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Digital Tools For Startups
The primary concern of every aspiring entrepreneur is to keep their startup costs as low as possible. Although there are several unavoidable costs an online business have to pay for, you can minimize some operational costs with the assistance of the best tools.
There are a number of startup tools and resources available that not only help in minimizing the startup costs, but they also assist in saving precious time of savvy businessmen.
Imagine if you could enhance your efficiency with just a few tools. What if you can get your hands on 30 best tools for startups? Fortunately, that’s exactly what I’m going to share with you today. Let’s take a look!
Best Startup Tools Categories
Ideation Tools
MVP Tools
Launch Tools
Marketing Tools
Finance & Fundraising Tools
CRM Tools
Design & Development Tools
I’ve divided these startup tools into seven different categories. Each of them casts a strong impact on the overall performance of your business and allows you to become more efficient with your business operations.
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1 Startup Ideation Tools
It’s a fact that the first step is always the toughest. The ideation phase of any startup is crucial but once you know what industry you wish to work with, and what type of product you’re going to sell, things get clear, and with the assistance of the following startup tools, you will have a clearer direction of how to proceed further.
- Squad Help
Squadhelp Startup tool
Squad Help assists you in finding an ideal name for your business. However, they do not limit their services to just business names. Instead, it also assists in finding the perfect name for your app, book, product or service, etc.
You can start a naming competition and engage thousands of experts as you’re guided through their agency-level naming process. You can also explore their hand-picked compilation of premium names that are available for immediate purchase.
Pricing: For as low as $199 per contest.
- Clarity
Clarity.fm for startup
It doesn’t matter whether you’re a fresh entrepreneur or an experienced businessman. Every entrepreneur needs actionable advice at one point or the other during their entrepreneurial journey. Clarity ensures ambitious entrepreneurs receive valuable pieces of advice from industry experts.
It helps you connect with industry leaders from all across the globe. These Clarity experts can help you overcome any challenge that you might be facing at any stage of your entrepreneurial journey. Whether it’s scaling your business, raising funds, researching market trends, or sharpening your skills, this tool for entrepreneurs has got you covered with the best business advice.
Pricing: For as low as $1 per minute on phone calls.
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- Germ.io
Germio tool
This tool for startup helps you better manage your business concepts and ideas. You will never lose the big picture of your startup idea with this resource. You can validate your concepts and share your vision by flaunting your big picture.
Germ.io helps you evolve your business idea by providing the ‘next steps’. Consequently, you will be able to shape up your business idea with ease. It lets you create actionable strategies by helping you with your how’s, what’s and why’s.
Pricing: Free version available
- Mindmeister
MindMeister for startups
This web-based mind-mapping tool lets you collaborate and brainstorm with experts in real-time. Besides ideation and project planning, you can use this startup tool for creating presentations. Mindmeister allows you to turn mind-maps into dynamic slideshows.
Moreover, it integrates with MeisterTask – a task management tool – allowing you to turn your ideas into actionable tasks.
Pricing:
Basic: Free
Personal: $4.99
Pro: $8.25
Business: $12.49
- Javelin
Javelin for ideation
To keep it simple, this is a one-stop solution for lean startups when it comes to customer development. A platform for innovators, Javelin can help you identify customer needs and validate new products. You can measure your product’s market fit with the assistance of their pre-designed surveys. It allows you to save time as the speed of workflow increases.
Pricing: Free to Signup
2 Startup MVP Tools
For entrepreneurs who create web or mobile apps, it is significant to understand how their Minimum Value Product (MVP) affects their business. It also helps you experiment with your ideas in your preferred industry or market, before you complete your product. There are three MVP tools for startups worth highlighting. They include:
- Just In Mind
Javelin tools
Here’s one amongst the best startup tools that’s an all-in-one prototyping solution for web and mobile apps. From wireframes to highly interactive prototypes, Just In Mind has it all. You can apply design fully-interactive prototypes from scratch and bring them to life with a click.
It offers a complete range of web interactions and mobile gestures so that you can concentrate on building a delightful user experience. You can create wireframes that adapt to multiple screen resolutions for desktop as well as mobile devices.
Pricing:
Professional $19/month (Billed Annually)
Enterprise $39/month (Billed Annually)
- Balsamiq
balsamiq startup tool
Their mission is to rid the world of bad user interface and help people to build websites and software that are easy to use. Balsamiq is a low-fidelity wireframing software accessible to entrepreneurs, managers, analysts, developers, agencies and anyone who’s into UX.
They provide extensive docs, assist in improving the software with the latest releases and provide support through multiple channels. You can find beginner-to-expert level tutorials and documentation on their support page for your convenience.
