If you’re looking to grow and scale your business quickly, you’re in the right place. That’s because here at Gun, we help companies of all sizes – from Fortune 500s to start-ups – hire top-rated tech talent in days.
But that’s not all.
When running a business, we know that having the right software makes all the difference. But with so many tools out there, how do you pick the right ones to scale your company?
In this post, we’re going to help you answer how to scale your business quickly by giving you 29 software tools. These tools range from project management and marketing, all the way through to operations and accounting.
Let’s go!
Productivity software and tools to scale your online business
Time management
Time management tools help you keep track of your time spent throughout the day. This can help you understand how profitable certain projects are. After all, time is money when it comes to business growth.
#1: Clockify
According to Clockify, only 10% of people say they feel “in control” of how they spend their workday. But focusing for a long period of time on a single task can be hugely advantageous.
This is where Clockify steps in. Its range of tools help you identify how you spend your time, what you spend it on, and when you’re most likely to perform your best work.
Plans
Free: Free forever, no limits
Basic: $3.99 per person/month (billed annually)
Standard: $5.49 per person/month (billed annually)
Pro: $7.99 per person/month (billed annually)
Alternatives: RescueTime
Project management
Project management tools help you track your projects, assign tasks, and improve your productivity. Here at Gun, we rely on project management software tools to make sure our tasks are completed on time.
#2: Asana
Asana is an all-in-one productivity and project management tool that lets you keep your work in one place.
It lets you organize tasks, docs, goals – whatever you want really – and you can visualize your projects in a List, Board, Calendar, or even Gannt view. It’s highly customizable, easy to use, and features like “assign tasks” mean collaborating with your team is a doddle.
We use Asana all day, everyday at Gun!
Plans
Personal: Free
Starter: $10.99 per person/month (billed annually)
Advanced: $24.99 per person/month (billed annually)
Enterprise: Contact Sales
Enterprise+: Contact Sales
Alternatives: Trello, Monday.com, Clickup
Communication software and tools to grow and scale your business
Team messaging
Team messaging software is now the primary means of communication for most businesses. These tools let you send and receive information, ideas, and files in real-time, and you can DM members of your team without having to hop on a call.
This form of messaging provides instant access to information that email cannot. I think you’ll also agree that GIFs are way cooler when they’re not sent as attachments.
#3: Slack
Slack is one of the world’s most popular group communication tools, and we’re massive fans of it at Gun. We have a bunch of different communication channels, ranging from #afk-alerts to #random, and our executive team can post company-wide announcements that everyone sees without having to send emails.
We also have a branded Slack workspace for our developer community. Here, our community can message our product team directly without having to hop over to email, which saves a lot of time on both sides.
This workspace also means we’re held to account. When we say we’re going to do something, you can bet your bottom dollar that our community will let us know if we don’t!
Plans
Pro: $7.25 per person/month (billed annually)
Business+: $12.50 per person/month (billed annually)
Enterprise: Contact Sales
Alternatives: Microsoft Teams, Discord, ClickUp
Productivity software for to grow and scale your business
Process automation
Process automation tools help you execute the recurring processes within a common or customized workflow. Even the most complex cross-functional and repetitive processes — like employee onboarding and scheduling — can be automated thanks to these tools.
#4: Zapier
Zapier, pronounced like “happier”, is one of the most popular process automation tools for busy teams. It’s basically the glue that connects more than 1,500 of your favorite business apps so that you can focus on your most important work.
How does it do this?
Through APIs, Zapier automatically moves necessary information between applications with a central command, meaning you can avoid wasting time and focus on the important work in your business.
Plans
Free: Free
Starter: $19.99/month (billed annually)
Professional: $49/month (billed annually)
Team: $69/month (billed annually)
Company: Contact Sales
#5: Scribe
Scribe is an SOP generator that documents your processes for you. In other words, you can turn any workflow into a step-by-step guide, complete with text and annotated screenshots.
It’s easy to edit, share, and embed in any knowledge base, and with Pages, you can add Scribes with text, video, and more into visual process docs.
This tool is bound to boost your productivity and save you hours upskilling teammates.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: $23 per person/month
Enterprise: Schedule Demo
Calendar tools for time-management and scheduling
#6: Calendly
With Calendly, you don’t have the awkward back-and-forth of emails to schedule calls. You can also manage other people’s access to your time.
It works with existing Google, Outlook, Office 365, and iCloud calendars and automates tasks with Salesforce and Zapier. You can also block out periods where you want to engage in deep work, and automatically block half an hour before and after an existing call. This gives you time to recover before the next round.
