Businesses are constantly looking for ways to improve efficiency and drive growth. They need to evaluate and implement the set of tools that will automate processes, increase productivity, and provide a competitive advantage. These tools range from business intelligence tools to business analysis tools and collaboration. In this article, we have compiled a list of the 20 business tools to consider in 2023 to save time and money.

20 business tools to consider in 2023

What are business tools?

Business tools are software applications, platforms, or technologies designed to automate, simplify, and improve various aspects of business operations. These tools help companies streamline processes, increase efficiency, and achieve better results. They can include a wide range of functionality and are used across departments and industries to solve specific business problems and achieve goals.

Business tools can include a variety of functionality, such as:

Data analytics and business intelligence tools to analyze data, generate information, and make data-driven decisions.
Marketing automation tools to automate email campaigns, social media management, lead generation, and customer segmentation.
Business process management tools to analyze, model, automate, and optimize their business processes.
Collaboration and communication tools to facilitate real-time communication, file sharing, project management, and team collaboration.
Project management tools to plan, organize, and track tasks, resources, and timelines to ensure successful project completion.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to manage customer interactions, track sales leads, and improve customer support.
Human Resources (HR) tools to automate recruitment, employee onboarding, payroll, and performance management.

The list could go on and on, for example, accounting and finance, reporting, customer support, inventory, supply chain tools, and others are also highlighted. Their use may vary depending on the sector and specialization of the company.

However, let’s take a look at the ones that are suitable for all companies, regardless of sector and company size.

1. Business intelligence and analytics tools

Powerful data analytics and business intelligence tools can assist you in making data-based decisions, identifying trends, and learning about customer behavior. Look for platforms that offer powerful data visualization, predictive analytics, and machine learning to explore the full potential of your data.

Google Analytics

20 business tools to consider in 2023 — Image source: agencyanalytics

If you have a website or engage in content marketing, Google Analytics is an essential business analytics tool. This free platform can help you track the performance of your website, apps, and campaigns.

Google Analytics shows your website’s audience and how and where customers are coming to your website from.

This allows you to enhance your marketing strategy to generate more leads and still save money.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analysis tool for analyzing conversions, application usage, and user retention rates. It can be used to create customized reports and analysis tables to analyze product adoption rates, conversions in different segments, and other important metrics.

The free plan includes up to 100,000 tracked users (unique visitors who have made at least one event). Paid options start at $25 per month, with the ability to create customized plans.

Mamoto

Matomo is a business intelligence tool that allows you to import historical Google Analytics data and acts as a complete web analytics tool. The system provides heat maps, A/B testing, funnels and goals, session recording, and many other conversion optimization features.

Paid advertising integrations for Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, and Yandex Ads are currently available. In addition, Matomo has no data limits.

A free trial is available, and local hosting prices start at $0 per month for light use and $23 per month for cloud use. Email support is provided when using the cloud.

2. Marketing tools

These tools help optimize marketing campaigns, automate repetitive tasks, and better target potential customers. Automation tools free up time for marketing team members, enabling them to concentrate on strategy and creative development and optimize campaign effectiveness.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is a popular email marketing tool that allows businesses to create and manage email campaigns. It offers features like email templates, audience segmentation, marketing automation, A/B testing, and detailed analytics. Mailchimp also has additional features like landing page creation and ad campaign management.

Mailchimp also engages artificial intelligence to run effective email marketing campaigns for your brand based on customer behavior.

The service is free for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails. The Mailchimp Essentials annual plan costs $2.34 per month.

Canva

Canva is a popular free graphic design software for businesses that lets you create professional designs for visual content. You can use Canva to create free social media posts, presentations, posters, videos, logos, and more.

Canva offers ready-to-use templates for social media banners, marketing flyers, event templates, document templates (presentations, letters, reports, etc.), and much more. Canva is very easy to use and helps create picture-perfect campaigns.

Canva offers a free version with a wide range of features, while its premium subscription gives access to additional templates, advanced functionality, and the ability to store and organize resources. Canva’s monthly subscription is $14.99 per month for up to 5 people.

