Top SaaS Tools for Startups and Small Businesses

Top SaaS Tools for Startups and Small Businesses

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Almost every day we’re asked for recommendations on tools and resources for businesses.

The list of SaaS tools below is compiled from recommendations by our team, clients, and community from their personal experience.

1. Collaboration

Slack brings the team together, wherever you are. With all of your communication and tools in one place, remote teams will stay productive no matter where you’re working from.

MURAL is a digital workspace for visual whiteboarding and collaboration, where everyone can do their best work together.

CalendarHero automates remote meeting scheduling, so you can skip the “when are you free?” dance. Use code BOAST for 25% off for 6 months.

Facebook Workplace connects everyone in your company, even if they’re working remotely. The UX is similar to Facebook and offers features like Groups, Chat, Video Calls, and Live video broadcasting.

2. Video Conferencing

Zoom is the best way to video-conference and screen share with multiple people. It has become the defacto standard for web meetings and webinars.

Google Meet is a free browser-based solution to share your video, desktop, and presentations with teammates and customers.

3. Webinars

eWebinar is an automated webinar solution offering rich, engaging, and automated webinars using a combination of pre-recorded video, real-time interactions, and live chat.

4. Project Management

Trello is a free and super simple collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards. In one glance, Trello tells you what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. Team members can also vote and prioritize projects.

Asana enables your team to stay focused on their goals, projects, and tasks—no matter when or where they work.

BaseCamp offers a more comprehensive collaboration and project management toolset enabling you to keep track of people, schedules, timelines, and data. Basecamp offers a free 45-day trial and pricing starts at $20 per month for unlimited users and up to 10 projects at once.

5. Software Development Issue & Project Tracking

JIRA is a great solution to plan, track, and manage your agile and software development projects in Jira. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and release great software.

6. Accounting Software

QuickBooks simplifies small business accounting and bookkeeping tasks by automatically completing them for you, saving you time, and reducing errors. Sync QuickBooks to your bank accounts and transactions will be automatically entered for you. QuickBooks performs all necessary calculations for you – it automatically calculates income, cost of goods sold, sales tax collected, and much more.

Wave Accounting is a free, simple and easy to use online accounting software. They also offer payroll integration at $3 per employee payroll, which is discounted as your company grows.

7. Payroll & Benefits Software

Gusto is the easiest solution for US companies to manage payroll and benefits online.

Humi is an all-in-one HR, payroll, and benefits solution for Canadian companies.

8. R&D Tax Credits

Boast.ai automates the complicated process of applying for research and development (R&D tax credits) to help companies get more money faster without manual work and audit risk.

9. Cap Table Management

Carta helps companies and investors manage their cap tables, valuations, investments, and equity plans.

10. CRM

HubSpot is a great free CRM for small to enterprise businesses.

Zoho is an easy to use, customizable CRM tool that helps you manage all your Sales, Marketing, Customer Support & Service, Inventory, and Email within one place.

11. Sales Productivity

Mailshake helps you turn cold prospects into warm leads with automated prospecting outreach via email, social, and phone in as little as 5 minutes. Put your sales outreach on autopilot.

Mixmax is an email app that extends Gmail’s functionality and delivers enhanced productivity for customer-facing teams including automated email sequences, open and click tracking and templates.

12. Websites

Webflow helps you design and build better business websites, faster, without coding.

Squarespace is the all-in-one solution for anyone looking to create a beautiful website.

13. Chat Bots & Messengers

MobileMonkey is a social media tool and multi-channel chatbot platform that enables companies to proactively engage with audiences on their website, Facebook Messenger, SMS text messaging, and other popular web chat applications. It’s one of the widely used chatbot builders by marketers since its key features include drip campaigns, list building, and chat blasts, which are perfect for lead generation.

Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform that helps businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences.

14. Marketing Automation

Wishpond makes it easy for marketers to create landing pages and contests, track leads, send emails, and more.

HubSpot offers all the tools you need to grow traffic, convert leads, and track your entire funnel in one place. HubSpot also has a startup discount program where qualifying startups can get 90% off an annual subscription.

ActiveCampaign is an easy-to-use integrated email marketing, marketing automation, and small business CRM.

15. Email Marketing

SendGrid is a great solution for transactional as well as marketing emails.

