36 Best Tools for Maximizing Productivity at Workplace
You would certainly come up with various success stories of established businesses. Those stories are a result of overcoming all the difficulties that comes in the way of establishing a new startup. Entering into the business world and to prepare for the successful launch of business, you will have to go through various hurdles.
“Want to become a leader who gets things done? If yes, then stop using email to manage work and switch to ProofHub.”
There is a belief that 50 percent of businesses fail in the first year and 95 percent fail within five years. Only a few of them are successful in leaving an impact on world. Luck is certainly an important factor in success but your fortune is not in your hands. What you can surely do is stack the odds in your favor by adapting the right techniques and working with the right people.
But do you know the best and the most required tools at hand so that you can build your company efficiently and run extremely successful projects. There are a lot of tools to choose from and by following the top entrepreneurs, here are some tools that will help you reach your goal.
For project management
- ProofHub: ProofHub makes it easier to share and discuss ideas across the entire team. With ProofHub you can access all your files stores across multiple platforms in one place. It serves as a simple business management software with task management features.
Top features:
- Assigned user roles
- Online team discussions
- Gantt charts
- Sharing and saving files
- Task dependencies and delegating
- Reporting and tracking projects
Pricing: Free trial, ultimate control plan is for $135 per month billed annually and $150 billed monthly for unlimited projects, unlimited users and 100 GB storage. Essential plan $45 per month billed annually and $50 billed monthly will manage up to 40 projects, unlimited users and 15 GB storage.
For E-mail Outreach
2. SalesHandy (An automated cold email campaign software): SalesHandy allows you to send a personalized cold email campaign with multiple auto follow-ups. The email sent using SalesHandys lands in the primary inbox of your prospects, not in the promotion tab. This enhances the lead engagement, increases the reply rate and helps you close more deals effectively.
To improve your email productivity, SalesHandy provides you instant notifications of individual email open and advanced analytics of email campaigns to make data-driven decisions.
Top Features:
- Muti stage automated follow-ups
- Mail Merge for personalization
- Email scheduling
- Unlimited free email and link tracking
- Advanced campaign report
- Realtime notification
- Team collaboration
Pricing: You can start with 14 days Free trial and upgrade to $9/user/month (billed yearly), Plus Plan: $22/user/month (billed yearly) and Enterprise Plan: $49/user/month (billed yearly).
For email management
3. Clean Email (Clean up your inbox with a few clicks):
Clean Email is a privacy-oriented email cleaner and organizer that helps to unsubscribe from unwanted emails and declutter your overwhelmed inbox. This email management tool segments all emails into easy-to-review bundles, allowing you to quickly clean up your mailbox from the messages and newsletter you no longer need.
Clean Email respects users’ privacy. They don’t keep, sell, or analyze your data for the purposes beyond the app’s public features.
Top features:
- Unsubscriber: opt out from unwanted newsletters with a few clicks
- Quick Clean: combines all emails into a screen with easy-to-select actions
- Auto Clean: automate your repetitive tasks for emails matching the rules set
- Block Senders: block certain senders to make sure their emails never hit your inbox
- Read Later: mark the emails you may need in the future
Pricing: Free for managing up to 1000 emails. You can use its Premium features and clean up an unlimited number of emails for $7.99/account /month or for $29.99/account /year.
4. EmailAnalytics (Visualize your email activity — or your team’s):
EmailAnalytics is an easy-to-use tool that visualizes you and your team’s email activity. You simply connect your Gmail or G Suite account, and it collects your email history and displays it in intuitive charts, graphs, and tables. You can see essential productivity metrics for your team like emails sent, emails received, and email traffic by hour of the day.
It also displays average email response time, which is an essential KPI for sales teams and customer service teams.
Top features:
- Team management: Add your employees and team members and monitor them from a single dashboard.
- Email reports: Easily track team productivity with daily activity reports delivered to your inbox.
- Filters: Include or exclude the data you want to analyze with advanced data filters.
- Real-time analytics: Refresh your stats on demand!
- Private & Secure: EmailAnalytics has passed Google’s security audit is Google-verified.
- Pricing: $15 per user, per month. Bulk discounts are available as well, bringing the price potentially as low as $5 per user, per month.
For communication
5. Skype (Lets you connect your way) : Skype is an instant messaging and calling app and a popular communication tool. It is free for all and allows audio and video calls between multiple devices like one on laptop and the other on phone.
