TL;DR
- Whether you have a small or large company, using additional software or tools for effective business management can boost productivity and company-wide growth.
- One of the key benefits of business management software is the opportunity to automate repetitive tasks to spend more time on work that actually matters.
- While most business management software offer team planning, multi-user platforms, custom dashboards, it is important to pick the software that suits your business objectives and budget.
Digital transformation is part of the business vocabulary whether you run a small business or head multiple businesses. The number of actions you must take and decisions you need to make increase as the company grows. It can be quite exhausting juggling all the different departments, tasks, clients, and meetings.
This is why it’s time to invest in business management software to increase productivity.
A complete business management software helps you stay on top of things and automates tasks that take too much time. Using the right software can scale your business faster by predicting risks, engaging with clients, and monitoring projects and employees.
You’ll find the top 7 software to help you make important business decisions with all-in-one solutions or feature-based tools. Let’s jump right in!
7 Best Tools for Effective Business Management in 2023
Here are the best seven tools you should look at for effective business management in 2023:
1- monday.com
2- HubSpot
3- Zoho One
4- Bitrix24
5- ProofHub
6- Scoro
7- StudioCloud
1- monday.com
Looking for all-in-one software? monday.com’s Work Management is here to save the day! Team productivity can come in all shapes and forms but equipping your employees with the best task and project management tool and streamlining their workflow ensures reaching your objectives.
monday.com‘s work management software allows you to see the full picture in perspective: Align your timeline with employees, track their progress on projects, use custom dashboards and reports to tweak your strategies, and more.
What is best about monday.com is that you don’t have to adapt to the software. It adapts to you. Based on your needs and requirements, you can customize your workflow and visualize it in 10+ ways to complete your goals.
The icing on the top: Their free plan is a perfect fit for small companies and includes the fundamentals to get you started with business management.
The project management software that will actually work for your team
Manage simple to complex projects and everything in between with monday.com
monday.com Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Monday.com has streamlined our entire process at our shop. From order to production to billing, everything is all in one place for our entire team. We could never see ourselves going back to the old paper work orders we used to use to track items. Being able to add notes to every pulse and being able to refer back to them has been the best thing we ever did for our business.”
“I wish the automations had better editing and organization tools. As automations are added it is hard to tract what the steps of each automation are and it is difficult and not intuitive to add additional steps.”
monday.com Pricing
- Individual: Free for up to 2 seats. Includes up to 1,000 items, and 500 MB of storage.
- Basic: €8 per month per user. Includes unlimited free viewers, unlimited boards, 200+ templates, 20+ column types, iOS and Android apps, creating a dashboard based on 1 board.
- Standard: The most popular tier of monday.com, it costs €10 per month per user. Includes timeline and Gantt views, automations (250 actions per month), integrations (250 actions per month), and creating a dashboard that combines 5 boards.
- Pro: €16 per month per user. Includes private boards, chart view, time tracking, formula column, automations and integrations of up to 25,000 actions per month, and creating a dashboard that combines 10 boards.
- Enterprise: For this plan, you need to contact monday.com’s sales team.
2- HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the biggest players in email marketing. However, they offer more than that. They also have a collection of engagement tools for marketing, sales, and customer service to oversee your business and employees.
You can manage your contact in a single database, create email workflows to keep the connection with your customers fresh, capture new leads, and build an entire website: All within a single platform! This makes collaboration and communication faster and more efficient, so you can focus on what really matters: your projects and customers.
And the best part of this software? Its customer relationship management functionality is free!
Whether you are a beginner looking at business management tools for the first time or an expert analyzing enterprise solutions for your company, there’s a little bit of everything for everyone at HubSpot. 👌🏻
HubSpot Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“I love having one place to customize the contact or company properties on the left-hand side—what is most important to me can be set and then consistently viewed. Customizing my tasks by queue has been the most helpful, in addition to customizing my notifications to alert me promptly for what I need to pay attention to. It’s a great tool for any and every sales development rep.”
“I wish there was a better way to visually organize the main activities on the contact/company pages, from email marketing, tasks, notes, etc. From a software standpoint, I’d like to see different tabs that could be grouped differently or even add the option to filter content by date. Having a search option within the company page might be a great tool to search for the activity you’re looking for.”
HubSpot Pricing
- HubSpot’s CRM tool is free up to 1 million contacts and there are no limits to customer and user data. For more advanced CRM functionalities, however, you need a paid plan as part of its premium Sales Hub products and the pricing starts at $45/month.
3- Zoho One
With Zoho One, you get an all-in-one business management software with a complete suite of applications and features. This business management software tool comes with multiple purchase options: You can buy individual apps, bundles, or the all-in-one complete suite, so you can pick and choose based on your business plan and specific needs.
