📝 21 Must-Have Software Solutions for Small Businesses
Running a business requires efficient management of tasks, leads, customer relationships, marketing, HR, inventory, and more to ensure growth and success. However, as a business owner, investing time and money may not be a feasible option for you. Fortunately, there are several affordable softwares available that can offer you essential features and functionalities without breaking the bank.
In this article, we will discuss 21 must-have software solutions for small businesses to significantly streamline your operations and enhance productivity.
📌 Home Base - Comprehensive HR Solution
Let's start our list with a comprehensive HR solution. Home Base is designed specifically for small businesses. From streamlining your work schedules and time clocks to payroll, HR, and more, it helps you to focus on what truly matters - your people. What sets it apart is its comprehensive set of features designed specifically for hourly work, along with time tracking and employee scheduling for hiring, onboarding, and compliance management. It has got you covered. Plus, with real-time communication features, you can keep your team in sync and on track no matter where they are. You can also transform any device into a Time Clock, making it easy to track hours, breaks, and overtime. Payroll becomes a painless process with just a single click, as it automatically calculates paychecks, sends direct deposits, and files payroll taxes. In addition to a free plan for unlimited employees, it has paid plans for additional features like labor cost control and employee engagement tools to help you make employee scheduling effortless.
📌 Deputy - Scheduling Software
Our next software, Deputy, can be a perfect solution. This US-based scheduling software comes with a feature of scheduling multiple employee roles in multiple locations. With its five-point check, it helps you to ensure training, stress profiles, leave, unavailability, and overlapping whenever you create a shift. In addition, it can track employee qualifications to let you know whether that person is qualified for the assigned task or not. Similar to the rest, finding replacement, auto-filling an empty shelf, and communicating with employees is easier with its 31-day free trial plan. It enables a multi-location schedule and allows you to publish up to 100 shifts per month. Even though the free plan has limited features, you can upgrade to its affordable paid plan for separate time and attendance and scheduling options, or you can choose a plan including complete solutions.
📌 Animated Explainer Video - 10 Studio
Are you struggling to explain your idea? Your audience is not getting what you're trying to say? An animated explainer video is a perfect solution for you. An explainer video simplifies any complex ideas through engaging animations, transitions, voiceovers, and meaningful scripts, which all together create a fun experience for any viewer. And here comes 10 Studio, a team of skilled professionals dedicated to creating engaging explainer videos. With over thousands of completed projects, we have the expertise to create explainer videos that break down your message and connect with your audience. Get in touch with 10 Studio today.
📌 Payroll for Free - Perfect Payroll Software
Next, we have Payroll for Free, the perfect payroll software for small businesses with 25 or fewer employees. With a quick and easy sign-up process and essential features, it simplifies your payroll process, providing hassle-free payment to your hard-working team and 1099 contractors. Along with generating and filing year-end forms, it also takes care of tax calculations, provides filled tax forms, and offers optional deposit and filing services. You can also choose a payment method between direct deposit and paper checks or use a combination of both. Additionally, it also helps in tracking vacation and PTO time with customizable options and keeps you informed with detailed reportings on earnings, taxes, benefits, and more. With this, employees can access their pay information, reprint pay stubs and W-2s, and make personal updates through the employee portal.
📌 Box Hero - Inventory Management Software
Coming up is Box Hero, an inventory management software designed for small and medium-sized businesses. Signing up is a breeze; you simply need to provide your email and get started with its user-friendly interface and comprehensive features. With its barcode scanning capability, it allows you to easily track inventory movements and update stock levels accurately. Moreover, real-time inventory tracking enables you to monitor stock levels, set low stock alerts, and generate detailed reports for better decision making. It also supports multi-location tracking, making it suitable for businesses with multiple warehouses or store locations. Additionally, you can access features like order management, purchase order creation, customer management, customizable labels, and cloud-based accessibility. It even allows integration with popular e-commerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. With its free plan, you can enjoy up to 100 inventory records in one location.
📌 MailerLite - Lead Generation Software
Capture potential customers effortlessly and help your business thrive. Having lead generation software is a must for that. Here we have MailerLite, one of the free tools that help you capture leads for your company. Using this tool, you can create a custom landing page to attract and convert visitors into leads. If you have a business profile and a website, then MailerLite is the best option for you to send automated emails to your leads for free. You can create interest groups or email tags to generate more leads and segments automatically. Moreover, using this tool, you can grab every visitor's attention with promotional pop-ups, embedded quizzes and surveys, and so on. With the free plan, you get access to up to a thousand subscribers, twelve thousand monthly emails, ten landing pages, an email automation builder, and so on. You can also upgrade to different paid plans to unlock additional features.