Top features:
- Video chat
- Messaging
- Conference calls
- Chat groups for various teams
- File sharing
- Notifications based on mentions
Pricing: Free (Up to 25 people on group audio calls), Skype for Business from $1.9 user/month
6. Google hangouts (Conversations that comes to life) : Hangouts will enable real-life conversations and for those who are running their business on a budget, Google’s Hangouts might be the tool for them.
Top features:
- Group conversations
- Instant messaging
- Hangout On Air
- Integration with other Google applications
- Custom Control for Admins
- Built-in screen sharing
- Auto screen focus
- HD video calls
- Compatible with multiple devices
Pricing: Free for all users.
7. ezTalks (Video conferencing): ezTalks is a professional video conferencing tool to make better, faster and stronger decision. It allows first rate video, audio, and wireless screen-sharing experience across Windows, Mac, iOS, Android system.
Main Features of ezTalks:
- Screen/File Sharing
- Whiteboard
- Public/Private Chat
- Remote Control
- Meeting Recording
- HD Video Conferencing
Pricing: ezTalks is FREE for starters — upto 100 participants per meeting. For pro $ 129.90/host/year when billed annually and 13.99/host/year when billed monthly.
8. HipChat (Great teams use HipChat): HipChat is tool designed for business team communication and is a private hosted chat service helping teams to collaborate more efficiently. The business owner can set a group chat with team and review it any time. This will also avoid any miscommunication and redundancies. Hipchat saves the conversation for convenience of users so that you and your team can upload and collaborate on documents and tasks. It is one of the few that is intended strictly for business use.
Top features:
- Easy Screen Sharing
- Secure Guest Access
- Drag and Drop File Sharing
- Unlimited Chat Rooms
- Full Customization
- Fully Searchable
- Synchronization Access Devices and App
- Searchable History
Pricing: HipChat Basic — Free and offers 5GB file storage and unlimited integrations and HipChat Plus — $2/user/month offers unlimited file storage.
Video Hosting
9. Cincopa ( Video Hosting Platform ): Cincopa is a digital asset management and video hosting platform. You can use Cincopa to create, distribute and present videos to teammembers and customers. Through Cincopa’s analytical dashboard, you can see exactly who watched each video and how much of a given video was engaged with by users.
Top features:
- RecTrace- record yourself, your screen or both, and send videos without leaving your email browser
- Video analytics
- In-video search
- Closed captions
- On-video calls-to-action and forms
- Podcast and image hosting
- Powerful 3rd party integrations
- Pricing: You can select the best plan for your business. Startup — $9/month, Plus — $25/month, Corporate — $99/month, Agency/Enterpriser — $350/month
Design tools
10. Viewflux (Better designs): View Another tool designed for small businesses and freelancers, Viewflux allows you to see all of your projects in one place.Viewflux provides visual feedback from colleagues and clients as well as version control so that all stakeholders are on the same page throughout the design and prototyping process.
Top features:
- Sync your projects with Dropbox
- Real-time collaboration
- Project archive
- Upload PSD and PDF files to your projects*
Pricing: You can start with a FREE plan, $59 per month for 15 Team Members, Unlimited Projects, Assets Delivery and Custom Branding.
11. Photoshop (Create anything you can imagine) : The core of almost every creative project is best imaging and design app. Photoshop will help to work across desktops and mobile devices to create and enhance your photographs, 3D artwork, videos, web and mobile app designs and many more.
Top features:
- Complex object selection made fast
- Advanced color picker
- General technology
- Smart sharpen
- Save to cloud
- Extended features included
- Better 3D tools
- Improved type styles
- Color import from web files
Pricing: For basic users FREE version is available and creative cloud plan at $52.45/mo (excl. tax) will give you access to 29 desktop apps and 10 mobile apps and 10 services and other useful features.
12. Canva (The simplest graphic design tool you’ll ever use) : Canva is the tool of your dream if you do not want to hire a graphic designer but do not want your social media posts to look like crap. Canva is a simple graphic design tool for non-designers to make visual content look decent.
Top features:
- Photo straightener
- Image cropper
- Add text to photos
- Speech bubble maker
- Transparency tool
- Photo enhancer
- Photo blur
- Photo vignette
- Design grids
- Free icons and Photo frames
- Badges, sticked and web wireframe
Pricing: It is FREE for all with simple drag and drop editor and Canva for Work is at $9.95 per month when paid annually or $12.95 per user / month.
