The secret to productivity in an enterprise is when your teams have a good base of collaboration. Because the best online collaboration tools help employees to work together on projects both in-office and remote workplaces. Nowadays, companies believe that collaboration and transparency are two key components of the modern workplace experience.
Meanwhile, with the help of the best online collaboration tools, teams can increase their productivity and efficiency. Thus, as remote work becomes the order of the day, companies need to leverage the best online collaboration tools to help their employees, partners, and clients stay on the same page at all times.
In this article, we are going to highlight the best online collaboration tools that your teams need at their disposal to bring the best out of their workplace. Moreover, the good thing about these collaboration tools is that there is one for every business type. However, you must choose these best online collaboration tools based on your business needs and budget, which could be a little bit challenging.
But we have made everything look simple and straightforward for you in this article by compiling a list of tried and trusted online collaboration tools that will suit your business needs. Most of these online collaboration tools support means of team communication such as chat, instant messaging, screen sharing, audio/video conferencing, and file sharing.
The Best Online Collaboration Tools For Greater Productivity
Here are the best online collaboration tools for your teams to harness a better remote and in-house working experience. We’ll categorize the tools based on their needs and preferences.
Online Project Management Tools
1. Trello
Trello over the years has proved to be one of the best online collaboration tools out there. The platform uses boards, lists, and cards to enable teams to organize and prioritize projects in a fun, flexible, and beneficial way.
With the help of Trello, teams work more collaboratively and get more work done. Its organizational ability makes it work well for you whether it’s a side project, office project, or even an upcoming family organization.
While using Trello for your online project management, you can set deadline reminders and email notifications. And it can equally integrate with other tools, including Evernote, Google Drive, Slack, and more for a unified team experience.
Trello, meanwhile, is quite affordable for any business as it is free to use. However, if you want to harness its full features for better productivity, you will need to upgrade to the paid packages.
Pricing starts at $9.99 per user per month and can reach up to $17.50 per user per month, billed annually.
2. Filestage
Filestage is one of the best online collaboration tools for project management. It has all the tools busy teams need to get results while requiring no extra training to use. The tool makes it simple for internal and external stakeholders to leave in-context feedback on videos, images, PDFs, and more.
With the software, you can save a whole lot of time by automating manual tasks such as sharing content with stakeholders and following up on feedback. Not only that, but Filestage’s online proofing software also helps you to build and manage review processes the way you want to.
Other features that this tool boasts include the integration of a to-do list to make sure that your team never misses a piece of feedback, time-saving approval workflow, and integration of other collaboration tools such as Slack, Trello, or Basecamp. You can equally collaborate in real-time using your mobile devices.
Filestage might be more costly than Trello, but all the same, it is all worth it. Pricing starts at $89 per month and can reach up to $219 per month; all billed annually.
Online Communication Tools
3. Chanty
Chanty is one of the best online collaboration tools that make chatting simple and easy for teams. It offers an unlimited message history, with easy-to-use collaboration features.
The collaboration tool helps you stay connected with your team by allowing you to stay synced with text, voice, or video. With Chanty, you can share screens, files, links, or set tasks to bring more context to your discussions.
It also allows you to integrate all the apps you use in a single place, but at the same time, you can choose the information you can get with smart notifications. Moreso, Chanty offers secured data encryption and export with its invite-only team feature.
Chanty supports you to easily transfer your message history and other team data from a third-party messenger directly to software.
This online collaboration tool for team communication is free to use, but you can also upgrade to a paid plan of $3 per user per month billed annually to ensure that you utilize all the features that your team would need.
4. Slack
Another online collaboration tool that makes team communication far way too easy. Unlike email, conversations in Slack are easy to follow, with the ability to make calls, share files, and even connect with other apps.
Slack allows teams to send direct messages to each other as individuals as well as groups both in desktop and mobile versions. Not only that, but the tool also lets you organize conversations into various channels for specific initiatives or projects.
As you know, teamwork can actually be hard, messy, and complicated but you can put all of those to bed with Slack, a place where you get all work done together. It integrates with other services such as Google Drive, Google Hangouts, Trello, and some other online communication platforms.
You can use Slack for free but with limited features. The pricing plan starts from $6.67 per month and can reach up to $12.50 per month.
Online Documentation Tools
5. Google Docs
One of the best online collaboration tools for online documentation, Google Docs allows you to write, edit, and collaborate wherever you are. It is probably the most famous documentation tool out there, which brings your documents to life with smart editing and styling tools o help you easily format text and paragraphs.
Interestingly, Docs allows multiple users to edit the same file at the same time, leave comments, and see changes made by every participant. To make your documentation much easier for you, Docs is designed in such a way that you can choose from a wide variety of resumes, reports, and other pre-made documents.
Google Docs equally allows you to access, create, and edit your documents wherever you go with any device, even when there’s no connection. You can as well convert Microsoft Word files to Google Docs and vice versa.
