Group Collaboration Software

Collaboration software is one of the easiest ways to improve the way your teams work. It gives them the tools they need to stay in sync and get their work done, wherever they are. But what exactly is it? How do you know if it’s right for you? Here are our top 5 tips for getting started with collaboration software.

Group Collaboration Software

Digging through the exhaustive number of team collaboration tools on the market can be overwhelming. How do you find the best collaboration software to improve your team’s productivity? And how do you know it’s effective before you adopt it?

Have no fear, Flock is here! We did the digging. We tested dozens of team collaboration tools and evaluated them based on features and pricing, to present to you the 10 best team collaboration software for your business.

Best Team Collaboration Tools

• Flock
• Slack
• Microsoft Teams
• Monday.com
• Asana
• JIRA
• Trello
• Google Drive
• Dropbox
• Quip
• Xtensio
• Teamwork

Team Communication Tools

Flock

We’d be remiss not to include Flock in our list of collaboration tools for productive teams. We’ve touted our features and pricing here on this blog, but here’s the deal:

Features

• Direct and team messaging
• Video conferencing and screen sharing
• File-sharing
• Advanced search
• Guest management
• Announcements
• Directory
• Auto-generated mailing lists
• To-dos
• Polls
• Notes
• Reminders
• Share code snippets
• Process automation
• Integrations

Pricing

• PRO plan: $4.50 per licensed user, per month (best value!)
• Custom pricing for large enterprises & organizations

Slack

Slack’s main interface

Slack is best known for its messaging platform, but also includes many integrations and tools that can be helpful for business.

Features

• Direct and team messaging
• Video conferencing and screen sharing
• File-sharing
• Advanced search
• Guest management
• Announcements
• Directory
• Private notes
• Reminders
• Share code snippets
• Integrations

Pricing

• Standard plan: $6.67 per person, per month
• Plus plan: $12.50 per person, per month
• Custom pricing for large enterprises & organizations

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is a newer tool, packaging together many Microsoft products like Skype, Office, and OneDrive.

Features

• Direct and team messaging
• Live Events – up to 10,000 viewers
• Video conferencing and screen sharing
• Built-in Office 365 apps: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and SharePoint.
• File-sharing
• Advanced search
• Guest management
• Announcements
• Directory
• Integrations

Pricing

• Free for chat only
• $12.50 per user/month for Office 365 Business Premium
• $20.00 per user/month for Office 365 E3

See our best team conferencing tools for business

Team Project Management Tools

Monday.com

Monday.com

Monday offers team and project management features with an assortment of different project trackers and file-sharing abilities.

Features

• Customizable project tracking templates
  • Gantt charts and Kanban
• Calendar view
• Files view
• File-sharing
• Desktop and mobile
• Integrations
• Process automation

Pricing

• Based on user size
• $39 – $1599+ per month

Asana

Asana’s task tracker

Asana isn’t just for development teams. Asana is similar to Monday.com in its focus on tracking work and getting it done.

Features

• Customizable project tracking templates
  • Lists and Kanban
• Calendar view
• Files view
• File-sharing
• Desktop and mobile
• Templates
• Integrations

Pricing

• Basic – Free for up to 15 users
• Premium – $10.99 per user, per month
• Business – $24.99 per user, per month
• Custom pricing for large enterprises & organizations

JIRA

JIRA project board

JIRA’s value lies in its ability to track projects and manage bug fixes in a product. This makes it effective for client-facing teams, especially SaaS companies.

Features

• Customizable project tracking templates
  • Gantt charts, scrum boards and Kanban
• Reporting
• Integrations

Pricing

• Standard: starting at $7 per user, per month
• Premium: starting at $14 per user, per month
• Max 5,000 users

Trello

Trello

Trello offers a free plan that allows project and task tracking on a business-ready level. For more features, businesses can opt into their business or enterprise plan.