As a complete business management software, Zoho One takes care of your separate tasks and transforms them into a single agile operation. This increases productivity across your business and facilitates project management.
Moreover, Zoho One includes a wide range of no-code, low-code, and developer tools to customize and improve your integrated platform, so you can reach your goals and make informed decisions to increase your profit.
Create a personal customer experience, automate repetitive tasks to spend more time on high value work, collect leads and close deals… This is all possible with Zoho One’s complete suite!
Have some questions before committing to an enterprise plan? No worries. You can schedule a free consultation meeting with Zoho One’s Concierge team and discuss how their options can fit into your goals.
Zoho One Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“We were already using Zoho for their sales IQ, so we know it’s a solid platform. I was impressed with the integration of our existing systems.
The ticketing system is excellent and allows a good degree of customization. There is also less time involved in going live as opposed to comparative systems offered by Engagebay or using power automation on Office.
The guys also have excellent tutorials available, which answered most of my questions, so I have not had to reach out to support (yet).”
“Ideally, I would like to have more access to standard scripts to use on DELUGE or more definitions readily accessible.
I also have some minor complaints about the visibility of the mandatory fields when creating a ticket.”
Zoho One Pricing
- All Employee Pricing: €22.5 per employee per month if billed annually. This pricing plan requires purchases for all employees on the payroll. Includes an all-in-one licensing model, centralized administrative control, and one invoice for your business.
- Flexible User Pricing: €56.25 per user per month if billed annually. Includes 40+ integrated business apps, enterprise-level features, and mobile, native apps, and extras.
Zoho One also offers a 30-day free trial and no card is required.
4- Bitrix24
Bitrix24 is attractive if you want a comprehensive suite of team collaboration, management, and communication tools that will take your customer management and business tasks to the next level. As one of the all-in-one business management software, Bitrix24 offers a complete task management and project monitoring tool for teams.
You can host it on your server or transfer the data from other systems easily and integrate it with your favorite apps. As a “virtual office,” you can host HD video calls and conferences, let employees keep track of their working hours on Bitrix24.
To generate more revenue and capture leads, Bitrix24 offers an internal social network where you can collaborate easily, and use marketing automation to engage with your prospects.
I’m sure you’re thinking that there must be a caveat for providing a comprehensive suite of features. No need to worry because Bitrix24 is free for use with unlimited user options and supports multiple languages!
Bitrix24 Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“Britix24 may replace traditional collaboration tools with a single platform, so everything works in favor of internal communication with the aid of Britix24. What I like best about this amazing software is its platform, which is beautiful and well-organized. It is very intuitive, and the customer support is excellent.”
“Despite the fact that it is a fairly straightforward platform, there are certain things that do not take a lot of learning time to grasp. The mobile app becomes too slow and takes a long time to open at times, document sharing isn’t always as useful as I’d like it to be, it takes some time to prioritize our tasks and subtasks, I don’t like their notification system because we constantly see the same notifications every time we log in, and the premium plans become very expensive over time.”
Bitrix24 Pricing
- Free: Includes 5 GB storage, HD video calls and chat, company workspace and knowledge base.
- Basic: $49/month for 5 users if billed annually. Includes manual task time tracking, Kanban boards, task dependencies, unlimited invoices, and Google Analytics for your website.
- Standard: $99/month for 50 users if billed annually. Includes recurring tasks, customizable templates with subtasks, company Google Drive, polls for collaboration, and employee task lists.
- Professional: $199/month for 100 users if billed annually. Includes knowledge base, CRM analytics, 500,000 catalog items for product catalogs, customer segmentation in CRM, Google Ads and Facebook ads audience segments, and unlimited websites.
- Enterprise: $399/month for 250 users if billed annually. Includes 3 TB storage, unlimited project management collaboration tool, employee work time, automated invoice payments and expense approval.
5- ProofHub
ProofHub is one the best business management software solutions in the market. As a cloud-based solution, ProofHub will be the perfect option for your business processes, if you want time management and project management software under one roof.
Thanks to its assigned user roles, online team meetings and chats, task delegation, tracking project history and progress, and secure file storage, ProofHub easily becomes the go-to solution for large teams that juggle multiple tasks.
On top of that, its user-friendly interface minimizes the learning curve, so you can get started on managing your everyday tasks, complex projects, hiring processes and more right off the bat!
Also, if you’re on a tight budget, ProofHub’s flat pricing for unlimited users can be really helpful.
ProofHub Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“The best part I like in ProofHub is that we can easily get all things on the single screen like announcements, tasks, agenda, project list, a logged time, events and milestones, and sticky notes. There are a lot of features they provide in low cost.”