WordPress

WordPress is a content management system that lets you create, edit, and publish content for a website. It saves a lot of time, as there’s no need to write code, and the publishing task can be performed by anyone. It helps you publish content more easily and quickly and reduces the time you spend managing your website.

With WordPress, you can create many different types of websites, from blogs and business sites to e-commerce stores and portfolios. It offers a wide range of customizable themes and templates to help you create a unique, visually appealing website.

Besides, it offers built-in tools and features that make it easy to optimize your website for search engines. You can optimize your content for keywords, create search engine-friendly URLs, and install plugins designed for SEO optimization.

3. Business process management tools

Business process management tools are a type of software that helps companies manage their day-to-day operations and processes more efficiently. It provides tools for designing, modeling, executing, automating, and continuously improving business processes. It aims to optimize operations, reduce inefficiencies, and improve overall productivity and customer satisfaction.

Appian

20 business tools to consider in 2023 — Image source: appian

Appian is a business tool used by companies to automate routine tasks, integrate with other enterprise tools, and create custom workflows.

Appian is a low-code development platform that provides a unified platform for building, executing, and managing business processes. It offers visual process models, drag-and-drop interface design, and workflow automation capabilities. Appian supports collaboration, integration with external systems, task management, and mobile optimization. It also includes features like business rules management, mobile app development, chatbots, AI assistants, and analytics for process improvement.

Appian is only available in the cloud. There is a free version that you can download and use to test the platform.

KissFlow

KissFlow is a business process management tool that helps companies optimize workflows and eliminates the need to perform tasks manually.

It is a cloud-based software that offers businesses a number of tools to improve the efficiency of their operations. It includes features such as task management, workflow, and project management. It also integrates easily with Google products such as Gmail, Google Calendar, etc.

Kissflow includes user-friendly dashboards, custom report templates, and advanced workflow and form design. It also integrates seamlessly with other software solutions and standard applications to improve productivity.

Kissflow Project offers several pricing plans to help you get started: Free functionality limited to 3 users.

Webcon

Webcon is an easy small business tool. It offers powerful features that enable users to develop workflows, forms, and business processes with minimal coding effort.

A user-friendly interface with SharePoint makes Webcon an essential business process management tool for companies to organize their document management system. It is especially effective when documents need to circulate between team or department members.

Webcon offers both on-premise and cloud deployment options. The company offers a free trial with no time limit if you use the local version and a 30-day trial from its cloud server.

4. Collaboration and communication tools for business

Effective collaboration and communication tools are more important than ever, especially with the proliferation of remote work. Such platforms facilitate real-time communication among team members regardless of their physical location. They increase productivity by enabling seamless collaboration, communication, file sharing, and document automation.

ONLYOFFICE DocSpace

ONLYOFFICE DocSpace is a collaborative business tool that allows users to edit and collaborate on text documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and forms in customizable rooms.

Collaboration is organized in rooms with different levels of access rights to optimize the collaboration process. The following roles are available: room managers, power users, editors, viewers, commentators, reviewers, and form fillers. Convenient sharing and invitation tools are provided for comfortable teamwork in and out of the room.

Built-in office suite offers professional editing tools as well as real-time collaborative document editing. Users can work on documents as a team using chat, audio/video calls via Jitsi and Zoom, comments, revision, version history, and change tracking.

The functionality of editors can also be extended by plugins that add third-party services. For example, translating texts with Google Translator or DeepL, detecting errors with LanguageTool, generating bibliographies with Zotero and Mendeley, entering text with your voice, etc. Besides, the editors integrate an AI assistant to generate text, get text resumes, add word definitions, find synonyms, and build code.

The free Startup plan includes 1 admin, 2 power users, up to 12 rooms, an unlimited number of users in each room, and 2 GB of disk space. The Business plan price is calculated on the chosen number of admins/power users. The price starts from $15 per admin/power user.