Features

• Customizable project tracking cards
• Create and comment via email
• Automation
• Calendar view
• Map view
• Voting
• Integrations (“Power-Ups”)

Pricing

• Free plan with limited features
• Business class: $9.99 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $20.83 per user, per month

Team Collaboration Tools

Google Drive

Google Drive

At this point, Google Drive is eponymous with file sharing. Its impressive storage, collaborative abilities, and cross-device sync makes it a leader for collaborative teams.

Features

• Storage
• Shared Drives
• Docs, Sheets, Slides
• Assign tasks
• Request approvals
• Track versions
• Device sync
• Sharing, viewing, collaborating
• AI-powered search
• Integration

Pricing

• Personal: Free for up to 15GB
• Enterprise: $8 per user, per month + $1 per 25GB

Dropbox

Dropbox

Dropbox is another leader in cloud-based file-sharing, in part due to its ease of use. Dropbox has also recently launched a Timelines feature, which makes for great project planning and tracking alongside file-sharing.

Features

• Storage
• Shared folders
• Assign tasks
• Track versions
• Device sync
• Sharing, viewing, collaborating
• To-dos
• Gantt-style timelines
• Personalized suggestions
• Remote wipe
• Integration

Pricing

• Standard: $12.50 per user, per month
• Advanced: $20 per user, per month

Quip

Quip’s Slides feature

Quip is among the newer players in collaborative software. Quip allows for easy file sharing with group chat and direct messaging features. Its pricing is competitive, and Quip touts building “a culture of action” among teams.

Features

• Sharing, viewing, collaborating
• Documents, spreadsheets, and slides
• Group chat and 1:1 messaging
• Integration

Pricing

• Starter: $10 per user, per month
• Enterprise: $25 per user, per month

Xtensio

Xtensio’s customizable documents

Xtensio is a collaboration tool that allows team members to create and share beautiful living documents easily. 

Features

• Intuitive page builder
• Branded documents 
• Customizable templates
• Dedicated workspace
• Access anytime, anywhere
• Responsive presentations
• Password-protected links
• Downloadable documents in PDF/PNGs

Pricing

• Basic: $8/mo/user
• Full Access: $15/mo/user
• Custom pricing for enterprise

Teamwork

Teamwork sets up project management over multiple styles

Teamwork is a powerful, feature-rich yet easy to use Project Management Tool used by over 20,000 companies.

Features

• View tasks as lists, gantt charts or board views
• Time tracking allows you to track the amount of time being spent on tasks and increases accountability.
• Resource and workload management allows you to assess team member workloads for more efficient task planning and distribution.
• Task and project creation and management, upload files, add comments all in one centralized location.
• Tailor client free access and permissions to areas such a time tracking and invoicing, perfect for agencies.
• Track project progress with dashboards, board view and project health status updates.
• Excellent customer support centre.

Pricing

• Free Forever: Max 5 users, 2 projects
• Pro: $10 per month per user (billed annually), $12.50 billed monthly
• Premium: $18 per month per user (billed annually), $22.50 billed monthly
• Contact for Enterprise rates

community group collaboration software

Social collaboration software (SCS) is a vast marketplace of platforms designed to handle everything from knowledge management to enterprise application development. Businesses looking for an enterprise collaboration solution are faced with a daunting task: they must compare innumerable vendors and products, but also decide what social collaboration software means.

This buyer’s guide to social collaboration tools will arm you with the information necessary to navigate the marketplace and begin narrowing your search.

First, we’ll attempt to define social collaboration software, including some analogous terms and common features. We’ll provide an outline of major categories for social collaboration and example solutions within each. Finally, we’ll discuss social collaboration software market trends and provide a case study of a leading vendor.

What Is Social Collaboration Software?

Defining social collaboration is like battling the mythic hydra; as one category is defined, two more grow in its place. Enterprise social networking, business collaboration, enterprise collaboration, enterprise messaging, social intranet, enterprise social and on — you get the picture. We’ve not even mentioned the sheer redundancy of the using both “social” and “collaboration” to describe a software platform.