Pricing:
2 projects $9 per month or $90 per year
20 projects $49 per month or $490 per year
200 projects $199 per month or $1990 per year
3 Startup Launch Tools
Launching a startup is never easy. From its ideation to execution, there are multiple factors that play a significant role in determining a successful launch. Nonetheless, there are multiple tried and tested startup tools that can help you launch your startup successfully. They include:
- Product Hunt
Product Hunt tools
This is the ideal go-to launch platform for startups. Product Hunt showcases amazing new products every day. It’s a brilliant platform for product-loving enthusiasts. They can share, discuss and geek about all the new products, websites, mobile apps, and tech other creations.
It can conveniently assist you to launch your product or more importantly, your startup successfully. The website operates on a system for user comments as well as a voting system which is similar to Reddit. With its pre-existing community of testers who are willing to try out new products, launching your startup had never been easier.
Pricing: Sign up for Free
- Beta List
BetaList tool for startup
Beta List is a pre-launch system that helps your startup gain the traction it needs for a successful launch. The best advantage of this platform is that you can put your startup idea in front of an exceptional community of savvy business enthusiasts, and garner valuable feedback from them.
Beta List has helped over 3,000 startup founders to better understand their customers with the help of qualitative and quantitative research to ensure they are creating the right product for their right audience.
Pricing:
Hobby Free
Startup $129
Funded $299
- Press Kite
Press Kite
The story of your startup lives here! Press Kite allows you to create a press kit for your startup. It’s so convenient that now you don’t have any excuse to not have a press kit ready to send a journalist whenever need be. Your startup can now enjoy the press coverage it needs so that even the masses can see you. A tool worth checking out!
Pricing:
3 Plans (Free, Founder for $9, Startup)
- Cloudways
Cloudways startup
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that offers sustainable growth and lets you focus on growing your business while it takes care of your website hosting. Cloudways provides excellent feature set helping you scale your startup with ease.
Exclusively for Startups: Cloudways offers mentorship, growth tools, and discount on Cloudways platform through the Cloudways Startup Program.
Pricing: For as low as $10 per month
Give Your Startup the Cloudways Edge
With super fast and reliable managed hosting platform you can grow your startup the way you want
4 Startup Marketing Tools
A solid marketing strategy demands a flawless implementation of processes so that startups can get the best bang for their buck. Proper implementation of a startup marketing strategy requires tools to monitor, analyze, and evaluate any marketing campaign. Hence, the following marketing tools for startups are a must-have in order to ensure effective implementation of processes.
- Hootsuite
HootSuite startup tool
Hootsuite is one of the best social media marketing tools for startups which is used across the globe by well-known startups, mainly due to its easy UI and affordable pricing plans.
You can schedule up to 30 posts across any social media platform with its free plan. It will help you to measure the ROI (Return On Investment) of your social media campaign, and keep track of the impact that is being created, all under one umbrella. Moreover, you can also link two RSS feeds and different apps such as MailChimp, YouTube, Dropbox, and other startup tools.
Pricing:
Individual (1 user 3 social media profiles) Free
Professional (1 user 10 social media profiles) $19 per month
Team (3 users 20 social media profiles) $99 per month
Business (5-10 users 35 social media profiles) $599 per month
- MailChimp
Mailchimp logo
Email marketing is a time-tested strategy that has done wonders for many startups. In order to run a successful email marketing campaign, you need an email marketing tool for your startup that is nothing but exemplary. This is where MailChimp comes in – a tool for startups that requires no introduction.
Approximately 205 billion emails were sent in a day during 2015 which means 2.4 million emails in a second. Isn’t this number just mind-boggling? This email marketing tool for startups allows digital marketers to utilize a reliable emailing service to deliver emails directly to any user’s inbox. It’s one of the many highly recommended tools for startups.
Pricing:
Free Plan
Essentials $9.99 per month
Standard $14.99 per month
Premium $299 per month
- Mangools
Mangools
Mangools is a set of five Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools for startups like KWFinder, SerpChecker, SerpWatcher, LinkMiner, and SiteProfiler. It helps startups to create effective SEO workflows.
With Mangools, you can find all the right keywords, analyze the search results in any location, compare yourself with competitors, track your keyword positions and boost them all with powerful backlinks.
Pricing:
Basic $29.90
Premium $39.90
Agency $79.90
- Google Analytics
Google Analytics
Google Analytics helps you to track the traffic coming on to your website. It allows you to identify what’s working and what’s not. When you know what isn’t working, you can fix it to enhance your customer engagement and user experience.
Moreover, it helps you create much better digital marketing campaigns and ultimately, increase your conversion rate. You must use Google Analytics in order to achieve greater results for your startup with continuous evaluation of data and monitoring online marketing strategies.
