20 tools to make your team more productive

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When collaborating in a team – and especially if you're working from home or remotely – it can be tricky to make sure everything flows smoothly. You need to share tasks out and communicate clearly and often enough to avoid teammates getting caught up with certain tasks and causing bottlenecks in your workflow. With the right set of tools, a team can maximise their potential and build creative workflows at any time and in any place.

In the sea of communication and collaboration tools on the market, finding the ones that will take your team’s productivity to a new level is not an easy task. That’s why we’ve rounded up some of the most powerful tools to help your team stay focused on real work – no matter where they are or what they are working on.

01. Slack

Functional and free, Slack is an incredible tool

Free

No matter whether you work with a remote or in-house team, Slack gives you an incredible opportunity to communicate with your colleagues through instant messages and chatrooms. Plus, it lets you create open or private channels and make voice or video calls. You can drop any files, documents and images into Slack to share them with anyone in the team. With Slack you can connect all the tools you use, incorporate feeds from social media into the application, and archive any messages and files in one central place.

02. Figma

Figma is the first interface design tool tailored towards UI design

Free (individual plan)

Figma is an excellent tool that lets teams collaborate on a UI design project and immediately share it with other team members. It’s the first browser-based interface design tool that lets you design vector-based UIs, edit, comment, share and store your work all in one place. Figma does for graphics what Google Docs does for text, connecting to the cloud so that many designers can work simultaneously on projects. To learn more, check out our article on how to create a responsive dashboard with Figma.

03. Active Collab

Stay connected in one place and in real time with Active Collab

From $25 (around £19) per month

Active Collab is a project management tool that helps your team stay organised in real time. It allows you to keep track of tasks and events, upload files, comment directly on tasks and keep all of your project feedback in one place. It also offers a number of features to help with collaboration, time tracking, task management and invoicing – you can issue invoices to your clients in just a few clicks. The tool runs in the cloud but you can also install it on your server.

04. Zapier

Zapier takes the tedium out of organising daily tasks

Free (basic) 

Zapier saves you time by enabling you to connect over 750 different apps and services and move information between them. It can automate daily tasks between applications too, such as uploading files you receive in an email to the team's Dropbox, then alerting you via Slack. On top of that, the tool gives you access to task history and lets you import and export via connected accounts. If you want to step up from the basic plan, a work plan costs from $20 (around £15.50) per month for an individual.

05. IFTTT

Streamline your to-do list effectively with IFTTT

Free

IFTTT (‘If this, then that’) is another handy collaboration tool that helps you link up a variety of internet-connected apps, services and devices and set up automated sequences. IFTTT works with over 400 services, including Dropbox, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify. So for example, if you’re making a status update or posting a photo on one of the channels, you can set up IFTTT to replicate the actions on another channel. These trigger-action relationships (referred to as ‘applets’) can save your team from drowning in endless administrative tasks.

06. Buffer

Focus on the important work by letting Buffer take care of social media

Free (personal use)

Buffer makes managing your social media a breeze. Buffer helps your team share content at any time, throughout the day. Simply add great videos, images and articles to Buffer and it will instantly share them on a variety of social channels. You can manage several accounts at once, and it’s possible to timetable posts for specific times or set them up to fill the next available time slot in your schedule. You can upgrade to a business plan from $10 (around £7.70) per month.

07. Zoom

Catch up face-to-face via video with Zoom

Free (basic)

Whether you are part of a small businesses or a large corporation, Zoom helps you improve your communications. It’s a one-stop video conferencing solution that enables you to conduct online meetings or group messaging in one software-based conference room. This means team members can chat easily with each other or clients, without needing to be in the same room. Upgrading to a pro account so that you can host conferences costs from $14.99/£11.99 per month per host.

08. Google Hangouts

Google Hangouts has the clean interface we've come to expect from the company

Free

Google Hangouts is another communication platform that gives your team members quick access to chat and enables them to make video calls with users across various platforms. The interface is clean and simple and the installation process is relatively easy. With a number of fantastic features such as video chats, group hangouts and the ability to add pictures directly into your conversations, it’s no wonder Hangouts is loved by users worldwide.

09. Join.me

Uncapped free video conferencing will help your team band together

Free

Join.me is an excellent communication tool, and it’s totally free. With Join.me, you can keep everyone in the loop with unlimited video and audio conferencing. It also lets you instantly share your screen or a single window, and join a meeting in just a click without having to sign up or download anything.

