoresponders, and behavioral triggers that help businesses engage with their subscribers and boost conversions.

SendX also provides lead capture forms, landing pages, and integrations with other marketing tools and CRMs. While these features may not be as critical as the platform’s email marketing capabilities, they still offer additional value for businesses looking to expand their marketing efforts beyond just email campaigns. Overall, SendX is an excellent choice for businesses that want to streamline their email marketing efforts while ensuring high deliverability rates.

3. factoHR – HCM Solution

FactoHR is a cloud-based human capital management software designed to streamline various HR processes for businesses. Please note that there may have been changes or developments since then.

FactoHR typically offers features such as employee data management, attendance tracking, leave management, payroll processing, performance management, and more. The goal of such HR software is to automate and simplify HR tasks, leading to increased efficiency and accuracy in managing human resources.

4. Intercom – Customer Success and Support

Intercom has transformed the way we engage with our customers. From on-boarding trial users, re-engaging inactive users, and supporting active users – Intercom has become the backbone of our customer communications, support, and CRM processes. We shifted to Intercom just a couple of months back from Zendesk which we used for over 3 years and the impact has been felt big-time. With Intercom’s emphasis on conversations rather than tickets, the way we support our customers has underwent a complete transformation. With in-app visibility, customer-metrics and an almost-chat-like experience, our average support response and resolution time is down to 10 minutes! Intercom also enables us to run targeted campaigns based on several customer metrics. Its the absolute-must-have tool for any SAAS product and I sometimes wonder how we were living without it.

5. Recruiterflow – CRM, applicant tracking and recruiting platform

Recruiterflow is a CRM, applicant tracking and recruiting platform for ambitious recruiting and executive search firms. Recruiterflow’s recruiting automation, ease of use, and simplicity are what set it apart from other ATS and recruiting CRM products. This makes Recruiterflow an excellent choice for businesses that need robust tools for screening applicants efficiently and effectively.

Recruiterflow software has drag-and-drop workflows, SMS and email messaging, API integrations, and ATS functionality. With its G Suite and office365 integration, you can two-way sync emails to clients and candidates. It provides a range of advanced functionalities such as candidate portals, company blocking, email tracking, job board posting, built-in report analytics, and more. Recruiterflow allows you to manage and maintain your applicant and client pipelines, post jobs on multiple job boards and track candidates, create custom, well-crafted email sequences, deliver a high-quality candidate experience without any extra effort, and get an in-depth view of your team’s performance and recruiting. 

With real-time statistics, you can review your recruiting strategy and performance immediately using Recruiterflow. You can also build your own custom apps using open APIs on the platform. Recruiterflow is easy to use, and straightforward and requires no training. All you need to do is sign in with your work email address, and you’re good to go. You can test out their product for free for seven days.

6. Peoplebox – Objectives and Key Results

Peoplebox is an OKR, Performance Management and Employee Engagement Platform for fast-growing companies to drive better alignment, team performance and retention.

It offers multiple performance and strategy execution tools such as OKRs, KPIs, Project Management, Business Reviews, Performance Reviews, 360-degree Reviews, One-on-one meetings, engagement surveys, org-chart, and people analytics to make people management easier for you.

Their integration with Slack goes beyond just notifications. You can run entire performance reviews, engagement surveys, and OKR check-ins without leaving Slack driving incredible experience and adoption.

7. Chanty – Team collaboration

Chanty is a perfect choice for small businesses. This collaboration platform is designed to improve productivity through online communication, task management, and video conferencing.

The unlimited messaging option even goes with the free plan and is a perfect feature for remote teams. Chanty offers one-on-one video calls and group video conferences with screen sharing.

One of the handy features in Chanty is the built-in task manager that turns any message into an assignment. If you are tired of switching between the tabs at work, connect any app available and turn your team chat into a single notification center.

8. CookieYes – Cookie Consent Management

Cookies can be used to store information that is useful for making your business website run more efficiently and can also enable you to deploy additional services. However, using some of these cookies may violate privacy laws like GDPR without first obtaining consent from visitors. CookieYes—a cookie consent solution that makes it easy for websites to add a cookie consent banner on their website so users can see which types of cookies are being used on their site and decide whether or not they want to store them on their browsers.

9. Aritic PinPoint – Marketing Automation Software

Aritic PinPoint is a full-stack marketing automation software platform for marketing operations teams at small and medium businesses. It helps you to build relationships with leads, automate marketing campaigns and convert leads to paying customers easily. 