Want to try ONLYOFFICE DocSpace? Create your DocSpace account or install it on-premises to start securely managing your files:

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Zoom

Zoom is a video conferencing platform that can be used for audio and video calls with employees and customers. Zoom provides comprehensive functionality for virtual video and audio communications, individual sessions, online webinars, and public and group events.

What sets Zoom apart from conventional video platforms are features like meeting chat, screen sharing, interactive whiteboard, transcripts, backgrounds, file sharing, meeting recording, and more.

Zoom has a wide range of pricing plans. The Zoom Basic plan is free for all users with a session limit of 45 minutes. The Zoom Pro plan costs $149.90 per user per year.

Dropbox

Dropbox makes it easy to share large quantities of files that would otherwise be too large to attach to an e-mail, with colleagues, partners, and even potential customers. Dropbox is easily accessible from any device, so you always have access to your files on the go.

In Dropbox, you can share documents or even folders with users, and manage access to certain data. File sharing with users who don’t have a Dropbox account is possible via an external link, facilitating collaboration with third parties.

Dropbox protects your data with AES-256-bit encryption, TLS/SSL encryption, two-factor authentication, and tracking of devices and web browsers connected to or associated with your account.

The free version offers up to 2 GB of cloud storage, the Plus version 2,000 GB, and the Professional version 3,000 GB. If you upgrade from the free to the paid version, the storage volume increases considerably.

5. Task management tools

Effective project management is crucial for successful execution and delivery of business initiatives. Project management tools like Trello, Asana, or Monday.com help streamline workflows, assign tasks, track progress, and manage teams efficiently. These tools improve communication, increase transparency, and ensure everyone remains aligned toward achieving project goals and deadlines.

Asana

20 business tools to consider in 2023 — Image source: asana

Asana is a centralized cloud-based environment for planning and controlling activities. The solution is primarily focused on project management and therefore has a number of additional advantages, such as automation of routine work.

Asana offers several project templates as well as the ability to create your own. Each project contains tasks and subtasks that can be thematically grouped into sections. The “Overview” tab allows team members to get a complete overview of current projects. Various views such as Kanban-style charts, Gantt charts, forms, and calendars make it easy to visualize and understand projects.

Asana’s free plan is for up to 15 users, which is an attractive option for start-ups. Paid plans are required to unlock some important tools: charts, forms, milestones, portfolios, etc.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a cloud-based software platform that teams can use to plan, execute, and control their processes, projects, and day-to-day work. The software helps teams strengthen collaboration, automate manual work, and analyze important data at a glance.

You create powerful dashboards, and different types of charts, combine multiple dashboards, or group information by column type, allowing you to make real-time decisions based on data. Monday.com allows you to assign people to each task, group tasks together, or manage different views of all projects.

The free version of Monday.com is suitable for small teams starting a business.

Trello

Trello is an online project management application designed to manage team projects on a single dashboard. Trello is one of the most popular and widely used collaborative project managers. It focuses above all on coordination with the rest of the team, allowing you to manage professional projects or organize all kinds of events, meetings, or day-to-day tasks.

Trello provides the Kanban system for task management, which has been inherited by many other similar applications and software. Such an approach allows you to create time limits or a dashboard where everyone knows what they have to do or when the deadline is, for example.

The free cloud version includes most of the features offered by Trello and unlimited cloud storage. However, if you need advanced features, it is better to upgrade to the paid version.

6. CRM tools

CRM software provides a centralized database to manage customer interactions, track potential sales, automate marketing campaigns, and improve customer support. Look for CRM solutions that offer advanced analytics, personalized messaging capabilities, and seamless integration with existing systems.

Zoho CRM

20 business tools to consider in 2023 — Image source: boostedcrm

Zoho CRM is a CRM platform for managing sales, marketing, and customer support for your organization.

It helps you manage a large customer database, automate marketing, sales, lead management, and customer experience to improve operational efficiency, and provides business intelligence to make informed decisions.

