Operating a digital business doesn’t require multi-thousand-dollar enterprise solutions. For businesses both small and large, there are plenty of tools to choose from that help manage, automate, market, and secure your operations.
This list of business tools encompasses some of the internet’s top choices for daily tasks you’ll be faced with when running a business. The tools on this list are aimed at smaller businesses that are looking for workflow solutions with lower or affordable price points.
Productivity and Project Management Tools
Notion
Notion is a productivity tool that goes beyond what most people expect from a project management solution. It can be used by individuals or businesses, as it’s designed to track tasks, to-dos, meetings, and more. If you have a team that you delegate tasks to, even if it’s small, Notion can be a great tool to work with.
One of its newest features is AI meeting summaries and note-taking that saves time while keeping records of what’s discussed.
ClickUp
ClickUp is a project management tool aiming to be an all-in-one solution for managing tasks, communicating with co-workers, and documenting work. ClickUp runs in your web browser but has plenty of tools depending on your organization structure, including a board that can be used for Kanban or Scrum, Gantt charts, and even a video call platform entirely within ClickUp.
Their goal is to centralize your communication within your organization, rather than splitting it among intra-office chat, email, and other platforms.
Slack
Slack is primarily known as a team messaging platform where you and your company can stay up to date on different topics and subtopics, depending on how you organize your business. For example, you can create a channel all about email marketing and add users relevant to that area. Slack also integrates with other programs like Google Drive and Salesforce.
Monday
Monday is a platform that offers both enterprise and small business solutions for its suite of management tools. It’s popular with marketing and agile teams, as it organizes tasks into larger campaigns with members and associated sub-tasks.
Beyond the project management tools you’d expect, Monday also stores contacts and lead information, which can keep your marketing team’s work in a central hub.
Core Operations
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is a popular suite of tools that includes Docs for document editing, Sheets for spreadsheets, Slides for presentations, and more. The main benefit of using Google Workspace is its collaborative nature: All documents, spreadsheets, and files are stored in the cloud, which means your team can work on the same files simultaneously without version control headaches (though there are settings that allow you to access files while offline).
This means that files can be updated, altered, or edited freely without any fear of not having the most recent version. You can also ensure that certain members of your organization have access to folders that will always contain the files that they need.
Gemini is Google’s AI assistant built directly into Google Workspace. It can summarize documents, answer questions about your files, draft content in Docs, analyze data in Sheets, and help generate presentations in Slides, all without leaving your workspace. Since Gemini is native to Google Workspace, it has seamless access to your files and can work across your entire suite of tools.
Document Sharing/Management
Google Drive
Although Google Drive is part of the Google Workspace, we’d like to highlight the functionality of Drive for storing and sharing files. A Google Drive account allows you to upload files for storage in the Google cloud. You can then access those files from any device that’s logged into a Google account that has access to the file you uploaded.
Delegate access to files, update or remove them, and Google Drive will have a history of what changed and when. It offers organization as well as redundancy and works well with some of the project management tools we listed before. You can also use Gemini to search across your Drive files, extract insights from documents, or get quick answers about your stored content without manually opening each file.
Dropbox
An alternative to Google Drive, Dropbox is another cloud storage solution that offers a similar solution without being tied to a Google account. Dropbox is a popular solution for organizations that deal with larger files, such as videos.
Dropbox is also expanding its capabilities beyond just cloud storage, as it now offers task scheduling and even AI integration, allowing you to have AI assistants review Dropbox files.
PDF.Live
The PDF is a popular file format because it preserves formatting settings across devices and programs. However, PDFs can be tricky to edit and work with once created. PDF.Live has a host of editing and management tools so you can easily alter and modify PDFs that you’ve created or received, without needing the native program that created the original.
PDF.Live allows you to sign documents, convert PDFs to other formats, merge multiple PDFs, create fillable forms, and more. It also has a cloud storage dashboard that stores PDFs that you’ve edited before.
AI Tools
ChatGPT
One of the most flexible AI assistants to date, ChatGPT is a generative AI tool that can automate tasks that would otherwise take you lots of extra time. Like Claude, it can read and review information from Google Workspace and Slack. ChatGPT can also quickly summarize documents, emails, images, and videos, and create basic reports based on data that you give it. ChatGPT is continually evolving with more capabilities like image and presentation generation.
ChatGPT also integrates with many other tools and can easily decipher information in multiple data formats. This thumbnail description of ChatGPT doesn’t do it justice — it is continually evolving with more capabilities like image and presentation generation.
Claude
An alternative AI assistant, Claude’s main selling point is its integration with some of the other tools we listed. Claude can read and review information from Google Workspace and Slack, search the web for current information, and present findings directly within those platforms.
Claude’s integrations are powerful, so you should definitely check them out if you plan on using some of the other tools on this list. There’s a good chance that Claude can save time on routine tasks across any connected software.
Marketing
Canva
Canva is a suite of visual tools designed for small businesses that may not have dedicated graphic designers for improving their social media or video content. Canva can be used to create brochures, website graphics, email marketing templates, and any other visual content that you need.
Canva is especially popular for creating marketing material, as it gives suggestions on templating outreach as well as helps design clothing and brand merchandise.
Wix
Small business websites can look generic or unappealing (usually because of a lack of resources), and Wix is designed to assist in creating a personalized website that fits the needs of your business. Beyond templates for website layouts, Wix also helps you set up functionality in areas like eCommerce, blogging, restaurant menu/reservations, and more.
Shopify
Speaking of eCommerce, many B2C small businesses use Shopify as a platform for selling their products. Shopify allows businesses to build pages to host their inventories and then connect to other popular marketplaces for selling. It also integrates product pages with other sites so that you can post and advertise direct links to your inventory.
SEO
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is an SEO tool that acknowledges that the future of organic search is intertwined with AI. Their platform is designed to help your business understand what kinds of keywords your website content is ranking for in search engines like Google as well as generative AI. Ahrefs provides insights into how visible your content is to LLMs, provides analytics on how your website is crawled, and helps you build new content with AI tools.
SEMrush
SEMrush is the classic SEO tool that’s still worth mentioning today. It was originally designed for researching keywords. In the nearly 20 years since then, SEMrush has evolved to analyze competitors, analyze the market, analyze links, create content and track AI visibility. It tracks how your brand appears across AI platforms like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, classifying mentions as positive or general and monitoring how sentiment changes over time. The tool also lets you see which topics competitors are mentioned for and optimize your content to earn more AI visibility.
Security
1Password
Don’t neglect web security with your small business, as 1Password goes far beyond being just a password manager. 1Password’s business solutions include user management for the accounts in your organization to ensure that only your team has access to your tools.
As you integrate more tools in your business, 1Password can audit all connected apps and reduce the number of entry points to your business. And yes, 1Password also integrates with accounts on other apps so that users need to authenticate through 1Password in order to log into a tool connected to your business.