📌 Calendly - Appointment Scheduling Automation Platform
Our next software is an appointment scheduling automation platform called Calendly. You can get started with this online scheduling by simply creating a free account and linking your calendar along with your Google account and Google Meet. You can even connect your Microsoft Exchange, iCloud calendar, and different meeting apps like Zoom, WebEx, and more. Now you need to choose your event type and add a name, location, description, event link, and color. You can also set up details like duration, define availability, and customize notifications. Once done, your booking page is ready to share directly through email or add it to your website. Whenever someone clicks on the link to schedule an appointment, you will be notified. While the free plan allows one calendar connection and unlimited meetings and appointment scheduling, you can access additional features by upgrading to a paid plan.
📌 Teamwork - Forever Free Project Management Software
Moving along with the list, we have Teamwork, a forever free project management software that fosters collaboration and timely project delivery for teams. From creating task lists for each project and assigning tasks to team members with due dates, priorities, and dependencies to adding comments, attachments, subtasks, and tags to each task, you can do anything. The kanban board view allows you to visualize tasks and drag and drop them across different stages as they progress. Apart from that, you can plan your projects with a Gantt chart and also log time spent on each task manually or using a built-in timer with a time tracking feature. With the resource management tool, you can also manage your team's workload and availability. Additionally, they're great with popular tools such as Gmail, Outlook, Slack, and Dropbox to streamline your workflow.
📌 Chisel - Free Product Management Tool
Next, we have Chisel, a free product management tool that comes with almost every essential feature needed for managing products efficiently. From creating seamless roadmaps and managing feedback transparently, everything can be done with this free tool. With its feature-rich roadmap, it becomes somewhat easier to manage and plan the future of your product. With a tree view, you can break down the process and prioritize features based on customer reach, value, expected revenue, and more. While the release view helps in maintaining the delivery timeline, the kanban boards can help in keeping track of and ensuring the progress of your product's whole development process. And lastly, the timeline view provides a detailed overview of the features developed over time. This tool also ensures team participation and alignment by keeping track of their output, comments, and suggestions. Apart from this, it allows you to connect with your customers through feedback portals, surveys, and an idea box that captures, stores, and organizes new ideas from your customers and team members in one place.
📌 MeisterTask - Customizable Task Management Software
Having a customizable task management software like MeisterTask that helps teams stay organized and track progress from start to finish is essential for every business. While the dashboard provides an overview of tasks and projects, including personal agendas, notifications, favorites, and statistics, you can create and assign tasks with due dates, priorities, checklists, tags, and attachments with customizable project boards. While the kanban style project sports enable you to manage tasks and collaborate seamlessly, the Gantt style timeline feature helps in assigning and scheduling tasks in calendar view, identifying bottlenecks, and ensuring deadlines. You can also track time with the built-in timer or with manual entries and also enhance task descriptions with custom fields. Moreover, it also offers multiple checklists, file attachments up to 200 MB, integration with popular tools, and task organization by tags. The free plan includes a customizable project board for up to three projects, unlimited users, and many more.
📌 GitMind - Innovative Online Mind Mapping and Brainstorming Software
Innovative online mind mapping and brainstorming software like GitMind can enable you to visually organize ideas, plan projects, and collaborate effectively. With its user-friendly interface, creating mind maps, flow charts, and concept maps that capture the essence of your idea becomes easier. Additionally, the drag and drop functionality, customizable templates, and a wide range of styling options can help you bring your thoughts to life in a colorful and organized manner. It goes beyond mind mapping with practical features such as task management, notes, and attachments, keeping you organized and on track. It allows you to sync your mind maps across devices, ensuring accessibility and flexibility in your workflow. What makes it even more interesting is its AI mapping feature that allows you to generate content from a prompt quickly. All you have to do is add some nodes, and it will do the rest within seconds.
📌 Any.do - All-in-One App for Task Management
Next is Any.do, an all-in-one app that helps you manage your work and personal tasks in one place. By signing up with your Google account, you are all set to create your tasks and view your plans and tasks on a daily and weekly basis. It also allows you to customize your viewing option by organizing your tasks based on people, due dates, or boards and sections. In addition to that, you can even create your workplace and invite your team members so that everyone gets real-time updates, and no tasks get missed. Along with creating tasks effortlessly, you can even add notes, subtasks, attachments, and set reminders. You can also move your tasks to specific lists, add tags, and set them as priorities. Along with a forever free plan, it also has some Pro plans.
📌 TimeCamp - Perfect Time Management Software
Time management is one of the crucial parts of any business, and to simplify that, we have the perfect time management software, TimeCamp. From geolocation tracking and billing to time tracking for project and computer activities, you can choose which feature you want to enable and disable. Along with providing the total work and project time per team member, it also provides project cost monitoring with budget oversight reports. With its automatic time tracking feature, it can detect your activities and track time spent on the app and website based on predefined keywords and also capable of allocating time to specific tasks and projects. You can also record inactivity periods by enabling idle tracking. Additionally, it streamlines timesheet approval processes, automating approvals or notifying approvers when action is needed. While the free plan allows unlimited users, you can also upgrade to any of its paid plans for additional features.