Pro Tip: Proofing tool of ProofHub is packed with powerful features to proof your file and achieve zero defects. Proof better and review faster with proofing tool to save your time and effort for reviewal and approval process.
Documentation tools
13. Google Docs (Create impactful documents): Google docs is a free web-based application that will bring your documents to life with editing and styling tool to format texts and paragraphs. It offers hundreds of fonts, add links, images and drawings.
Top features:
- Perfect templates
- Everyone can work on the document at the same time
- Navigation sidebar
- Clear formatting
- Research tool
- Suggesting mode
- Comments
- Footnotes
- Voice typing
- Image editing
Pricing: It offers all its features for free and for a higher usage it costs $1.99 per month for 100GB storage and $9.99 per month for 1TB storage.
14. Office online ( Office delivers the tools you need): With office online you will be able to collaborate while working on documents and save your documents in Onedrive. It is a Microsoft product and you will be able to easily use your abundance of MS office files.
Top features
- Add fluid motion to your presentations
- Automated designs
- Zoom in and zoom out during presentations
- Researcher and editor for work
- Advance proofing capabilities
- Advanced collaborations
Pricing: Free for all users
For social media managing
15. Storify (Create best stories): Storify provides social network services that will let the users create stories or timeline using social media like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It will also unite traditional stories with engaged audiences.
Top features
- Export stories as PDFs
- Connect Facebook pages to profiles
- Live blogging
- SEO full compatibility
- Customizable story display
- Secure links for content protection
- Ad-free stories
Pricing: Free trial available
16. Mailshake ( A simple solution for cold emails): With mailshake you can promote your content, build relationships and generate leads. It has a collection of pre-written messages that you can select from for content promotion.
Top features:
- Automatic follow-ups
- Built for teams
- Calendars for sending controls
- Personalization
Pricing: $9 per month, per user
17. Buffer( A better way to share on social media): By using buffer you can easily manage your social media content. You can share any page you are reading across today’s well-known social media sites. Buffer will let you connect to all social media accounts while making it easier to create and schedule posts.
Top features:
- Multiple posts and tweets
- Social profile sharing
- Profile management
- Multi-media format sharing
- Customized scheduling
- Standard buffering
Pricing: You can select the best plan for your business. Individual — free, Awesome — $14/month, Small — $99/month, Medium — $199/month, Large — $399/month
18. Hootsuite (Manage all your social media in one place): Hootsuite will empower your business to execute amazing social media strategies. With Hootsuite, you can post updates, connect with your client base, and review responses on more than 35 popular social networks.
Top features:
- Manage multiple contributors
- Measure your social ROI
- Update multiple networks in one step
- Optimize delivery
- Social Analytics reports
Pricing: Pricing plans vary according to your business. One basic plan is free that offers up to 3 social profiles and Pro: from $8.99/month.
Organizational tools
19. Pocket( Save your files to view later) : With pocket you can save interesting articles, videos and more from web to view them later. The list of content that you want to save can be viewed on any device.
Top features:
- Undo Save from Browser Extension
- Delete an item while it’s open on iOS
- Tag while in Tile View on Web
- Limit Offline Storage on Android
- Read a Random Article on iOS
- Search for and Discover New Articles and Videos by Topic
Pricing: Free for basic users and pocket premium for upgraded features is available at $44.99 per year.
20. Evernote(File and MEMO syncing): Evernote makes a great writing app for Android. You can jot down your ideas at one central place with Evernote app anytime anywhere. With Evernote, you can save any important articles you receive in your email via subscriptions for future references.
Evernote tool makes it possible to share your ideas with a large team. The teams can contribute their best ideas in seconds and the huge virtual whiteboard that lets everyone contribute their ideas and knowledge.
Top features:
- Collect, save, and share documents
- Search inside PDFs and Word docs without opening them
- Presentation mode
- Idea boards
Pricing: Basic version is FREE for users, plus plan is available at $13.218 per year, premium plan at $23.326 per year and business plan at $12 per user per month.
21. Todoist( Accomplish more everyday): It is a powerful task manager for business productivity and lets the user manage tasks from an inbox, browser, desktop or mobile device. This tool will customize your experience, organize your tasks and projects and optimize your productivity.
Top features:
- Access tasks everywhere
- Collaborate on shared tasks
- Distraction free design
- Powerful recurring dates
- Visualize your productivity
Pricing: Todoist basic is free, Todoist premium for individuals is at $28.99 per year and Todoist business for teams is at $28.99 per user per year.