Zoho CRM allows you to combine business data from different departments to improve customer service and business communications to ensure profitable operations.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a popular small business tool in the CRM software field that offers a popular essential-level platform. Small businesses will benefit from a workflow builder that allows you to automate every task your team performs repeatedly. Salesforce is easy to use and allows you to customize them for employees with different roles.

Salesforce has integration capabilities with an impressive number of platforms like Mailchimp, QuickBooks, Dropbox, and Google Workspace, Salesforce will help you integrate and optimize everything you need to achieve your sales and service goals.

The Starter plan for small businesses costs $25 per user per month, with a maximum of 10 users.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a web-based sales and pipeline management CRM system. It enables companies to plan sales activities and track contracts. Pipedrive offers all the features associated with converting a potential deal into a successful sale.

Pipedrive provides high-value information about sales strategy. Pipedrive’s artificial intelligence (AI) tool identifies key opportunities for improvement with performance recommendations and task suggestions. The tool also calculates your average conversion rate so you know how many new leads you need to get and what activities you need to take to reach immediate goals. Real-time reports show you how well you’re on track, giving you time to make adjustments as needed and providing timely training to maximize the effectiveness of your sales strategy.

Pipedrive has a wide range of integration apps that allow it to connect third-party services with the platform. For example, you can add Zapier, Google Meet, Mailchimp, or ONLYOFFICE functionality. The ONLYOFFICE app comes with advanced editing for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

7. HR tools

HR tools automate time-consuming and manual HR processes such as employee data management, recruitment, performance appraisal, leave accounting, and benefits management. Optimizing these tasks can increase efficiency, reduce errors, and save valuable time.

Freshservice

20 business tools to consider in 2023 — Image source: freshservice

Freshservice is a business tool specialized in HR management, facilitating the hiring and management of new employees.

Freshservice enables you to optimize your HR processes thanks to its wide range of functionality: applicant tracking system, time tracking system, employee information system, employee hiring and dismissal system, mobile application, and HR reports.

As a result, you’ll be able to take advantage of intelligent candidate search, making it easy to track job offers and candidate channels. What’s more, you’ll save a great deal of time in the candidate selection process, as you’ll be able to use the talent pool, which contains all data on current and past candidates.

The starter plan is $19/month per agent. All plans come with a free 21-day trial period to test them before making a purchase.

BambooHR

BambooHR is a complete tool for all HR management tasks, from recruitment and onboarding to performance management, employee experience, payroll, etc.

BambooHR is an all-in-one HR management tool: it provides all the tools you need to hire employees quickly and efficiently, such as instant, pre-built reports, automated workflows, deep analytics, applicant tracking system (ATS), new hire onboarding, employee termination, and electronic signatures.

It connects your HR data with 125 out-of-the-box integrations that can help you achieve even more HR and other business results at a lower cost.

How to choose tools that fit your company?

As the business grows, it is critical to adapt and implement new tools that increase productivity and overall efficiency. Choosing the best business tools can be a critical decision for the success of your business. Here are some aspects to keep in mind while choosing the best business tools:

Business needs. Analyze your specific requirements. Determine which specific fields of the business you want to improve or optimize.

Scrutinized research. Look for tools designed to meet your specific needs. Read reviews, look for information online, and ask for recommendations from trusted sources or business networks.

Features and functionality. Draw up a list of the most important features of your business. Compare different tools in terms of functionality, ease of use, scalability, compatibility, integration capabilities, and data security.

Budget. Set a realistic budget for the purchase of work tools. Determine if the tool is good value for money and fits your financial constraints. Some tools offer free versions or trial periods, which can be a good way to test them.

Test before decision. If possible, try out the tools yourself before making a final decision. Take advantage of free trials or demos to get hands-on experience and determine if the tool meets your expectations.

Scalability. Think about the future growth of the business and whether the tool will be able to meet the growing needs. It is beneficial to choose tools that can scale with the business to avoid frequent migrations and disruptions.

There is no one best business tool. The optimal choice depends on the specifics of your business and its needs. Take your time, do thorough research, and make a decision that meets your requirements and goals.

20 business tools to consider in 2023

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