It has features such as landing page builder, SEO tracking, keywords tracking, lead scoring, lead tracking, lead nurturing, email campaign management, email campaign automation, push notification campaigns, marketing campaign builder, a/b testing, website tracking features with marketing assets management. 

Aritic PinPoint integrates with CMS, like WordPress, Drupal, has bi-directional native CRM integration with Salesforce, SugarCRM, Dynamic CRM, Zoho CRM and social media platform integration with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Foursquare, Instagram.

10. ProofHub – Team Collaboration And Project Management

ProofHub is an award-winning team collaboration and project management tool that is designed specifically to simplify complex project management through a list of advanced features in a centralized location. Be it task management, time management, intra-team communication or file management, ProofHub covers all aspects of project management. Simple, fixed pricing plans make it affordable for startups and small businesses while its scalability ensures that it grows as your team expands. Minimal learning curve makes ProofHub easy to understand for new team members and all project stakeholders are brought together on a single platform for enhanced collaboration. In other words, ProofHub is an all-in-one SaaS solution for all your project management and team collaboration needs.

11. Jotform Sign – E-signatures Meet Automation

Businesses always need contracts. Using Jotform Sign, you can create secure online documents and share them with people easily with a link so they can electronically sign them. Automate this process by integrating with your favorite apps and receiving notifications whenever your contracts get signed. Choose from 600+ ready-made templates and style your document to fit your business branding. Use approval flows to hand off documents to your colleagues and upload your data to your cloud storage account. Analyze and visualize your data with Jotform Tables and create reports to uncover new business insights.

12. NuovoTeam – Push-to-Talk

NuovoTeam is a reliable Push-to-Talk, business messaging and collaboration software designed to keep your remote and on-field teams connected. It is a two-way walkie-talkie app that offers instant connectivity and team collaboration features to drive a mobile-first business strategy. Your field service teams can leverage instant messaging, document sharing, location tracking, group calls and much more over cellular or Wi-Fi networks. In essence, NuovoTeam acts as an all-in-one tool to track productivity, engage your on-field employees and offer seamless connectivity on the go

13. Fellow.app – Meeting Note App

Fellow.app is a meeting note app tool that can help you run more efficient meetings and one-on-ones. The software also allows you to create a meeting agenda and track all your talking points to ensure meetings stay on track. You can also use Fellow to run asynchronous meetings, track OKRs, or even give and receive feedback. Use note-taking software to build great meeting habits through collaborative agendas, real-time notetaking, and time-saving templates.

14. Acquire – Customer Communication

Acquire is a customer communication platform for delivering seamlessly integrated support. Users are able to communicate with support agents in real-time via text, video or voice thanks to the Live Chat feature. The sophisticated Chatbot functionality saves time and resources by automatically answering the most common customer questions without the need of support agents. This frees them up to focus on other more complicated queries. Chatbots can even work as a lead qualification tool, too. Meanwhile, Acquire’s Cobrowse delivers a simple on the go solution. All customers have to do is share their browsing screen with a support agent in real-time to get guidance on complex issues like product navigation, payment failures, and checkout difficulties. To sum up, Acquire is a one-stop-shop solution for all your customer support needs.

15. Quaderno – Automatic tax compliance

Quaderno is a tax management software for businesses who want to scale without memorizing all the tax policies at home or abroad. From tax calculation and tax receipts to threshold alerts and comprehensive tax reports, Quaderno automates the tax compliance process for US sales tax, VAT, and GST around the world. Quaderno will track your sales around the world and alert you when your business might be liable for taxes so that you can register on time. The app also applies the correct tax amount to each sale, and sends automatic invoices every time you get paid. Thanks to instant, easy-to-read tax reports, you can file returns in minutes. Ultimately, the app keeps your business tax compliant and saves you hours of manual accounting, so that you can get back to doing what you love.

16. Brinso

Brinso brand name idea evaluation tool is one of the most important tools for those who search for a brand name for their startup. Those who have a brand name idea can evaluate how good or bad their brand name idea is according to human psychology. Once you enter the chosen brand name the Brinso evaluation tool will generate a complete report on your brand name. In this report the tool will evaluate your brand name idea based on the universal brand name qualities and also how psychologically the brand name connects with the human brain.