Docs is totally free to use, but you can upgrade to a professional office suite for $6 per user per month.
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6. Bit.ai
Bit.ai is one of the world’s most powerful workplace and document collaboration platforms built for teams and individuals to create, collaborate, and organize all your work in one place from anywhere around the globe. It allows you to create fast dynamic notes, documents, projects, training guides, client portals, etc. so as to integrate across other tools, you work with.
The documentation software allows you to invite team members, contractors, partners, and clients to collaborate in real-time and work together effectively. Bit makes sure that your work is organized by creating workspaces around projects, teams, clients, and more.
Furthermore, your documents and projects can be moved to different workspaces allowing your teams to share and store knowledge without complicated sharing permission levels easily. Moreover, Bit combines an endless number of tools to simplify your work and collaboration life. Indeed, it’s an all-in-one document collaboration platform that you can’t miss out on.
Bit.ai is free to use, but you can upgrade to paid plans to leverage its best features. Pricing starts from $8 per member per month and can reach up to $15 per member per month, billed annually.
Organizational Tools
7. Pocket
Save content from everywhere with Pocket. Simply put knowledge in your pocket by saving articles, videos, and stories from any publication, page, or app. Pocket is a great organizational tool as it allows you to curate your own space filled with everything you would wish to learn. It lets you read or listen to materials without any distraction on any device, even offline.
You can use Pocket for free, but it offers more flexibility in features when you go premium. With a Premium Pocket package, you can build a permanent library of everything you’ve saved. Also, you can organize your saved items in Pocket with tags so that you can easily search and find them anytime you need them.
With Pocket premium, you would experience a beautiful and ad-free reading environment, which gives your mind the peace and quietness it deserves.
Pocket annual membership starts at £35.99, while the monthly membership is billed at £3.95 monthly. You should start saving to your pocket now.
8. Evertone
This is one of the best online collaboration tools designed for note-taking, organizing, task management, and archiving. Evernote helps to keep you and your team’s best ideas always with you and in sync. It is the home for everything you need to remember, and everything you want to achieve.
With the Evernote collaboration tool, you can never lose track of your tasks and deadlines. It also helps you to capture ideas and inspiration in notes, voice, and pictures.
Evernote’s other unique features include web clipper (a save button for web), multi-device synchronization, document scanning, PDF and document search feature, and so on. Get started by creating your free account and choose the plan that fits your needs. Then type notes, add attachments, clip web pages, or record memos – all in one place.
Finally, organize your notes the way that you like and use notebooks, tags, or Evernote’s powerful search feature to find everything you need quickly.
Evernote offers a free trial, but your projects and day-to-day tasks run more smoothly with Evernote Premium. Pricing starts from $1.99 per month.
Online File Sharing Collaboration Tools
9. Dropbox
Dropbox is one of the best online collaboration tools for file syncing and sharing. The file-sharing platform helps you bring all of your team’s content together while you use the tools you love. What’s more interesting about this tool is that it offers the users the ability to stay organized, focused, and in sync with their teams.
Its key features include the capability of sharing files and folders with others in order to collaborate, you can send file links via email or chat messages and access your documents easily from anywhere on any device.
Dropbox is a smart and seamless way to optimize your existing workflow by bringing your files and cloud content together so that your PowerPoints can live next to your Google Docs, Trello boards, and other tools your team wants to use.
For your business needs, Dropbox pricing starts at $12.50 per user per month and can reach up to $20 per user per month; all billed annually.
10. Box
Box is a cloud-based file-sharing software that helps you to create, edit, review, and share documents from anywhere in real-time. The tool offers secure file sharing for teams with their end-to-end data protection.
With Box, you can get everyone from teammates to customers to partners and vendors on the same page with one place to work together easily on your most important content. File sharing becomes easier when you share it with peace of mind, which is what Box offers you.
The platform also makes your work easy for you by allowing you to automate the repeatable workflows that are key to your business, such as HR onboarding and contract and digital-asset management. Box also complies with data retention and regulatory policies and easily integrates with third-party apps such as Slack, G-Suite, and more.
Pricing starts at $5 per user per month and can reach up to $35 per user per month; all billed annually.
Summary
The truth is that teamwork is not easy to manage. Imagine having different teams scattered in different parts of the globe; the question will be how do you collaborate with your remote workers frequently and conveniently? That question is what we have put together the answers for you in this article in the form of the best online collaboration tools. They help you stay organized and collaborate easily with their unique features.
There are plenty of tools in the market today and as a result, making a choice can be very difficult for you and your business. However, with this our list, we’ve made that decision a light one for you. Just search through our number of tools in this article and choose the ones that will serve your business needs. It’s not a must that you will have to choose from this list, but there is a greater chance you will enjoy success with them when you do.
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