Pricing: Free as long as you do not exceed 5 million impressions per month.
- Hunter.io
Hunter.io tool for entrepreneurs
Hunter.io assists you in finding business emails within seconds. By simply searching any domain, it will provide you with all the email addresses that are connected to it. With 200+ million email addresses indexed, it’s one of the most powerful tools for finding email addresses in order to connect with the relevant experts for your business.
Pricing:
Free
Starter $49 per month
Growth $99 per month
Pro $199 per month
Enterprise $399 per month
- CallHippo
CallHippo
A powerful Voice-over-Internet-Protocol(VoIP) service provider, CallHippo is a market leader in providing business phone numbers. A great tool for start-ups and mid-sized businesses, CallHippo has a wide array of innovative features that improve sales capabilities and agent performance. It enables managers to monitor calls, track key performance indicators, and provide real-time feedback to increase bottom-line results. With third-party integrations, a user-friendly interface, and high-level customization.
Pricing:
Bronze : $20 Per Month – (For Startups)
Silver : $35 Per Month – (Ideal For Small Team)
Platinum : $55 Per Month – (Preferred For SMB Sales, Support & Marketing Teams)
- SendPulse
Sendpulse
Staying in touch with your customers is probably the most important objective for a startup for it to stay afloat and be successful. Some customers like good old email, others might prefer chatbots or an SMS with a discount coupon. SendPulse is all about multichannel marketing. Offering various lead generation tools and promotional channels like email, SMS, or social media and messenger chatbots, SendPulse has every base covered. There is even a free CRM tool within the platform. The platform is constantly evolving, adding new features. The latest addition is an Instagram chatbot that apart from usual things can react to subscribers’ stories that mention your brand.
Pricing:
There is a free plan for almost all major features on the platform, with certain limitations in the functionality.
Paid plans can be either monthly or with annual payment, usually with a 20% discount.
Paid plans start at around $7 per month depending on the feature.
- WiseStamp
WiseStamp
WiseStamp is a popular email signature management tool that lets businesses run email-based employee advocacy campaigns on autopilot. With WiseStamp, businesses can centrally create one email signature that is automatically synced to the email addresses of all employees in the organization.
WiseStamp works seamlessly across all the popular email clients, including G Suite, Outlook, Mac Mail, and more. The service offers an easy drag-and-drop interface to create beautiful email signatures in minutes.
Pricing:
WiseStamp Pro: $5.80/month billed annually
WiseStamp Teams: $2/user/month billed annually
5 Finance & Fundraising Tools
Focusing on financial balances is crucial for startups. It is important to understand and record where the revenue is coming from, where it is going, and how will the startup perform in the upcoming months.
Investors admire entrepreneurs who incorporate calculated numbers in their pitch deck. However, you cannot do everything with just a pen and paper. You will require one of the following financial startup tools in order to accomplish your goals.
- Foundersuite
Foundersuite
Foundersuite is an amazing tool to raise capital for your startup. It brings structure, speed, and efficiency in fundraising and investor relationships. It offers CRM tool for managing your investor funnel, a searchable venture capitalist database, and an Investor Updater tool that helps in creating monthly progress reports.
It also includes Startup Docs – a comprehensive set of templates and spreadsheets like pitch decks, founders’ agreements; as well as FoundersMarket which is a set of curated deals on popular products.
Pricing:
Basic Free
Silver $44 per month
Gold $62 per month
Agent $150 per month
- Crunchbase
Crunchbase
A leading startup platform for entrepreneurs to explore innovative organizations. It lets you connect with experts and pursue new opportunities together. More than 50 million entrepreneurs, investors, market researchers, and sales professionals trust this tool for startup to make their business decisions. Many startups from all across the world rely on Crunchbase to power their applications.
Crunchbase Pro lets you access any startup, investor, or funding data through their web interface. It offers features like advanced searching, customized lists, personalized alerts, and CSV (Comma-Separated Values) exports. Some big names amongst their customers are Samsung, Honda, Nvidia, Shell, MixPanel and Harvard. It is truly a great tool for entrepreneurs.
Pricing:
Essential Free
Pro $29 per month
Enterprise Custom
- Gust
Gust
If you want to try out startup tools and resources, Gust is an excellent platform to start, grow, or fund your startup. They help entrepreneurs build investable startups with the assistance of mission-critical business tools, powerful performance benchmarks, and trusted fundraising recommendations.
It provides support during every stage of your startup evolution. When it’s time to raise funds for startup, Gust provides you with the best shot at investment. With over 650,000+ startup owners and 80,000+ investing professionals, they’ll connect you to a startup ecosystem unlike any other.