Finance tools
22. FreshBooks (Make billing painless): FreshBooks will provide you with tools for invoicing, expense tracking and time management to make your accounting job easier and less intimidating. You can automate most of your billing activities and have more time for projects and meetings.
Top features:
- Time tracking and billing for work
- Automatically importing and categorizing expenses from bank accounts and credit cards
- Upload and share files
- Track spending with expense reports
- Reports on received payments and billing history
- Get feedback from your team by keeping track of projects progress
Pricing: If you don’t have many clients you can continue to use it for FREE and for more clients you can use seedling plan at $19.95 per month, evergreen plan $29.95/month (bill up to 200 clients), Mighty Oak plan $39.95/month (bill an unlimited number of clients)
23. Xero(Online accounting software for small business): Xero is designed to meet the requirements of small business and considered as the useful asset for managing financial activities.
Top features:
- Unlimited users and 24/7 support
- Easy invoicing
- Go mobile
- Inventory
- Attach files to data
- Pay bills
- Create purchase orders
- 500+ third party apps
Pricing:
You can try Xero FREE for 30 days. Paid plans include: Starter — $20/month, standard- $30/month and premium — $40/month.
Copywriting
24. Grammarly (A grammar check for proofreading articles): Grammarly is a tool that will help writers to expand their vocabulary, write better, check for grammar, spelling and punctuation much faster.
Top features:
- Identify confused prepositions
- Identify overuse of the passive voice
- Detect wordy sentences
- Highly repetitive words
- Identify spelling errors
Pricing: You can install grammarly’s free browser extension for chrome, safari and firefox and premium version is available via a subscription that will cost you $29 per month.
25. Hemingway( Make your writing bold and clear): Hemingway will help you fix potential problems in your writing and you can download it to PC or MAC computer. It is a terrific tool for on-demand writing with tight deadlines to make your writing clear.
Top features:
- Highlights complex words or phrases
- Identify extra long sentences
- Identify too many adverbs
- Format your prose
Pricing: You can buy Hemingway for Mac OS X or windows at $19.99
For data analysis
26. Landing page grader by Leadpages (how effective is your landing page): To turn all your pages into high converting landing pages. When it comes to landing page optimization, it should be good enough as it will decide your quality scores as well as ROI.
Top features:
It will provide full report of:
- SEO
- Analytics
- Mobile responsiveness
- Links
- Speed
- Forms
Pricing: Standard ( for home business and solopreneurs) $25 per month paid annually, Pro ( for small businesses and professional marketers) $48 per month paid annually and advanced ( for marketing teams and agencies) $199 per month paid annually.
27. Optimizely (Transform your customer experience) : Optimizely will provide you the opportunity to create and personalize your business website. You need to optimize your website according to what your customers like for online marketing.
Top features:
- Predictive Analytics
- Recommended Audience segments
- Behavioral Audience Targeting
- Mobile Web Compatible
- Developer Tools
- Customizable platforms
- Multipage testing
- Campaign management
- Grade security
Pricing: Free for 30 days. Standard Plan — basic A/B testing for startups and small companies, for professional plan — for growing businesses and premium plans for enterprise grade users. at $49 per 1000 monthly unique visitors.
28. Kissmetrics (Keep and grow more customers) : Kissmetrics will help to engage your users by adding email campaign automation to your analytics platform. You can build your marketers to increase conversions, engagement and retention.
Top features:
- Segment Data By Any Point in Time
- Real Time Data Monitoring
- Multi and Cross Platform Support
- Data Export
- Unlimited A/B Test Reports
- No-Limit Conversion Periods
- Free setup guidance
Pricing: 14 day FREE trial. There are three plans for the users: Growth $500 per month, power $850 per month and enterprise plan.
SEO expert
29. Google search console (Find yourself on the web): To monitor website performance in Google search engine index, Google search console has helped many web owners. You can monitor your site’s performance in Google search results and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results.
Top features:
- Search analytics
- HTML improvements
- Crawl errors
- Fetch as Google
- Sitemaps tester
Pricing: For all users of basic level Google search console is available for free and for large enterprise professional office suite with 30GB storage is available at Rs. 150 per user per month.
30. Google analytics (Measure your advertising ROI): With google analytics you can improve engagement by 33% and click-throughs by 21% for content promotions. It also offers marketing analytics products for businesses of all sizes.