You’ve got to love these time-saving tools.
Plans
Free: Free forever
Standard: $10 per person/month
Teams: $16 per person/month
Enterprise: Contact Sales
#7: Doodle
Similar to Calendly, Doodle lets you book business meetings fast. You can quickly schedule 1:1s with outside parties without guessing or inquiring about availability. What’s more, a first-come, first-served open block for appointments lets guests respond to your changing availability without you having to constantly update them.
Scale your business without having to worry about scheduling calls ever again.
Plans
Free: Free forever
Pro: $6.95 per person/month (billed annually)
Team: $8.95 per person/month (billed annually)
Enterprise: Contact Sales
Video conferencing
Video conferencing tools give you the flexibility of communicating face-to-face from just about anywhere—the home, the office, or a job site—across all devices.
The right tools integrate screen-sharing, screen-recording, and video streaming, meaning you have powerful tools to conduct professional virtual meetings.
#8: Zoom
You know Zoom. We all had to do those quizzes at home during the Pandemic, am I right? This video conferencing took the world by storm and has since cemented its spot as one of the most popular video conferencing apps on the market.
Its free plan lets you host unlimited 1:1 meetings or group meetings of up to 100 participants with a 40-minute limit, and includes custom meeting IDs and screen-sharing capabilities in HD.
Plans
Basic: Free
Pro: $15.99 per person/month
Business: $21.99 per person/month
Business Plus: $26.99 per person/month
Enterprise: Contact Sales
Alternatives: Flock, Google Meet
File and document manager
Data management and file-sharing systems are essential for scaling your business. File sharing software backs up all of your important documents in the cloud and syncs them across your devices—all while keeping a record of relevant and data accessible by your entire company.
#9: Google Drive
Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud-based file management and sharing softwares, and you probably use it all the time already.
You can create, store, and share all types of files, from documents to slide presentations to spreadsheets to images, and edit them collectively as a team in real-time. Google Drive even lets you sync your files across all your devices and share them publicly or privately with external stakeholders.
Plans
Personal: Free, 15GB
Business Standard: $12 per person/month, 2TB
Google One: $2 per month, 100GB; $3 per month, 200GB; $10 per month, 2TB
#10: Dropbox
Dropbox pioneered the idea of cloud file sharing and it’s now known for its superfast sync speeds and unique file types often used by developers and designers. It’s also best-in-class for user experience and a plethora of add-ons like watermarking, tiered-admin roles, and file recovery.
These features give Dropbox the edge for product development and creative teams.
Plans
Individual Plus: $9.99 per month
Individual Essentials: $18 per month
Business: $20 per person/month
Business Plus: $26 per person/month
Note-taking apps
Note-taking tools ensure everyone on your team is fully engaged and on the same page—literally.
Digital note-taking tools integrate across productivity platforms and are a great way to keep all relevant information together and accessible. Attach notes to a message or email, or convert them into tasks or to-dos.
#11: Todoist
Todoist organizes all of your projects and makes sure they’re accounted for. This gives you a clear overview of your workday and your schedule, and will help you prioritize your projects so you’ll always know what to work on next.
Never lose track of an important task or to-do again.
Plans
Beginner: Free
Pro: $4 per person/month (billed annually)
Business: $6 per person/month (billed annually)
#12: Notion
As it claims on its homepage, Notion is a workspace to write, organize, and collaborate. And after buying automate.io in September 2021, it’s going ham on AI.
Notion is an insanely powerful tool that does just about anything. You can think of it like a bunch of building blocks. If you want to use Notion to build a website, you can. If you want to turn it into a CRM, you can.
The only limitation is your imagination.
Plans
Free: Free forever
Plus: $8 per person/month (billed annually)
Business: $15 per person/month (billed annually)
Enterprise: Contact Sales
Marketing software and tools to grow and scale your business
CRM apps
Customer relationship management (CRM) software and tools manage all of your company’s touchpoints with existing and potential customers—and so much more. A complete CRM solution can help your company stay connected to its goals that drive profitability.
#13: HubSpot
Hubspot’s CRM software brings marketing, sales, and customer service tools together under one roof with popular features like lead generation, analytics, and automation.
It puts everything you need to know into a central hub for stakeholders to access. For example, this means you can run a full-blown inbound marketing campaign and share insights on revenue, traffic, and prospecting.
The basic version is free forever, but you can upgrade for advanced features as you scale.
Plans
Basic: Free, upgrade as needed
#14: Zoho
Zoho CRM is another popular CRM solution to help you scale your business that brings companies and customers together via one integrated platform. This gives marketing, sales, commerce, and customer service an intuitive lens into every customer.