Pricing:
Start $175 per year*
Accelerate $875 per year*
Raise $4,775 per year*
- inDinero
inDinero
It lets you gear up for growth with scalable accounting software and on-demand CFOs (Chief Financial Officers). Their cloud-based solution allows you to scale your startup with the right accounting, tax management, and CFO support whenever you need it.
inDinero combines accounting, taxes, and CFO consultation so that you can enjoy proactive assistance along with real-time visibility of your startup’s performance. You can talk to your on-demand CFO any time you want, access financial data on the cloud, enjoy real-time accounting insights, and maximize your tax savings with ease.
Pricing:
The Basics $310 per month
The Essentials $525 per month
The Next Steps $1300 per month
- Fresh Books
Fresh Books
It is an all-In-one startup invoicing and accounting software solution. Fresh Books makes your startup bookkeeping fast, convenient, and secure. It automates your financial tasks such as organizing expenses, invoicing, tracking payments and following up with the clientele in just a few clicks.
You can view your financial statuses via Profit and Loss Statements (PLS), taxation summaries and expenditure reports. It can categorize the fees of your credit card transactions and provide a summary against all deposits on its dashboard. You can also integrate it with MailChimp, Paypal, Basecamp, and Zenpayroll.
Pricing:
Lite $15 per month
Plus $25 per month
Premium $50 per month
Custom pricing for 500+ billable clients
6 Startup CRM Tools
As soon as you’ve your first few loyal customers, it is the perfect time for your startup to invest in the best CRM tools for a startup. A CRM tool can prove to be a great help for your startup as it frees up so much time which you can spend productively on converting new leads. Some of the best CRM tools for startups are:
- CRM by Hubspot for Startups
Hubspot for Startups
Hubspot CRM is a great pick for startup owners. Honestly, you don’t need the frills, but you can use assistance with the data entries of your business. HubSpot centralizes your contact list. It helps you by automatically logging customer interactions, and extracting the data from the web to generate information about your potential customers.
Some salient features include:
Customize Views
Deal and Task Board
Hubspot Marketing Synchronization
Drag and Drop Communicator
Social Media
Company Database
Email Connections
Sidekick Integration
CRM Details
Templates, Tracking, and Scheduling
You can begin by using their free version, which is simple yet powerful. However, if your startup demands additional features, you can always opt for their paid versions. It’s one of the best startup tools available online for entrepreneurs who care about their customers.
Pricing:
FREE
STARTER $50 per month
BASIC $200 per month
PROFESSIONAL $800 per month
ENTERPRISE $2,400 per month
- Intercom Early Stage
Intercom
Intercom can help you scale your early-stage startup with ease. Its user-friendly products let you acquire, onboard, engage or support your customers in a personalized manner.
You can improve your website conversions with targeted visitor messages and live chat. You can also send behavior-based push and email messages to onboard new clients. It lets you track and segmentize your prospects based on their personas, and the actions they take on your website or the product page.
You can announce new features through personalized in-app messages. By using email and messaging, you’ll get quicker responses, faster resolutions and more satisfied customers.
Pricing:
Essential $87 per month
Pro $153 per month
Premium Custom pricing
- Salesflare
salesflare
Salesflare has an amazing integration with both Gmail (including Workspace) and Office 365, gathering a ton of information from your inbox and meetings, tracking email opens and clicks, powering email templates, and offering a handy sidebar that allows you to use Salesflare 100% from your inbox.
Some of our favorite features of Salesflare are:
Visual, drag-and-drop sales pipelines
Email and website tracking
Email signature sync
Automatically enriched company and contact data
Email templates and sequences/workflows
Relationships strength indicators
Automated reminders to follow up, answer emails,
Business card scanner
Out-of-the-box and customizable dashboards
Salesflare’s pricing is simple and fair for startups. Unlike some other CRMs, it won’t cost you an arm and a leg if you want to use all its functionality.
And if you’re an early-stage startup they even offer a big discount, which you can ask for on their live support chat.
Pricing:
GROWTH $29 per month
PRO $49 per month
ENTERPRISE $99 per month
Give Your Startup the Cloudways Edge
With super fast and reliable managed hosting platform you can grow your startup the way you want
7 Startup Design & Development Tools
For someone who’s about to start a startup, things become difficult to a breakdown in terms of design and development. If you take the wrong first step, things may become complicated in the future and it’s difficult to turn back. To refrain from putting yourself in such circumstances, here’s a list of the best design and development tools for startups.
- Mockplus
Mockplus
Mockplus is a web-based collaborative design tool. With Mockplus, you can create responsive wireframes & prototypes with your team in real-time, using drag-and-drop capabilities.
The application comes with hundreds of ready-to-use components & icons. Using its pencil and pen tools for vector drawing, you can easily create & customize your own components.