17. TeamWave

TeamWave is a powerful, straightforward, easy to use, and super affordable Work Management Software. You can manage your sales, projects, teams, clients and marketing – everything in one single place. With TeamWave you can streamline workflows, get things done faster and scale your business with confidence. Similarly, businesses can leverage sharepoint development services to enhance collaboration, document management, and workflow automation, ensuring smooth operations and increased productivity

TeamWave is very intuitive – you’ll need only 5-minutes to learn the ropes. And the best part is all your business needs – CRM, Project Management and HR are integrated into one platform.

And all this is available at a flat price of US $39/month for UNLIMITED USERS. Yes!! TeamWave does not charge a per-user fee.

18. Scribe — AI-powered process documentation

Scribe is an extension and desktop app that writes your process documentation for you. 

If you’ve ever had to manually write out instructions or copy/paste screenshots, Scribe saves you hours of documentation time, so you can focus on doing the work you love. 

The versatile tool empowers individual users and teams to build SOPs, help center guides and training manuals in seconds. 

Scribe follows along as you work to capture your screen and create step-by-step guides, complete with text and annotated screenshots. With the power of AI, you can insert each guide into long-form process documentation for teammates and clients alike.

Scribes are easy to edit, share and export as a PDF, HTML or Markdown. The software also offers several integrations, such as Confluence, Notion and Sharepoint. You can also embed Scribes in any of your favorite tools, so your team can find answers exactly when they need them.

19. Chisel

Chisel is a free Agile product management Software. If you are looking for an ideal product management tool you can go for the chisel. Its features like Roadmap, Team radar, and product feedback can really help your business grow. Also, Chisel can be easily integrated with various platforms so that you don’t have to manually set up everything. So if you want to boost your team’s productivity Chisel is the way to go.

20. Zendesk – Customer Support

The trusted old-friend Zendesk still continues to play a role albeit a supporting one in our customer communications. We now use Zendesk primarily for billing related communications as billing issues many-a-times take a much longer time to resolve and email as a medium works fine for this use-case.

21. Sendy with AmazonSES – Bulk Emailing

As our subscriber base grew, so did the cost per email campaign. It was becoming way too expensive for us to communicate with our customers and subscribers with most hosted email platforms being way more expensive than they should be. I searched around for a self-hosted platform that would enable us to send out email campaigns without worrying about cost or deliverability, and that is when I found Sendy.  Sendy is a self hosted email newsletter application that lets you send trackable emails via Amazon Simple Email Service (SES). This has made it possible for us to send authenticated emails to tens-of-thousand of our subscribers at an insanely low price (Amazon SES rocks!) without sacrificing deliverability.

22. Freshdesk: Omnichannel Helpdesk software

Freshdesk is a cloud-based customer support software from Freshworks Inc. It streamlines customer conversations across multiple channels and enables cross-team collaboration to help organizations of all sizes deliver exceptional support. With a focus on productivity and scalability, Freshdesk has a powerful suite of features including advanced ticketing workflows,  AI-enhanced automation, a comprehensive self-service solution, intuitive reporting, field service management capabilities and an extensive marketplace for third-party apps. With a presence in more than 140 countries, Freshdesk is used today by over 150,000 companies across industries including Honda, Pearson, UNICEF, Cisco, Azimo and the University of Pennsylvania.

23. Skype – VOIP

I use Skype to connect with our customers around the world and it continues to be my tried and tested app for voice calls. Skypeout also makes it easier for me to have country based phone numbers that our customers can call into and have the calls forwarded to my mobile. With productivity tools such as a minute meeting sample, Skype meetings can become more effective, communicative, and to the point. You can also use other business VOIP solutions if you need any custom calling services.

RELATED: How to Use Skype for First Timers | Easy Comprehensive Guide

24. Wild Apricot – Member Management

If your business entails managing memberships, then Wild Apricot provides you with all the tools to do that in one place. You can manage all your members, take online payments, create events and take registrations and do much more easily with this tool.

Read More: Buying or Selling a Small Business

25. Mockplus iDoc – Design Collaboration Tool

Mockplus iDoc is a popular all-in-one online design collaboration tool that allows designers, developers and product managers to import, prototype, test, share and handoff web/app designers with automatic specs, assets, code snippets. Product team can easily import designs from Sketch/PS/XD, create UI flows and interactive prototypes, check and download design assets/specs/code snippets, upload and preview files from Axure/JustinMind/Mockplus/Office/Excel, handoff designs, and manage team members with ease. Its advanced team and project management feature is also worth trying.