So build pipelines and help sales acquire more leads with marketing automation tools and omnichannel workflows that streamline customer journeys at scale.
Plans
Basic: 15-day trial, then $12 per person/month
Social media marketing
Social media marketing software monitors, manages, and analyzes social interactions and automates post scheduling. Aggregate your social media feeds across multiple accounts and stream them via a single dashboard on a range of devices.
#15: Buffer
Buffer lets you build your social following and grow your brand by planning, scheduling, and publishing social media content across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram.
If you want to streamline your social media management, you can also explore browser extensions. These offer additional features for improving your online presence.
Plans
Free: Free forever
Essentials: 14-day trial, then $6 per month (billed annually)
Team: 14-day trial, then $12 per month (billed annually)
Agency: 14-day trial, then $120 per month
#16: SocialBee
SocialBee is a social media automation platform that helps you take a strategic approach to planning and scheduling content. It lets you build a content calendar, create posts using AI, publish across multiple social accounts, and analyze the performance of your content.
What’s more, you can manage your messages, mentions, and comments from SocialBee’s Engage Module.
Plans
Bootstrap: 14-day free trial, $24/month (billed annually)
Accelerate: 14-day free trial, $40/month (billed annually)
Pro: 14-day free trial, $82/month (billed annually)
Email marketing
Email marketing tools automate and schedule promotional campaigns for products and services. You can also use these tools to maintain relationships with customers and clients.
Email marketing supports a wide range of digital marketing initiatives and is a great way to supplement social media marketing and content marketing campaigns.
#17: Mailmodo
Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that helps you create and send app-like interactive emails to improve conversions. Mailmodo is backed by Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Y Combinator, and other popular investors.
With Mailmodo, you can send interactive forms, calendars, calculators, shopping carts, surveys, quizzes, and more inside the email. Unlike other email marketing services, your readers don’t have to open a website to book an appointment or complete a purchase; they can do all these straight from their inboxes. This reduces friction and improves email conversions.
Plans:
Mailmodo offers a 21-day free trial, and their paid plan starts at $39/month.
#18: Saleshandy
Saleshandy is an email software that helps sales teams send personalized but yet automated cold emails. The sales outreach process is made much easier and faster with automated follow-ups, helping sales teams close more deals.
Although this platform isn’t one of the big boys on the market, Saleshandy has thousands of positive customer reviews, and offers features like sender rotation, unified inbox, sequence score, prospect outcome, and more.
Plans:
Outreach Starter: 7-day free trial, $36 per month (billed annually)
Outreach Pro: 7-day free trial, $99 per month (billed annually)
Outreach Scale: 7-day free trial, $199 per month (billed annually)
Outreach Scale Plus: 7-day free trial, $299 per month (billed annually)
Agency Portal: 14-day free trial, starting at $149 per month
Account Management Services: Starting at $1,500 per month
#19: ConvertKit
Although mainly targeted at content creators, ConvertKit could still be a great choice for you if you’ve recently started building your email list. It offers a whole host of features as you’d expect, such as automation sequences and AB testing, and its Creator Network means other businesses can promote your email list.
It’s worth checking out.
Plans
Free: Up to 1,000 subscribers
Creator: Two months free, starts at $9/month
Creator Pro: Two months free, starts at $25/month
Design tools
From logos to websites to blog posts to email templates and social media pages – we all know that design can distinguish your brand from the competition. Whether you have a single graphic designer on your team or a full creative staff, modern digital design tools allow for varying levels of expertise and functionality.
#20: Canva
Canva is the OG of online design tools, and it’s still popular with millions of users today. From social media posts to presentations to videos, this tool does everything.
Best of all? You can be a bonehead at art like me and still make amazing designs.
Plans
Canva Free: Free forever
Canva Pro: 30-day free trial, $12.99/month
Canva for Teams: 30-day free trial, starting at $29.99/month for the first 5 people
Alternatives: Envato elements, Picsart, Dalle
Accounting software and tools for online businesses
Bookkeeping
Fun fact: “bookkeeping” is the only word in the English language that has three sets of double letters consecutive with one another.
ANYWAY, accounting tools help you scale your business by tracking income and expenses. Do this manually, though, and your bookkeeping creates a bottleneck at the end of the fiscal year.
Not so with bookkeeping software. Platforms like QuickBooks and FreshBooks let you create and maintain financial records throughout the year. This helps you monitor your financial records which in turn helps you avoid critical errors and future problems.