Top features:
- E commerce tracking
- Conversion reporting
- AdWords
- Site search
- Campaigns
- Excludes internal traffic through filters
- SEO reports via tools
- Content analytics
- Mobile analytics
- Social analytics
Pricing: For all basic level users, Google analytics is free and for large enterprises Google analytics is free for use but you can purchase the premium version at $12500/month
31. Moz (Improve your search engine optimization) : With Moz you can improve your SEO by using basic and advanced search tools. Small business use this site to attract traffic to their website and generate customers.
Top features:
- Advanced online marketing guides
- Beta access to new tools
- Competitive analysis
- Comprehensive Q&A database
- Keyword difficulty
- Moz toolbar
- On-Page recommendations
- Open Site Explorer
- Weekly crawls and rank tracking
- World’s largest SEO community
Pricing: Standard Plan — $99/month, Medium Plan — $149/month, Large Plan — $249/month and Premium — $599/month.
File sharing tools
32. Dropbox (Reinventing teamwork) : Dropbox is a cloud storage provider used as a file sharing service. Sharing files via Dropbox will transfer everyday workflow and entire businesses. Dropbox is a home for all your photos, docs, videos and files.
Top features:
- Share screenshots quickly
- Add comments to files
- View any file without installing extra software
- Edit microsoft office files online for free
- Use selective sync to save space
- View favorite files on mobile
- Safety at first place
- Backup all your pictures to dropbox
Pricing: Basic account is for FREE and standard plan is available at $12.50 / user/month and 2TB of space for secure storage, advanced plan at $20 / user/month and as much space as you need with sophisticated admin, audit and integration features.
33. Google drive(Your stuff, Your way): Google drive is an online storage space for all your photos, videos, stories, designs, drawings, recordings and anything. These files in your drive can be reached from your smartphone, tablet and computer. The files you store can be shared by inviting others to view, download and collaborate on all the files you want.
Top features:
- Voice typing
- Research from Google docs
- Templates
- Explore in sheets
- Share files between users in the organization
- Change color codes to build workflows
Pricing: The first 15GB of storage remain free, but 100GB now costs just $1.99 you can now get a terabyte of online storage for $9.99 a month and 10TB at $99.99 per month.
34. OneDrive (Do more wherever you go): OneDrive will give you online storage that works seamlessly with tools you use everyday to create, collaborate, communicate from your device. You will have a fast,, intuitive browser experience with OneDrive that will make it easy for you to manage, upload and share files.
Top features:
- Great mobile experience
- Advanced sharing outside your organization
- Selective sync
- Save email attachments directly to OneDrive for business
- Write an excel survey
Pricing: 5Gb of storage is available for free. Office 365 home Premium OneDrive features at $99.99 per year. Office 365 personal with premium OneDrive features at $69.99 per year. If you only want storage on OneDrive of 50GB buy for $1.99 per month and OneDrive basic 5GB is free.
Software tools
35. GitHub: At GitHub programmers and designers can work together to fix bugs, collaborate and contribute. GitHub has a collection of development tools and resources that you can build on to increase the efficiency and scale of your workflow.
Top features:
- Write better code
- Code review
- Project management
- Integrations
- Community management
- Documentation
- Code hosting
Pricing: For public and open source projects, GitHub is free to use. With a paid plan, your team can work together across unlimited private repositories. For developers $7 per month, for team $9 per user per month and for business $21 per user per month .
36. CodePen (Inspiration, education and sharing) : CodePen will help you to show off your latest creation and get feedback from your peers. You can test out bugs, collaborate and find new inspiration. With CodePen you can also create sets of HTML, CSS and JavaScript and display these sets on your profile, take feedback and edit them any time.
Top features:
- Flavors of HTML, CSS and JavaScript
- Collections and tags
- Different pen views
- Blogging
- Community
- Inspiration
- Unlimited privacy
- Asset hosting
- Live view
- Unlimited embed themes
Pricing: It has FREE account available and CodePen Pro starts at just $9 per month when billed annually.
Regardless of how your employees are working and where your business is leading, use these tools to make your life easier and help you and your team work more efficiently. Build a great office culture to maximize the positive attitude in workplace. If you execute your plans thoughtfully, staying productive at work will not longer be a rocket science.
“Don’t let poor project management become a barrier in your success. Start using ProofHub.’’
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