26. Chargify – Recurring Subscriptions

One of the most critical functions in running a SAAS product is managing recurring billing. Its not easy to get customers to continue to pay you month-after-month. We started with the idea of writing our own code for managing the billing but soon (thankfully!) realised the futility of it. We chose Chargify and it has served us reasonably well over the last 3 years, but the platform hasn’t really grown in features or finesse and I am looking at making a shift now. ChargeBee looks very promising and we are in the very initial stages of playing with it. It is cumbersome to migrate customers to a new platform, so choose your billing platform very carefully.

27. Authorize.net – Payment Gateway

We use Authorize.net as our payment gateway connected with Chargify. Does its job well but is a little complex to manage and needs a separate merchant account. I am looking at shifting to Stripe because of its full-stack service, simplicity and transparent pricing. Credit card data portability is much better with Stripe and that’s important to me.

28. Quickbooks Online – Accounting

I use Quickbooks Online for accounting and while its never fun, its pretty easy to get the job done with it. Syncs with our bank accounts, is cloud-based and hence I can manage our accounts from anywhere.  

29. BuzzSumo – Influencer Marketing

BuzzSumo has been our tool of choice for finding influencers, identifying content that works well and researching for our SEO campaigns. If influencer marketing is your focus, I would recommend having BuzzSumo in your arsenal. It saves us a ton of time and lets us take informed decisions pretty quickly.

30. AeroLeads – B2B Data

AeroLeads is a tool used to find Emails, Phone Numbers and B2B Data. Install the chrome plugin and search for the people on LinkedIn, CrunchBase, AngelList and many more. This lead generation software will find their business emails, phone numbers, job title, and location too.

You can also able to verify email which will support you to reduce the bounce rate as you can able to verify one’s email before sending an email campaign. Select the best plan by visiting the AeroLeads website.

31. Grove HR – HR and culture management

Grove HR is the best free HR platform for startups who want to develop and build meaningful relationships with employees from the young days of business. With the New Normal rolling in & the emergence of young talents whose needs for inspiration are more than their paychecks, Grove HR helps bring Human Resources to the future with a tool that can reduce time wasted on manual HR tasks, accessible on the go, and provide a digital space for employees to engage and connect authentically, even in the remote work setting.

Grove HR offers free all Core HR features for companies with less than 50 employees, including Recruitment, Onboarding, Time Tracking, Employee Profiling, Payroll, Employee Mobile App, and more. So, you don’t have to worry too much about the budget needed to spend on keeping your small team efficient.

32. Ahrefs – SEO

Content marketing and SEO are our main sources of organic traffic and Ahrefs lets us track backlinks, keywords, brand mentions and know what our competitors are doing. Its a pretty nifty tool that combines several functions into one – the paid versions are a tad expensive but you can get going (to some extent) with the free version as well.
Also, checkout some alternatives to Afrefs.

33. Google Analytics – Web Analytics

We need to keep a constant tab on our website traffic and track sources, campaigns, page views, bounce rates and funnels. Google Analytics is pretty powerful when it comes to tracking and analysing traffic. I have tried some of the paid products to track traffic but have still not found any other compelling product to make a shift. 

34. SnapSquad – Photographer Marketplace

SnapSquad is a photographer marketplace, connecting photographers with customers and allowing photographers to gain more exposure. Unlike other platforms we let you make the rules; allowing photographers to set their own rates, hours, locations and specialisms.

Quite fancy the idea of a few weeks in Paris? Why not create a listing there and have a working holiday? Having the idea is one thing, having the platform to do it is another. And that’s where we come in.

No monthly subscription, listing or joining fees. The only fee is charged on bookings made. No bookings, no fees, no risk, which we think is fair.

35. Workhoppers – Freelancers

When things get very busy around the office and I need an extra hand, Workhoppers is a cost-effective and fast solution to find local quality professionals for freelance, contract, gig or part-time help. The fact that I get matched with the right professionals and can proactively search profiles makes hiring super easy and flexible.

36. Google Docs and Drive – Collaboration

I don’t remember the last time I used Microsoft Word / Excel. Google Docs has been the default document and spreadsheets processor for me for ages now and all my documents are stored in Google Drive. The fact that I can access and work on them from anywhere and share them easily from my mobile devices make it a no-brainer for me.

37. Gmail – Email

I have tried Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Outlook earlier, but the web interface of Gmail has been my default choice for several years now. With a few add-ons like Streak (for email tracking and scheduling), Gmail’s native interface more than suffices for my needs. 