Mockplus combines the entire product design workflow process – This app doesn’t just cover design, but also includes team collaboration, handoff & management within an organized system, all you need to use Mockplus is an internet browser.
Pricing:
Basic: FREE, up to 10 users and 10 projects
Pro: $7.95/mo, up to 30 users and unlimited projects
Ultimate: $17.95/mo, unlimited users and projects
- Logo Design
logodesign
Logo design is an online logo maker tool to give your new startup a compelling visual identity. The program hosts an extensive gallery of unique logo templates for a huge array of industries. The designs are visually-appealing, fit for varying style tastes, and easily customizable. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to be able to work this tool. By simply clicking on different design features, you can change the logo icon, edit the colors, choose another font, or make tons of other changes available on the customization panel.
In addition to the company name, you can also add your tagline to the logo.
While each template on this tool is designed by a team of professional graphic artists, the tool also allows you to go for custom/premium designs. You can get in touch with their design team and ask for an exclusive logo design.
The website also offers business card designs and printing services for maximum brand exposure.
Pricing:
Currently, the website offers discounted prices on all logo design packages, so we are going to include both rates for your ease.
Logo Design Templates:
Basic:
Offers only logo design: $78, currently $39
Standard:
Logo design plus business card design: $114, currently $57
Pro:
Logo design + business card design + Letterhead + Envelope + T Shirt: $195, currently $97
Custom Logo Design:
Professional: $97
Startup: $167
Enterprise: $297
Small Business: $697
- Unsplash
Unsplash
Unsplash is one of those startup tools that offer high-resolution stock images so that you can create visually appealing promotions and campaigns for your startup. The world’s most generous community of photographers contributes actively to this platform.
Their huge library of over 1 million stock HD images – and hundreds more being added every day – will certainly let you find the perfect images. You can find inspiration from the new images they hand-pick each day or use their search feature to download precisely what you’re looking for.
Pricing:
Free to use
- Canva
Canva
Canva is an online graphic designing tool. It is widely used by many individuals and startups to design social media posts, blog graphics, Twitter headers, Facebook ads, Instagram posts and much more. With a library of more than a million fonts, images,and icons, you can come up with an array of visually appealing content.
Its user interface is quite easy to use. You can select a template, or you can create your own from scratch by using their drag-and-drop features. Graphics or images uploaded by global designers are also available for a small amount of fee.
Pricing:
Basic Free
Pro $12.95 per month
- Visme
Visme
Visme is a powerful design tool for startups that lets you showcase amazing visual stories in presentations, infographics, and other forms of visual content. You can easily translate boring content into stunning visual formats in your web browser.
Pricing:
Basic Free
Standard: $19 per month
Single/Complete: $39 per month
Team: $117 per month
- Github
Github
Github is one of the best development software for startups. It’s a great space for development engineers to collaborate and host / review their codes together. They manage a number of projects without compromising on quality while ensuring maximum efficiency. Github is a community of more than 35 million people who share, work and learn together to build better software.
Pricing:
Free $0 per month
Pro $7 per month
Team $9 per month
Enterprise Custom Pricing
- WordPress
WordPress
One of the most popular CMS that requires no introduction is WordPress. This free, open-source content management system is based on PHP and MySQL. Its primary features include a plugin architecture and a template system to build attractive websites.
It offers responsive designing, social sharing, multiple page styles, auto upgrades, and support, a vast variety of widgets and plugins, theme customization, SEO and much more. It is an ideal platform for fresh startups to build their websites and generate online traffic with ease.
Also Checkout The Best Marketing WordPress Plugins
Pricing:
Basic Free
Personal $5 per month
Premium $8 per month
Business $25 per month
Ecommerce $45 per month
- Bootstrap Zero
Bootstrap Zero
Bootstrap Zero is an array of responsive web templates that help developers make the most out of Bootstrap’s CSS, powerful grid, and other components. Their primary focus is to curate free-to-use templates that can adhere to the best practices to use Bootstrap’s baseline as much as possible. You can find resources that are logically grouped by collection, or you can always browse by popularity, ranked on the judgment of other Bootstrap developers.
Pricing:
Free to use
- Jotform Apps
Jotform apps
Jotform Apps is a free no-code app builder that lets you add forms, widgets, and branding to a fully custom app that can be downloaded onto any smart device.
Use their intuitive drag and drop interface to add forms and elements to your app. When your app is ready, share it via a link, email, or QR code. Your users can directly download the app onto their devices. Jotform also offers tons of unique templates to help you get a jump start on your app.