Mailchimp provides free email marketing for up to 2,000 subscribers and up to 12,000 emails per month, offers great-looking email templates, and provides all the analytics you’ll need.

16. Content Marketing

Contentfly is a fast & simple content writing service f0r blog posts, social posts, email copy, and more.

17. Landing Pages

Unbounce enables you to create custom landing pages that convert more visitors than any website—no coding required.

18. Customer Support

Zendesk is a fast and simple content writing service for blog posts, social posts, email copy, and more from world-class writers.

19. Social Media Management

HootSuite enables you to manage multiple social media profiles including Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin, schedule messages and tweets, track mentions, and analyze traffic. Hootsuite is free for up to five profiles and plans start at $9.99 after that.

Buffer prides itself on being a smarter way to schedule content on social media. All you have to do is add content to your Buffer and it gets posted at the most optimal times throughout the day. The free account gives you one account from each social network plus ten posts in your Buffer with the option to upgrade for $10 per month.

If This Then That (IFTTT) is a trigger and action-based automation tool where you can create recipes to automate almost anything.

20. Design

Venngage is an infographic solution for marketing pros with no design experience, and who want to present complex information in an easy-to-understand way. This simple design platform turns dull and dry communication into memorable infographics, timelines, and mind maps to visualize your vision and strategy.

Canva simplifies visual content creation by featuring a library of pre-designed templates optimized for Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms. They previously launched a premium model called “Canva for Work” which specifically caters to large teams for promoting a highly collaborative branding strategy.

21. Stock Photos

Unsplash offers the best free stock photos and videos shared by talented creators.

22. Surveys

Typeform is a well-designed solution to create interactive, conversational, and dynamic forms based on user needs.

Surveymonkey is an easy-to-use, web-based customer survey tool that is free for up to 10 questions and 100 responses per survey. Unlimited plans start at $19 per month.

23. Screen Recording

Loom helps you record and share video messages of your screen, cam, or both. Faster than typing an email or meeting live. Free to use on Mac, Windows, Chrome, iOS, and Android.

Vidyard’s free screen recorder makes it easy to communicate better with video. Record and share unlimited videos for customer presentations, employee onboarding, team updates, and more—in just a few clicks.

Snagit lets you quickly capture your screen, add additional context, and easily share with coworkers.

24. Video Marketing

Vidyard is an online video platform for businesses that allows you to increase leads, accelerate your pipeline and delight your customers.

Breadnbeyond is the most cost-effective resource for explainer videos that are so hot these days, especially with startups. Most sources can cost you upwards of $10,000, but I know several startups that had videos done for under $1,200 including voiceover.

PowToon is a Do-it-Yourself animation platform. Works great if you have no budget, but still want a nice-looking animated explainer video.

Virool is a video marketing technology that matches relevant video content with the right audience to produce an incredibly high level of engagement. It works by distributing videos to influential sites, blogs, social games and mobile applications and provides real-time analytics on the campaigns. Virool offers a Cost per View model starting at 10 cents.

25. PR

Help a Reporter Out (HARO) connects you with journalists who are on a deadline for an article and are looking for sources. Getting your story written by a journalist is still the best and most credible press you can get. The free account sends you three media alerts a day with plans starting at $19.99 per month for keyword-based alerts and user profiles so journalists can better recognize you for future stories.

Pitchengine is another social media news release platform. You can create and publish unlimited pitches for free, but they have plans offering SEO, enhanced analytics, and distribution starting at $19 per month.

PR.com is a great free press release distribution service. The releases are often syndicated on Google news.

26. Data Storage and File Sharing

There are several like Dropbox (2 up to 16GB free), Box (5 Gb free), and Google Drive (5 Gb free) which offer more space than most people will ever need and have great tools for sharing.

27. Password Manager

Dashlane saves and fills your passwords, payments, and personal details securely. Free plan for up to 50 passwords on a single device. Get Dashlane Premium free for 6 months with unlimited passwords, devices, and sharing plus dark web monitoring and Wifi VPN protection.

28. Expense Reporting Software

Fyle is a real-time expense management software that simplifies employee expense tracking using everyday apps. It also integrates with Visa and MasterCard enabling you to reconcile credit card expenses in real-time on your existing cards.

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