#21: Intuit QuickBooks
QuickBooks has been the holy grail of accounting software for some time, and we don’t think that’s changed.
Developed by Intuit, QuickBooks can help you scale your business by keeping on top of your finances, and this all-in-one accounting platform covers everything from money management, bill pay, and payroll functions.
Plans
Simple Start: 30-day free trial, $15/month (billed annually)
Essentials: 30-day free trial, $30/month (billed annually)
Plus: 30-day free trial, $45/month (billed annually)
Advanced: 30-day free trial, $100/month (billed annually)
#22: FreshBooks
FreshBooks is an all-in-one cloud accounting software for entrepreneurs and small business teams. Similar to QuickBooks, it automates accounting tasks like tracking expenses, invoicing, and vendor relationship management, and its award-winning customer service is supported by real humans.
Plans
Lite: 30-day free trial, $17/month
Plus: 30-day free trial, $30/month
Premium: 30-day free trial, $55/month
Select: Contact Sales
Invoicing
#23: Xero
Millions of customers use Xero as their accounting software. It’s easy for business owners to use and it’s built to scale. This cloud-based accounting software (available for both PC and Mac) is also a full-suite solution that doesn’t compromise functionality on a Mac or iPhone.
Plans
Starter: $29 per month
Standard: $46 per month
Premium: $62 per month
#24: Wave
Wave is award-winning accounting software designed for entrepreneurs and the majority of its tools are absolutely free (invoicing, payments, payroll, receipts, and more). However, collecting payments via credit card or running payroll comes with a price tag.
One of Wave’s best feature is that it lets you fully brand, customize, and personalize invoices with advanced features like recurring billing and automatic payments.
Plans
Basic: Free
Payments
Good payments software is the first and last line of defense when it comes to processing the money going in and going out of your business. Professional payments tools make it extremely easy to issue and collect all forms of payments and manage deductions.
#25: PayPal
PayPal for business lets you accept all major forms of payment. You can start accepting credit cards and PayPal payments or send invoices online, and you can also take payments from your mobile devices.
Simply add the PayPal button to your website and give your customers a fast, safer way to pay.
Plans
Standard: $0 per month; 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction
Pro: $35 per month; 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction
#26: Stripe
Stripe powers millions of businesses in more than 100 countries and across nearly every industry. It can help you collect payments via card, ACH, or other popular payment methods instantly.
Stripe provides billing software for everything from per-seat pricing to metered billing out of the box. It also gives you the ability to set custom pricing, automate the collection process, and sync billing and payment data with your other accounting software and tools.
Plans
Payments: $0 per month; 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction
Operations software and tools to grow and scale your business quickly
Customer service
Customer support software is a key business tool that allows you to manage customer service requests and track customer engagement using real-time reporting and response times.
Most modern customer support software platforms incorporate a ticket system or a chatbot that uses process automation workflows to streamline communication and problem-solving.
#27: Zendesk
Zendesk is actually a CRM software for support, sales, and customer engagement that’s designed for businesses – both online and offline – to create better customer relationships. You can think of it as a CRM for customer support.
You get an all-in-one help desk that generates insightful data on engagement, which will help you keep customers happy and conversations flowing.
Plans
Essential: $5 per person/month
Team: $19 per person/month
Professional: $49 per person/month
#28: Help Scout
Help Scout is an all-in-one support tool that’s designed to help you engage with your customers. The platform offers multi-channel support with email and chat, and additional self-service tools that compile customer data to ensure a great customer lifecycle experience.
Plans
Standard: $20 per person/month
Plus: $40 per person/month
Pro: $65 per person/month
Contract management
Legal documents like contracts and formal business filings require authorized signatures. You can think of contract management software as a digital filing cabinet for all the important documents that contain highly sensitive information.
#29: DocuSign
Whether you’re approving a purchase, closing a sale, or signing an agreement, DocuSign helps you electronically sign agreements from anywhere. You can choose from more than a dozen applications and more than 350 different integrations, covering the entire agreement process—from preparing to signing, acting on, managing agreements, and more.
Plans
Personal: $10 per person/month
Standard: $25 per person/month
Business Pro: $40 per person/month
Enhanced Plans: Contact Sales
Alternatives; HelloSign, SimplyAgree
And breatheeee; we made it through the 29 software tools to grow and scale your business quickly!
Are you looking for support on hiring talented developers? We can help. Here at Gun, we’ve helped companies of all sizes – from Fortune 500s to startups – hire top-rated tech talent in days.
Contact us today to find out more!
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