Pricing:
Bronze $24 per month
Silver $29 per month
Gold $79 per month
- Icons8
icons8
Background Remover by Icons8 is an AI-based online tool that enables you to remove background from any photo. Unlike other similar products, it’s absolutely free. It won’t ask you to pay for the full-scale result. It will save your time with the bulk upload functionality, which is also free. Background Remover is as simple as a rock and as accurate as a scalpel. Exceptional quality. API for developers.
Pricing:
Free to use
By and large,
There you have it! A list of the best startup tools curated after thorough research and consideration. Each of the resources in this list is beneficial for startups in keeping their business operations quick, convenient, and efficient. They hold the power to maximize your potential and increase your ROI. But, whichever tool you choose, do make sure that you also use high-speed ecommerce web hosting.
If you use them wisely, you can conveniently flourish your business with better prospects and experience sustainable growth for the many years to come. Just in case if you think I have missed out on any helpful tool or resource, feel free to mention it in the comments section below and help us in making this blog post more resourceful for other curious startup owners.
best tools for startups
Growing a startup is not easy. Keeping cost low is often one of the goals for small startups to survive. But to grow your business and enhance productivity, investing money in adopting the right tools can often save you more costs than the price of the tools themselves.
There are a lot of tools on that market that offer a free plan or affordable pricing that are suitable for small startups. In this article, we will share 30+ best tools for startups in different categories:
Communication Tools
Project Management Tools
Documentation / Knowledge Management Tools
Scheduling Tools
Team Culture / Team Building Tools
Holiday Management Tools
Automatic Daily Startup and Status Report Tools
Marketing Tools
Sales Tools
Customer Success Tools
Product / Design Tools
Expense management tools
1 Best communication tools for startups
Communication tools that startups often use include instant messaging and video conferencing tools. Instant chat tools are great for quick updates and small questions but for more complex issues, jumping on a video call is often a more effective way. Video conferencing tools are also very useful in conducting client meetings when the use base of your startup is global.
Slack
Startup Tool – Slack
Slack is our favorite tool for instant messaging. Using Slack, you can create channels to group discussions on different topics. Slack offers an extensive Slack App Directory where you can easily connect Slack with tools that your startup already use in your daily workflow or add extra functions to help you use Slack in a more productivity way. The free plan pretty much covers all the things a startup needs, just that the free plan only has limited history and can install up to 10 apps max.
Need more tips on using Slack? Check out our blog posts on Slack tips and tricks.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $6.67/month per user
Zoom
best startup tools – Zoom
Zoom is one of the most popular web conferencing tools on the market. Using Zoom, you can easily start an online meeting or webinar with good video/audio quality and screen sharing function. One handy feature of Zoom is that you cna create recurring meetings with the same URL, which is very useful for hosting internal team meetings for your startup.
The free plan covers the basic needs that you need to do a video call. But group calls are limited to 40 minutes for the free plan.
Need more tips on using Zoom? Check out our blog post How to use Zoom: 15+ Zoom tips and tricks.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $14.99/month per host
Google Meet
best tools for startup – Google Meet
If you are looking for a completely free option for video call, Google Meet is a great choice as well. Using Google Meet, you can safely create and join high-quality video meetings for groups of up to 250 people. You can also view and present in live-streamed events that include up to 100,000 in-domain viewers
Pricing: Free
2 Best project management startup tools
Using a project management tool to organize and track progresses of projects and tasks is very helpful to enhance the productivity of your startup because at the early stages, when you are still trying to find product market fit, it’s likely that there can be numerous changes to your priorities and task arrangements. Without a right tool, things can get very messy and your teammates may find it hard to keep track of what needs to be done and the progress.
Trello
Best startup software – Trello
Trello is a Kanban-style list making tools that are helpful in project or task management. You can create boards, lists, and cards with labels, checklists and due dates to organize your team’s projects and tasks and simply drag and drop them to track progresses. There are also a lot of Power-ups (essentially apps for Trello) that you can add to Trello to supercharge its already amazing functions.
The free plan is adequate for most small startup needs but is limited to 10 team boards and 1 Power-Up per board.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $9.99 per user per month
Asana
Best software for startups – Asana
Asana is another very popular project management tools among startups. Using Asana, you can organize your projects and tasks in one shared space and switch between list, kanban board and calendar views easily.
Its free plan covers most small startups’ needs and can have up to 15 teammates.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $10.99 per user per month
3 Best documentation / knowledge management tools for startups
Knowledge management tools help teams better organize useful team knowledge such as frequently asked questions, workflow guidelines and other important information in a centralized hub so teammates can access important info quickly when they need them.
When choosing an internal knowledge management tool for your startup, look for tools that integrate well with other tools your team already uses, offer a powerful search, good collaborative features and built-in workflows to ensure content accuracy and freshness.