10. Google Docs

Google Docs is so easy to use it's no surprise it's so popular

Free

Google Docs is the easiest way for teams to collaborate by editing documents with other people in any real time. It’s a free web-based application that allows you and your team to create, edit, import and update documents and spreadsheets. One of its biggest assets is that it allows your team to store documents they create online, without running a risk of data loss. Finally, it’s compatible with most presentation software and it’s totally free.

Next page: 10 more tools to boost your productivity

11. Dropbox

Access data anywhere, from any device, with Dropbox

Free (basic)

Dropbox is a feature-rich document collaboration and storage platform that lends itself to a number of features, most notably document and file storage. Features such as easy and simple sharing, file and version recovery, smart sync and a team folder manager make it an ideal tool for your team and business. As it's in the cloud, you can access your data from any device, wherever you are. While you can have a Dropbox basic account for free, Dropbox Plus and Dropbox Business are paid subscriptions, costing from $9.99/£6.58 per month.

12. Red Pen

Red Pen's drag and drop functionality makes feedback quick and easy

From $20 (around £15.50) per month

Red Pen offers an exciting and intuitive way to mark, assess and annotate digital work, making team collaboration super-fast. Because it’s web-based, team members can access it at any time and anywhere, without having to install any software. It enables you to insert audio comments, highlight work, add position notes and drag-and-drop.

13. Dropbox Paper

Centralise your work and apps with Dropbox Paper

Free

At its core, Dropbox Paper is Dropbox’s version of Google Docs. It has a clean and minimalistic interface and offers a flexible and user-friendly workplace within which your team members can connect and share their ideas. Users can collaborate on documents by centralising their work from other apps. With Paper, you can keep a team’s work organised in one shared space, and control who can access what content. 

14. Evernote

Evernote acts as a personal digital assistant to keep you on track

Free (basic)

Evernote is a powerful note-taking application that enables anyone to easily capture ideas, images, contacts or pretty much anything they want to make a note of. It can be accessed on all of your devices, enabling you keep all your work in one place and start in-app discussions. Plus, it acts as your personal digital research assistant. A business account is priced from $10/£10 per user per month.

15. SaneBox

Stay on top of your inbox with SaneBox

From $7 (around £5.40) per month

SaneBox is the ultimate organisation tool that helps you keep track of and prioritise your email by filtering unimportant messages out of your inbox. You can set SaneBox to notify you if your emails haven’t received a reply, rescue real emails from spam, or upload attachments to your cloud – helping your team get work done.

16. Mural

Bring people together to share ideas with Mural

From $12 (around £9.25) per month

Based in the cloud, Mural is a visual collaboration workspace that enables your team to brainstorm ideas, organise them and collaborate with ease. Mural provides shared, digital whiteboards where your team can visualise problems and deliver solutions. There are also templates and built-in frameworks you can use to kickstart the problem-solving process.

17. Cage 

Say goodbye to long-winded meetings with Cage

From $24 (around £18.50) per month

Cage makes collaborating on design projects simple and hassle-free. Share, manage and approve your creative work with your team and your clients, and avoid marathon meetings and bulky email threads by receiving regular feedback. Cage aims to help you reduce the number of revisions you'll need, and help you complete your projects quicker.

18. TeamViewer

Stay connected to your team remotely with TeamViewer

From free

TeamViewer is a remote, easy-to-use access program. Its appeal is that it lets you access your office computer from your home PC or mobile device with very little lag time. Share your files or simply drag-and-drop them from one device to another. With TeamViewer, you can offer technical support to a friend, hold meetings, hold video calls and generally interact with other people as if you were in the same room. Simply install TeamViewer on both host and admin computers and you are ready to go. It's free for personal use or from £32 (around $41.50) per month for a business plan.

19. Help Scout

Share an inbox with your client with Help Scout

From $8 (around £6) per month

Help Scout is a helpdesk software specifically designed to help improve the customer experience. The most important feature of Help Scout is its shared inbox, which should help keep the entire team on the same page. Further to this, it’s possible to create multiple inboxes for each shared email address, or to manage a few brands from a single account. Use the Note Feature to start an internal discussion on a specific topic with your team before replying to a customer.

20. Zeplin 

Zeplin is a straightforward way of bringing designers and developers together

From free

Zeplin is a collaboration tool that helps designers and web developers leverage their workflow and communicate smoothly and speedily. It allows designers to upload their visual designs from a desktop app such as Sketch or Photoshop and add them to a project folder in Zeplin. Once both designers and engineers have an account, sharing design specs such as sizes, colours, and margins and contributing to it is simple. While working on one project is free, pricing increases as the number of projects increases. It starts from $17 (around £13) per month.

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