Google Workspace (formerly Gsuite)
Google workspaces is a one stop shop for all your working tools for everyone in your startup. From emails to storage google covers it all. It is the most economical and quickly accessible solution among all the services available out there. Google workspace not only provides tools but also gives you an admin security and management dashboard, through which you can control all the security and workflow mechanisms of the company. Google workspace offers the following tools:
- Gmail
- Meet
- Chat
- Calendar
- Drive
- Docs
- Sheets
- Slides
- Forms
- Sites
- Currents
- Keep
- Apps Script
- Cloud Search
- Admin
- Endpoint
- Vault
- Work Insights
Although all these services are available the pricing is very economical.
My rating: 4.5/5
Slack
Slack is one of the most popular chat apps among startups. Not only do they offer free services, they also have some great integrations with external apps and bots. You can find all the possible integrations for apps in the slack marketplace. You can find the slack pricing here.
My rating: 4.5/5
Trello, Asana or Monday.com
The next one is to have good project management too for all the tasks in your startup. If you are on a tight budget then the best way to go is to use Trello. Trello offers simple task management and is great to use among small teams. But if you have some budget but want it to be economical both Asana and Monday.com offer some great features. My personal favourite is Monday.com because they have amazing automation which will make your works way simpler in managing the tasks. As an add on Monday.com also offers a graphql based API to operate the tool.
You can find the pricing of Trello, Asana and Monday.com here.
My rating:
- Trello: 4/5
- Asana: 4.25/5
- Monday.com: 4.5/5
Jira
While the above project management tools are good for managing the tasks for any non-software projects, Jira is the best for managing any software project. The tool has been used for a long time in the technology industry among agile teams and is like no other. Jira offers great integrations and also a perfect bug and task tracking system. It is also economical and integrates well with the code repository Bitbucket. If your startup is a technology startup and uses Bitbucket, then Jira is a must use tool. Jira automatically tracks the pull requests and the branches merged for the respective tickets on the platform. You can find the pricing here.
My rating: 5/5
Canva
Canva is an online design tool to create media content. It allows you to design any type of media with amazing templates in perfect sizes and formats. Canva’s templates contain Facebook posts, Instagram posts, youtube covers, business cards, documents, print media, logos and many more. The variety of templates are just simply superb for content creators. It has a minimal design tool to edit and exports can be done in very high quality for any type of print. you can find the pricing here.
My rating: 4.75/5
Figma
Figma is one of the most sophisticated and free design tools available in the market. It is great for designers and product teams. It also has great community support and offers many apps and templates for free. Figma is very simple to use compared to other design tools like AdobeXD. It is also very economical and the pricing can be found here.
My rating: 4.5/5
Confluence
Confluence is a remote friendly team workspace. While there are many team collaboration workspace tools confluence is one of the best. It integrates perfectly with Jira, slack and many more. Confluence is an alternative for team wiki, where you can add all your documentations, descriptions and many more. I use it to create product descriptions, workflow plans, team onboarding or off boarding templates and to document our culture deck. It can be used for any purpose and can be attached well with any Atlassian tool accordingly. You can find the pricing here.
My rating: 4.25/5
Zoho Invoice
While Zoho Corporation offers many tools i.e CRM, billing and accounting software, marketing tools etc. Zoho invoice is the cheapest and the best for any new startup to raise invoices and store customer information for billing. It offers amazing flexibility with ready templates, automated billing reminder workflows and more. Zoho also has a mobile app that works perfectly and generates reports for an overview of the company’s expenses. Zoho is quite economical too. You can find the pricing here.
My rating: 5/5
Lucid Chart
The Lucid chart app is a sophisticated drawing tool to create flowcharts, user flows, UI flows, drawings and many more. It offers an amazing library of clipart that fits well with any type of chart drawings and is also simple to use. Lucid chart also supports team collaboration and workspace sharing, hence a perfect drawing tool among teams. You can find the pricing here.
My rating: 4/5
Mailgun
Unlike all the above tools Mailgun is a more technical one. It is a great bulk emailing software available in the market at the moment. They have a very powerful API integration with sophisticated features where you can track the user click-through rates and interactions. It also has an amazing dashboard with custom template design possibilities. They also provide a Mailjet email marketing product that can be used for newsletters and other marketing emails. You can find the pricing here.
My rating: 4.25/5