Benefits of investing in knowledge management tools:
Speed up onboarding
Enhance team productivity
Standardize workflows and share learnings among teams
Reduce repeated questions and mistakes in your team
Kipwise
Top startup tools – Kipwise
Kipwise is a knowledge management tool that helps teams build up their company knowledge hub easily. It offers powerful Slack integration, browser extensions and is integrated with Google Drive, Trello, Airtable and more, so you can save and retrieve team knowledge easily, wherever you need them.
Some key features that help teams enable better internal knowledge flow:
Powerful Slack integration – Handy slash command and Slack Actions to create and search for team knowledge. You simply don’t have to leave Slack to build up your knowledge base.
Real-time collaborative editor – With rich embedding options, your team can edit the same doc at the same time and create visually appealing documentation easily.
Content review process – Set designated reviewers for your collections to ensure content is always up-to-date and accurate.
Pricing: Starting from $16/month for 10 users
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4 Best scheduling tools
As startup founders or customer-facing roles, it’s likely that you have to schedule quite a lot of meetings with different stakeholders like investors, prospects and customers. Instead of needing to send back and forth emails to schedule a time, using a scheduling tool can help you save a whole lot of time and also increase conversion rate as booking a meeting has become much easier and hassle free for your prospects and customers as well.
Calendly
Useful startup tools – Calendly
Using Calendly, you can set specific time that you are available (or simply link your Calendar to block off unavailable time slots) and allow people to make a booking with you easily. Other than sharing your Calendly booking link, you can also embed the Calendly booking form in your website directly for prospects to book a timeslot with you or sales team directly.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $8/month per user
YouCanBook.me
Useful startup software – YouCanBook.me
YouCanBook.me is another popular online appointments booking system among startups. It works well with Google, iCloud and Microsoft cloud calendars. Simply link your calendar and your customers can make a booking directly into your calendar and they will automatically get their notifications, calendar invites and reminders, etc.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $10/month per user
5 Best team culture / team building tools for startups
Most startups are still operating in small teams and busy focusing on product building and customer acquisition. It’s easy for startup founders to overlook the importance of building the team culture that they would like to see in the team that will help the company grow in a healthy way. Below are some tools that can help shape the team to live the values that you care and build a team that can work cohesively together.
Disco
Tools for startups – Disco
With Disco, you can easily send appreciation to teammates directly via your company chat tool like Slack. This way, you can shape your team culture by recognizing teammates in real-time when they live your values. Disco also provides leaderboards so you can formalize recognition by rewarding your team superstars every month or quarter.
Pricing: Pricing starting from $3/month per user (they are currently having a 50% off discount in light of the Coronavirus, so starting from $1.5/month per user)
Donut
Tools for startups – Donut
Donut helps your team members get to know each other better, across departments, office locations and continents – a particular useful tool if your startup works remotely (read more tips about remote work). Donut introduces people who don’t know each other well on teams of all sizes via direct message, and encourages them to meet in person or virtually for a variety of programmes. You can also use Donut to welcome new hires, and introduce them to onboarding buddies or other teammates.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $49/month for 49 users
6 Best holiday management tools for startups
Even if your startup is small, having a proper procedure on leave management is important in keeping productivity high. With proper vacation management, your team can plan ahead when employees need to take some time off and ensure your tight deadlines won’t be missed. This is particularly crucial for remote teams as teammates are not based in the same office so sometimes it’s hard for them to know who’s out of office on a particular day and might not be responding to their requests.
Absense.io
apps for startup – absense.io
Absence.io helps you manage team absences like vacations or sick leaves with ease. With its Slack integration, managers can decline or accept absence requests directly within Slack and teammates can see current and future absences easily with using Slack slash commands.
Pricing: Starting from €1.5 per month per user
Timetastic
startup apps – timetastic
Timetastic is another great holiday management tool that can be easily integrated into Slack to help your team prepare for a teammates’s absence in advance. With Timetastic, you can basically manage the entire “taking time off” process directly on Slack. Best for startups that want to avoid the paperwork that comes with planning a few days off for a teammate.
Pricing: Starting from $1 per month per user
7 Best automatic daily standup / status report tools for startups
Status Hero
software for startups – Status Hero
Status Hero is a lightweight tool for tracking daily goals, activity logs from your tools, and status updates from your team, all in one place. It makes checking in within a team and collecting daily goals easier. With Status Hero, your teammates will be prompted to check in and give a brief update on their progress to the rest of the team. Then Status Hero will combine the daily check-in with data from connected project management tools such as GitHub, Trello and Jira and create status reports to be sent to the team.