According to Wikipedia, social collaboration “refers to processes that help multiple people or groups interact and share information to achieve common goals.” They further qualify social collaboration by saying its “natural” environment is on the Internet, and that it is “group-centric.”¹

By that definition, any community working online towards a common goal is engaging in social collaboration. For the purposes of this guide, we’ll define social collaboration software as web-based tools that encourage the sharing of ideas, division of effort, and group-wide accountability.

Companies can even use social collaboration tools to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-one, when threaded, forum-style discussions or wikis are used. They can be project or process-focused, customer-focused, messaging-focused, or any combination of these.

Social collaboration software can be a single platform that serves an entire enterprise, department, or team, or it may be an amalgamation of solutions that together form a collaborative, virtual work environment.

Despite the many-headed nature of the social collaboration beast, for the purposes of this guide, we’ll use four main subcategories:

I. Enterprise Communication

Probably the most recognized social collaboration category, enterprise communication platforms are essential in a world where widely-distributed, remote teams are becoming more common than co-located teams.

Whether it’s via an internal social network with threaded discussions and newsfeeds, such as Yammer or Jive, or through an instant messaging-centered platform like Slack, this category of social collaboration tools focuses on the exchange of knowledge, usually in an indexed, searchable database with unique user logins and options to communicate one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-one.

Of course, these solutions are not necessarily limited to the above functions. Many have a file sharing component, employee engagement tools such as pulse surveys, a public calendar, video conferencing, wiki/knowledgebase, etc. Some even offer telephony, either built-in, or via integrations with VoIP providers.

In some cases, enterprise social tools can be used to communicate with external users as well as within your own company. One example would be a product knowledgebase where employees collaborate with customer “power users” to ask and answer support questions, or elicit consumer feedback for product design.

• 6 Slack Alternatives to Try Before You Commit
• 4 Brilliant Ways HR Managers Can Solve Internal Communication Problems

II. Enterprise Content Management

Another common type of social collaboration platform, enterprise content management systems are quickly gaining traction among business users. This is especially true for sales and marketing teams, as content marketing and sales enablement become increasingly important functions.

Of course, collaborative content management platforms are important to departments beyond sales and marketing. IT may rely on a collaborative content management solution to distribute reports, warehouse data for ETL, or provide the backbone of an internal helpdesk system or corporate intranet. HR can utilize enterprise content management platforms to distribute and collect new hire documents.

Solutions in this subcategory provide a collaborative sandbox where employees can work together on documents or multimedia. They may also include a development environment for platform-hosted systems (such as Microsoft SharePoint), a text editor and publishing platform (such as WordPress), an automatic backup component (such as Box or Dropbox), and other collaborative, content-centered functionality.

Irrespective of type, most content-focused collaboration solutions will offer user and/or role-based permissions, a search function, file versioning, synchronization, audit control, and a method of commenting/reviewing individual pieces of content.

• Box vs Dropbox: Which is Best for Your Business?
• 6 SharePoint Alternatives to Put on Your Shortlist

III. Embedded Social Collaboration

Collaborative functions are being embedded into an ever-increasing number of software solutions. Whether project management software, customer relationship management platforms, service management tools, HR systems, or the never-ending parade of new marketing tools — nearly all of these categories were conceived to reduce reliance on communication via third-party platforms and provide a single version-of-truth.

Most of the categories on TechnologyAdvice.com contain solutions that offer some form of embedded social collaboration. In the interest of brevity and clarity, we won’t delve further into embedded social collaboration tools, save to direct you to the various Product Selection Tools we offer for solutions in these categories.

• Project Management Software
• Customer Relationship Management Software
• Business Process Management Software
• Customer Service Software
• Human Resources Software

IV. Social Collaboration Suites

Last but certainly not least, the rise of collaboration suites — platforms with functionality from all three categories we’ve outlined — is not to be ignored.

Google for Work (Hangouts, Docs, Sheets, Drive, Slides, etc.), Microsoft Office 365 (Word, Excel, OneDrive, Lync, PowerPoint, etc.), and similar solutions offer an end-to-end solution with ubiquitous access for the whole enterprise. You can implement communication, sharing, productivity, networking, and collaboration solutions as part of a single platform, at an affordable, per-user price.

Conclusion

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