📌 SEMrush - All-in-One Marketing Toolkit
Having proper knowledge about your competitors is a must for any business, and to help you with that, we have SEMrush. This all-in-all marketing toolkit comes with the ability to conduct SEO analysis on your own or competitors' websites. For that, you simply need to paste the URL, domain, or keyword and select the country, and within seconds, the results will be in your hand. With its various tools and reports, it helps you to solve marketing challenges like online visibility of your business, content marketing, market research, advertising, and many more. By addressing SEO, advertising, and content creation tools, you can be in the top spot in search results. The free account allows you to use many of these tools but with limitations in some projects, keyword tracking, and many more. However, the paid plan allows you to discover all the available tools with additional advantages. Moreover, you can downgrade, upgrade, or unsubscribe anytime you want.
📌 Social Blade - Integrated Social Media Analysis Tool
Then we have Social Blade, an integrated social media analysis tool that can analyze your competitor's social media accounts for you. This tool supports platforms like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and many more to track your competitor's social media statistics. All you need to do is type in the username on the search bar, and immediately all data regarding your competitor's account will pop in front of your eyes. With its advanced technology, it can provide you with your competitor's followers, subscriber count, estimated earnings, and more. Along with day by day followers, you can also offer a live follower account to your competitors. Moreover, you can compare your Twitch, Twitter, or YouTube channels with your competitors for better understanding. Even though you can get all this analysis for free, you can also purchase a premium membership for faster and more premium data.
📌 Statista - Marketing Research Tool
Up next is Statista. As the name suggests, this marketing research tool is all about statistics. With this, you can easily get access to important statistical information about various companies and business institutions from all around the world. To get started, all you have to do is type in your keyword in the search box, and it will provide you with all the necessary data within seconds. Along with markets, customer, and company insights, it also provides insights from popular e-commerce sites like Amazon, Alibaba, eBay, and many more. It comes with both free and paid plans. While access to all the basic information and primary data is free, you can also upgrade to a different paid plan for additional features anytime you want.
📌 Zoho CRM - Cloud-Based Solution
Choosing the best CRM is a crucial part of any business's success and growth. One of the best options out there is Zoho CRM, the ultimate cloud-based solution that works perfectly with businesses of all sizes. While fostering a strong and long-lasting relationship with your customer, it also supercharges your sales team's productivity. From leading contact management to sales forecasting, email marketing, and seamless social media integration, this feature-rich platform covers almost everything. Additionally, the system allows you to customize fields, layouts, and automation rules extensively to meet the specific requirements of your business. Along with communication through various communication channels like phone, email, live chat, and social media, you can also conduct face-to-face meetings. It comes with both free and paid plans. While the free plan allows up to three users, you can also upgrade to its paid plan for additional features.
📌 Livestorm - Webinar Software
To connect with new customers directly with ease, webinar software like Livestorm comes in handy. Getting started with this software is easy. All you need to do is sign up using your Google account and provide your company name. Upon signing up, it directs you to its calendar feature where you can see all your meetings and events and also create one. Along with creating events, you can also see information like registrants, on average registrants attended, average attendance duration, and more. Here, this webinar software stands out from the crowd with its instant meeting feature, which allows you to set up meeting rooms in no time. In addition to that, it also allows you to integrate with your other business software like HubSpot, Pipedrive, Google Analytics, and more. While the free plan offers up to 20 minutes, 30 live attendees per event, and unlimited team members, you can also access more attendees and additional features by upgrading to the Premium plan.
📌 Buffer - AI-Powered Social Media Management Software
Moving along, we have Buffer, an AI-powered social media management software that simplifies managing your social media presence across multiple platforms. It allows you to create and schedule posts for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest from a single dashboard. With analytics and insights, you can track performance and understand your audience. Moreover, it also comes with collaboration tools, allowing your team to work together on content creation, approval, and publishing workflows. You can easily respond to comments and messages from your followers on Facebook pages and Instagram business accounts. Additionally, with Buffer's AI assistant, you can optimize your content strategy with data-driven suggestions, repurpose and rewrite posts. With this simple and user-friendly software, you can easily plan and publish your social media posts in advance and save time for other important tasks. It comes with a forever free plan for up to three channels.
📌 GetResponse - Powerful Email Marketing Tool
Last but not least, we have GetResponse, a powerful email marketing tool that can help you connect with your audience and grow your business. This simple user-friendly platform makes it easier than ever to create and send effective targeted email campaigns with its drag and drop editor or over 500 professionally designed email templates. You can also use marketing automation for complex campaigns based on triggers and also create attractive and functional pages