Pricing: Starting from $3 per month per user
Standuply
software for startups – Standuply
Standuply helps to automate most common Agile processes via Slack, including standup meetings, retrospective meetings, team motivation check-up, etc. You can integrate Standuply with tools like JIRA and GitHub to build Agile charts and run complex processes, such as backlog grooming, planning poker, and more.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $5 per month for 3 users
8 Best marketing tools for small startups
Buffer
Startup tools – Buffer
Buffer is a social media management platform that can help you save a lot of time by allowing you to manage all your social media accounts in one place. Using Buffer, you can schedule posts to share in multiple social media accounts in one go and track the performance of your content.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $15 per month for 8 social accounts
SEMrush
Tools for startups – SEMrush
SEMrush is a popular SEO tool that specializes in keyword research, backlink analysis, competitor analytics, Google Ad optimization and more. A very useful and comprehensive tool if you are looking to grow the traffic of your website.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $99.95 per month
9 Best sales tools for small startups
Apollo
Startup platform – Apollo
If you are looking to do outbound sales, Apollo is a handy tool to help you find verified email addresses and phone numbers of the prospects that you would like to reach out to. Its data base has over 200M business contacts and 10M companies, and you can set up your own filters to target your ideal buyers.
Currently, its free plan allows you to get 150 verified emails per month for free.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $19 per month per user
Yesware
Startup Stacks – Yesware
Yesware is a very useful email tool for sales people. Using Yesware, you can track emails, create templates, set up personalized email sequences and schedule meetings easily. A great tool to help your sales close deals faster.
Pricing: Plans starting from $14 per user per month
Close CRM
Startup stacks – Close CRM
Close is a CRM built for sales teams. Every touchpoint with a lead is automatically tracked in a visual timeline so it’s easy for your teammates to keep track on the stages of the lead and all the data are very useful for handover as the lead move along different stages.
Pricing: Plans starting from $21.25 per user per month
10 Best customer success tools for startups
Intercom
startup tech stacks – Intercom
With Intercom, you can build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey. Using Intercom, you can talk to your leads and customers almost anywhere: on your website, directly in your app, on mobile and via email. Some of our favorite features include event triggered emails, in-app messages product tour and drip campaigns.
They have a special startup pricing at $49 per month for qualified early stage startups.
Pricing: Plans starting from $49 per month
FullStory
Startup tech stacks – Fullstory
FullStory is platform that helps you understand better how prospects and customers are interacting with your website and product through useful analytics such as heatmaps, conversion analysis, user session recordings, etc., which is a very useful tool across product, marketing and support teams.
Fullstory also offers a special rate for early stage startups at $2,028 per year (i.e. $169 per month).
Pricing: Not shown on website
11 Best product / design tools for startups
Figma
Startup tool stack – Figma
Figma is a cloud-based design tool that is similar to Sketch, but with a lot more functionalities and features that makes it much better for team collaboration. Because Figma is browser-based, your team can collaborate in real-time just like Google Docs. Figma supports in-app commenting so it’s great for design review feedback. Figma also also great Slack integration, so it’s easy to track progress and updates via Slack.
Pricing: Freemium with plans starting from $12 per editor per month
Productboard
Startup tool stacks – Productboard
Productboard is a product management system that helps your team understand what users need, prioritize what to build, and rally everyone around your roadmap. It has great integration with customer support tools like Intercom so you can consolidate customer feedback easily, and use its build-in features to help you better prioritize what to build next, share your roadmap with your team and monitor progress towards launch.
Pricing: Plans starting from $49 per maker per month
Visme
Best startup tools – Visme
Visme is a visual content creation platform perfect for startups who need to design all of their branded assets, marketing materials, sales presentations and more all in one place. Store your logo, brand fonts and colors, templates and more in Visme’s digital asset manager. Access thousands of professionally designed templates, stock photos, icons and illustrations, data visualization tools and tons of other design elements that you can use to spice up your creations.
Pricing: Create an account for free, with premium plans starting at $19/mo, paid annually.
11 Best expense management tools for startups
Fyle
Fyle – expense management tool for startups
Fyle is an expense management software that can help automate mundane, repetitive expense reporting, tracking, and management tasks. It comes with a receipt scanning feature that can extract crucial information from paper and digital receipts. The tool ensures the receipt is attached to the digital expense report and runs a real-time audit check before the employee submits it. This ensures no error or out-of-policy expenses get by and are curbed right from the start. The expense tool also helps finance teams automate tedious, manual credit card reconciliation processes by reconciling credit card transactions, expenses, and receipts with a tap. In addition, you can seamlessly integrate the tool with your existing accounting software for easy data migration and uniformity.
Pricing: Fyle’s Standard plan starts at $4.99 per month, Business at $8.99 per month, and custom pricing for Enterprise and bills only for users who create at least one expense report in a month
Conclusion
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