38. Slack – Team Communications

We use Slack for team communications. Slack lets us form small groups and keep conversing on any idea or task.  Its a simple and effective platform to keep the team on the same page and keep the communication flows open and active.

39. Nextiva – Team Communication

Nextiva is another great team communication tool. Growing businesses are using Nextiva’s Small Business Phone System for instant voice calls, video conferencing, and quick messaging to leverage the team collaboration. It is a simple and powerful software to discuss complex concepts with your team within a few minutes without paying extra fee.

40. Ecosmob – Custom VoIP development

Ecosmob is the leading provider of custom VoIP solutions development for small businesses, focusing strongly on Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) and Session Border Controllers (SBC). Its expertise ensures secure, scalable, and efficient bespoke communication solutions for small businesses that fulfill your or your customer’s unique needs.

41. Asana – Tasks

Our product road map is recorded and evolves everyday in Asana’s simple task-based interface. Asana lets me create projects, assign tasks, set timelines and sequence tasks visually. Its the one tool that keeps our team and the product road map on track.

42. Evernote – Archives

I dump everything in Evernote. Notes, favourite links, images, references, quick task lists and much more. Its searchable and syncs across devices and makes my life easier.  

43. Alfred – Productivity App for Macs

Alfred is my favourite productive app for my Macbook. It helps me be more efficient everyday with search, hotkeys, keywords, text expansion, calculator (I need one) and more.

44. Pen and Paper – Ideation

There are times when I just need to doodle and visualise things using a pen and paper. It feels organic and more real and lets me play freely with design ideas. I use notebooks and sketchbooks from LetterNote and always carry one with me.

You can also go for a budget drawing tablet that is easy to use, PARBLO is a professional brand specializing in digital painting tools such as pen displays and drawing tablets.

Also Checkout – Best Tablet Guide for more.

45. Recordit – Animated GIFs

Its always easier to explain concepts and workflows with moving GIFs and Recordit is a dead, simple tool for making just that. Its simple, bare interface and no-nonsense, limited functionality makes it my choice for creating GIFs quickly whenever I need to explain something quickly to customers. Saves a tonne of writing and screenshots.

46. Skitch – Annotated Screenshots

Well, you do have to take screenshots and annotate them many a times and Skitch works well with several simple annotation features and a timed-snapshot feature as well. Plus it lets me crop and resize images quickly. The only limitation is that it only lets you capture what’s on the screen. I use Awesome Screenshot (Chrome extension) to capture full web pages whenever needed.

47. Unsplash – CCO Images

Unsplash is an awesome repository of CC0 high-resolution images that are free to use for any purpose. The collection on Unsplash just feels more real and organic than stock photo websites. I use Unsplash whenever I am putting together a new theme for Pixpa. Many times I opt for premium quality images and my choice is Shutterstock for that, if you want to know what Shutterstock is – click here.

48. Floship – E-Commerce Order Fulfillment

Running an E-commerce store gets much easier with all above mentioned tools. Now all that is left to do is to figure out how you’re going to get your products to your customers.
Floship is a Hong Kong-based order fulfillment provider specialized in helping small to medium-sized businesses with warehousing, inventory management, order picking and worldwide shipping. Having your fulfillment provider close to your Chinese manufacturer or supplier has many benefits, a short lead time being one of them. We would recommend contacting them and help you create a solid shipping plan.

49. Standuply – The Virtual Agile Assistant

Standuply is a powerful and user-friendly online tool designed to help small business owners streamline their communication and collaboration processes. As the name suggests, Standuply is primarily used for conducting virtual stand-up meetings, which are brief and frequent meetings where team members share updates and discuss progress. With Standuply, small business owners can automate these meetings, eliminating the need for manual scheduling and follow-up. The tool integrates with a variety of collaboration platforms, including Slack, and offers a wide range of customization options, so business owners can tailor their virtual stand-up meetings to their specific needs. Additionally, Standuply provides valuable analytics and insights into team performance, enabling small business owners to make data-driven decisions to improve their processes and drive success. Overall, Standuply is an essential tool for small business owners looking to boost their collaboration and communication efforts.

All these tools help me stay productive, you can also see more expert productivity tips on this post. And if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur and looking for free tools to start your business then this article will definitely help you to enhance your knowledge and stay productive.

Also Read: Small Business photography and film pricing

Comments

No comments yet. Why don’t you start the discussion?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *