We know that keeping up with the demands of running a business is hard enough. And it can be even harder when you don’t have the right tools at your disposal. Fortunately, we’ve done the research for you and put together this list of the absolute MUST-HAVE tools for any entrepreneur.
No matter what kind of business you’re running, these are the apps and websites that will help you save time, money, and resources so that you can focus on making your product or service as effective as possible. You’ll find everything from budgeting apps to project management software to communications tools. Check them out!
Table of Contents
Most Popular Online Business Tools
#1 Acquire – Customer Support
Acquire is a conversational customer support platform that helps businesses bring all of their digital interaction channels into one single dashboard. Customer profiles put web browsing, purchase, and conversation history, plus other important details, right at your fingertips so you can resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
Acquire also provides self-service tools that free your team up to focus on the more complex real-time customer conversations.
Acquire features:
- Conversational AI chatbots
- Real-time live chat
- Video chat with customers
- Secure two-way cobrowsing
- Self-service knowledge base
- Collaborative shared inbox for support teams
This software suite makes it easy to create high-touch, personalized experiences customers love while also streamlining workflows for your service team. All of these tools connect seamlessly together to create a single, unified view of the customer.
How much does Acquire cost?
Acquire’s pricing is based on team sizes, usage, agent seats, and more.
#2 ClickUp – Work Productivity
ClickUp is an all-in-one productivity platform that offers a range of powerful features to help scale your growing business. It is a completely customizable work management solution designed for teams of all sizes and across different industries.
Their platform offers 15+ interactive views to visualize your project timelines. Dashboards bring all of your work together in a high-level overview, enabling you to track progress from any area in your Workspace and use resources effectively. Take advantage of ClickUp’s Docs (similar to Google Docs) to collaborate with team members on ideas, bugs, notes, and more.
Choose from over 50 widget variations to instantly pull data for any activity to gather, display, or share, and embed other apps to your Dashboards with a simple link or code.
ClickUp features:
- Plan, track and manage tasks
- Real-time team chat
- Create and organize goals
- Gantt, calendar, board, mind map views
- Collaborative online whiteboards
- Customizable dashboards
- 24/7, highly-rated client support
ClickUp’s unique organizational hierarchy allows you to easily break down any project into manageable tasks, while subtasks and nested checklists allow you to track anything from multi-step workflows to simple to-do’s.
How much does ClickUp cost?
With the Free Forever Plan, users can add unlimited members, tasks, and get 1,000 MB of storage, and access more advanced features with paid plans starting at $5.
#3 HubSpot – CRM
HubSpot is an inbound marketing, sales, and service software. It contains a suite of business tools plus a free plan CRM software that gives business owners a complete management tool for sales and marketing. They’ve been deemed one of the top small business tools to get your company up and running with everything you’ll need to succeed.
HubSpot CRM features:
- Detailed view of contacts and companies
- Track calls or email communication
- Create custom lists and target accounts
- Assign contacts to your team to follow up
- Use your contacts in email marketing campaigns
- Track contact progress through your sales funnel
- Convert contacts into customers
- Automatically log sales and marketing interactions
- Website builder (CMS Hub)
With a scalable and upgradable platform, HubSpot enables businesses of all sizes to work collaboratively while customizing their approach to sales or marketing.
How much does HubSpot cost?
HubSpot’s CRM is one of the best marketing tools out there and is 100% free.
#4 2Checkout – Payment Processing
2Checkout (now Verifone) is an online payment processing platform built around growing your business. By reducing the back-end complications that contemporary digital commerce entails, 2Checkout’s monetization platform enables businesses to swiftly grow worldwide and maximize recurring income streams across channels.
2Checkout features:
- Global payments
- Digital & B2B commerce
- Subscription billing
- Reporting and analytics
- Tax & financial services
- Risk management & compliance
- Partner sales
Whether you’re looking to expand internationally, increase conversion rates, or operate a subscription-based business, 2Checkout can help you navigate the intricacies of global digital commerce. 2Checkout’s payment processing platform easily integrates with dozens of top-rated ecommerce shopping carts.
How much does 2Checkout cost?
2Checkout’s pricing tiers are based on individual sales when using their platform.
#5 Automate.io – Workflow Automation
Automate.io is a no-code, easy to use drag and drop workflow automation platform. Automate.io was created with a single goal in mind: to deliver the power of workflow automation to non-technical people in order to boost productivity and growth throughout your organization’s teams.
Automate.io features:
- No code workflow builder
- Drag & drop interface
- Pre-built automation templates
- Multi-step workflows
- Advanced controls, logic, and formatting
- Shared folders
- Rest API connectors
- More than 200 application integrations
This online business tool gives small companies the same capability as enterprise organizations at a lower cost, allowing you to automate repetitive operations once and for all.
How much does Automate.io cost?
Automate.io’s pricing can fit businesses of all shapes and sizes. The free version allows a single person to perform 300 actions with five bots. But the business version allows more than 100,000 monthly actions, 200 bots, up to 10 team members, all for $159/mo.
#6 Slack – Collaborative Team Chat
Slack is a team collaboration tool that connects people with the relevant information and tools to get tasks completed. Millions of individuals across the world use Slack to connect their teams, integrate their systems, and move their businesses forward, from Fortune 100 firms to small businesses.
Slack features:
- Create custom channels
- Real-time messaging and chats
- Slack Connect (outside your company)
- Voice and video calls
- Integrate with more than 2,200 apps
- Workflow builder
- Sharing files
Slack enables teams to bring all of their business communication into one location to keep everyone on the same page and make decisions faster.
How much does Slack cost?
Pricing for Slack starts off as $6.67 per person, per month (billed yearly) and comes with everything a team needs to communicate remotely. However, for bigger companies that need greater functionality, Slack offers Business+ and Enterprise tiers.
#7 Zoom – Video Meetings
Zoom is a highly-rated video meeting platform that lets users host high quality video and audio meetings for up to a max of 1,000 participants. Zoom allows for rapid adoption by providing meeting capabilities that make it simple to start, join, and collaborate from any device.
Zoom features:
- Host video meetings of up to 1,000 attendees
- View 49 screens simultaneously
- Stream in HD video and audio
- Enable filters, polls, hand raising, and emojis
- Co-annotations and screen sharing
- Recording and transcripts
Zoom syncs with your calendar (Gmail, Outlook, iCal) and provides simplified enterprise level video conferencing from your PC, smartphone, and dedicated Zoom for Home Devices.
How much does Zoom cost?
Zoom comes with a free plan that can host up to 100 participants for up to 40 minutes, but the one-on-one meetings have a 30-hour limit. The higher tiers allow for longer meeting times, branding options, social media streaming, recording transcripts, and increased cloud storage. All options (besides the free plan) enable you to upgrade to 1,000 participants through the “Large Meetings” add-on.
#8 Dropbox – File Manager
Dropbox enables you access to all of your documents in a safe manner. From any device, collaborate with friends, family, and coworkers. Comparable to Google Drive, Dropbox is a standalone business tool that can be downloaded as a desktop software or used on the web.
Dropbox features:
- Store and access files from anywhere
- Online cloud storage
- Create and edit your work directly in Dropbox
- Sync files between different devices
- Secure file management
- Restore folders and files
- Easy file sharing
Dropbox hosts all of your files, cloud content, and online shortcuts into one convenient location. It automatically syncs new or updated files to all team members with access.
How much does Dropbox cost?
Dropbox’s plans have free trials, but the cheapest plan for individuals starts at $9.99/mo (billed yearly). Business use starts at $16.58/mo for an individual, then scales up to $20/mo per user for larger teams.
#9 Canva – Design Suite
Canva is an online design and publishing platform with the goal of enabling anybody to design anything and publish it anywhere. With thousands of templates, images, and quality content to choose from, Canva covers all of your design needs.
Canva features:
- Thousands of professional design templates
- High quality images and content
- Collaborate with team members
- Create, schedule, and publish social media content
- Built in comments to work effectively
How much does Canva cost?
Canva’s free plan comes with a decent amount of design types, images, and graphics, but is very limited compared to the paid versions. The Pro account (team of five) starts at $119 for the entire year and comes with tons of useful templates, images, and content. For enterprise pricing, contact Canva’s sales department.
#10 Clearbit – B2B Data
Clearbit is the marketing data platform that powers the world’s fastest-growing B2B businesses. Boost acquisition, conversion, and operations, using real-time intelligence throughout your whole stack. Clearbit provides you with full, up-to-date visitor, contact, and account profiles so you can reach out to the appropriate individuals, make outstanding first impressions, and nurture connections throughout their lifespan.
Clearbit features:
- View companies visiting your website
- Discover ideal accounts
- Notify sales with target accounts
- Turn emails or domains into people or company profiles
- Retarget qualified accounts on Facebook/Instagram
- Personalize campaigns
- Create custom lists of company types
- Integrate with top CRMs
Improve lead routing, power segmentation, and send information throughout your whole stack by incorporating real-time data into your CRM, MAP, and ABM applications.
How much does Clearbit cost?
For pricing, contact Clearbit’s sales team.
tools for entrepreneurs 2020
1. Zoom
Who doesn’t know about Zoom today?
The onset of coronavirus made Zoom a center of attraction among businesses. Earlier, Zoom was catering 200 million daily meeting participants. Now the outburst of user participants has risen up to 300 million.
From government to schools everyone is using Zoom across the world. Over 90,000 institutions in 20 countries are contributing to the new user base of this app.
Image source
It is a video conferencing tool that allows you to communicate with a large number of people over video calls and messaging. Almost every business vertical is using this tool to connect with their team and clients. It offers a secured medium for meetings, conferences, webinars, and chat.
Use Zoom to connect securely with your team.
2. Prezi
As an entrepreneur, you must be juggling between multiple meetings and client proposals and presentations. For an investor to invest in your venture, you need to create compelling presentations that can lock in his attention towards your presentation, and thus you will be able to assure the number of right investors for your project.
Prezi is the tool that can streamline everything for you.
Prezi has more than 100 million users and over 360 million presentations have been created over this platform. Over these years, this tool has earned huge appreciation from its users.
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So, try Prezi to create presentations.
3. MeetEdgar:
Among the entrepreneurs this tool has gained great numbers, it has been rated 4.5 at Software Advice. Clearly, it is a highly useful tool for entrepreneurs.
It allows you to put your content before a larger audience available on social media. Being a sharing tool for social media, it offers access to organized libraries. Besides, you can create your content and set the schedules for publishing.
4. Canva:
Have you ever thought about promotion without creatives and graphics? Want an easy way out to create your images, graphics, PPTs, etc for promoting and positioning yourself as a brand in the market by yourself without hiring a graphic designer? Confused? Don’t worry, I got you covered with a tool called Canva that allows you to create beautiful images, graphics for your social media pages and ad campaigns like PPC, etc.
Currently, Canva has more than 10 million uses across the world with over 100 million designs. It is the largest platform for designing graphics. There are tons of templates available to choose from and create compelling graphics in one go while saving time and cost.
5. Virtual Staff Finder:
As per research, 13% of employees are more efficient at home rather in office. The fact is that virtual work culture is growing at a faster pace and 90% of virtual employees are preferring to work from home for the rest of their life.
In such scenarios, hiring a virtual team can be the most wise step for the perspective of the future.
Virtual staff finder is a tool that allows you to hire virtual employees through interviews. Using this tool, you can create a job description, and it serves you the top three candidates by matching the criteria. Later you can schedule interviews and can hire a virtual employee.
6. Optimizely:
An old blown startup mantra is iterate, iterate, and iterate. And a better way to experiment and run A/B testing for your websites that will help you to make market-driven decisions. Not just A/B Testing, you can do much more. 71% companies run A/B testing twice a month. Optimizely is a tool that allows you to test website copy, pricing, presentation, and other elements of your web presence both on mobile and desktop.
7. Slack:
More than 12 million people use slack in 2020. This platform is rapidly expanding with more than 9 million monthly active users. If you are an entrepreneur, slack can be proven as a great communication tool for establishing a faster and seamless connection.
An easy way to communicate with your team and a smoother design interface that will allow you to create multiple groups and create chat sessions. A better way for Entrepreneurs to collaborate and keep things in momentum. It supports multiple features such as file sharing, private chat mode and much more. You can automatically sync all your devices and connect with other apps like WordPress, Skype, etc.
8. Rebrandly:
Rebrandly is a growing tool for link tracking that is getting popular among businesses to improve their marketing efforts. A number of young business owners are switching to Rebrandly for better insights.
Basically, it is an URL Shortener tool. However, it can be proven as remarkably useful for your business. Rebrandly link management platform is able to help you gain great insights about audiences’ interest. Using it you can track your each link in reference to country, language, frequent times of visit, devices, and more. In short, it reveals valuable information about the audience’s preference.
9. Asana:
Another great tool for maintaining the workflow with inbuilt features like dashboards, task creation, projects, conversations, and much more. An easier way to optimize and align your teamwork efforts. A great way to convert your conversation into actionable tasks and dashboard will allow you to see the progress of on-going tasks and much more.
Asana is having 70,000 customers across 195 countries, and thriving as a trusted tool for managing organizational workflow. For entrepreneurs, it can ease down the hassle and streamline tasks.
10. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is an outstanding tool for entrepreneurs as it allows you to organize your marketing activities. It renders a master calendar that enables you to make marketing plans in an interactive environment. It caters an ecosystem for top-notch team collaboration. It can save your significant amount of time in social media engagement by allowing tweets and blog posts scheduling.
Conclusion
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