“There should be an option to get detailed reporting for projects timesheet, and on time project creation, there should be an option to select project industry so it’s easy for project manager.”
ProofHub Pricing
- Essential: $45/month if billed annually. Includes 40 projects, unlimited users, 15 GB storage, and Gantt charts.
- Ultimate Control: $89/month if billed annually. Includes all the core features that come with the Essential plan. Plus, time tracking, custom roles, white labeling, workflows, assigning project managers, IP restrictions for security, priority support, and detailed activity logs to keep an eye on all the projects you’re working on.
6- Scoro
Scoro is another all-in-one solution for business management. Client management, expense tracking, project management, and task management work seamlessly within Scoro, so you don’t have to worry about finding relevant documents or updating your workflow across multiple platforms.
If efficiency is the key element for your business decisions, Scoro is the platform you need under your belt!
You can plan ahead and track your projects, manage quotes, invoices and contracts seamlessly, use time trackers and create bills to complete projects accurately, and manage all the teams working for you within a single platform.
Kanban boards the drag-and-drop planner help a lot to prioritize your work and leverage shared calendars to keep everyone on the same page.
What I find remarkable with Scoro is the opportunity to define individual capacity and assign roles based on actual availability, which increases productivity and keeps your employees happy. Paying per user per month can be a downside you must consider.
Scoro Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“With Scoro, you no longer need multiple software solutions to manage your projects and workflow. One of the things we like best about Scoro is that it can be customized to suit the specific needs of any organization. Another great feature is its command center which gives users an overview of all their tasks, performance statistics, and upcoming calendar events in a simple, easy-to-navigate interface.”
“One of the main cons of using Scoro is that it may be challenging to keep track of everything on your planner or to-do list. This is because the tool has limited display options. Another potential downside is that you must become familiar with all the available options and configurations before getting started.”
Scoro Pricing
- Essential: $26 per user per month if billed annually. Includes projects, calendars, a task list and a task board, quotes, invoices and receipts, dashboards, and financial reports in summary form.
- Standard: $37 per user per month if billed annually. Includes all the core features that come with the Essential plan. Plus, Gantt chart and dependencies, phases and milestones, time tracking, project templates, purchase orders, multiple currencies, and detailed financial reports.
- Pro: $63 per user per month if billed annually. Includes all the features in Standard. Plus, planners, project budget, timesheet and time locking, task matrix, sales pipeline and report, labor cost, late invoice reminders, and utilization report.
- Ultimate: You need to contact the sales team for pricing. Includes all the features in Pro. Plus, single sign-on, unlimited custom fields, budgets and forecasts, orders and contracts, customer portal, supplier report, and multi-account reporting.
Scoro also offers a 14-day free trial to see its features in action. You can also purchase its onboarding program to familiarize yourself with the platform.
7- StudioCloud
StudioCloud has all the tools you need: from marketing automation to bookkeeping for assessing financial health. This easy-to-use business management software tool is great for business owners to keep everything organized and makes the entire management feel like a breeze.
One of the advantages of working with StudioCloud is its features for building strong customer relationships and initiating new customer interactions with lead generation. Integrating customer-oriented solutions are important for establishing core business processes.
Covering a wide range of personalized details such as birthdays, client image, anniversaries, and customizable tags, StudioCloud go beyond saying they care about their customers. They show how much StudioCloud cares about them.
Other top features are project and task management, online booking for clients, customizable templates for your business plan, and time card tracking. Integration with big third-party applications like Google Calendar, ProSelect, QuickBooks, and MailChimp supports the digital transformation your business needs.
If you are a large business owner, however, StudioCloud might not be a great fit as it is not super intuitive.
StudioCloud Reviews
👍 Pros
👎 Cons
“StudioCloud is a great all in one investment, especially if you’re a small business owner. When I was building my private lesson studio, I used this program namely to keep track of scheduling, billing, and all my bookkeeping needs. Due to the fact that I was having to manage all of these roles, having an all-inclusive system that synced with my calendar and phone was appealing.”
“The user will have to be comfortable with some level of comfort setting up StudioCloud in terms of importing and exporting clients, etc but the tutorials make it relatively user friendly.”
StudioCloud Pricing
- Free: This starter version is only available on desktop and includes 1 user login, a limit of 300 clients, a limit of 300 sessions and invoices, and unlimited bookkeeping.
- Select an Add-on: $10 per each add-on per month. Includes 1 user login, cloud and desktop, unlimited computers and devices, free upgrades, customizable, technical support, unlimited clients, sessions, invoices and brands.
- PartnerBoost: $30 per month if billed annually. Includes 2+ user logins, all add-ons, free 1-hour one-on-one with an annual subscription, unlimited automated email reminders, lead generation, and templates/forms.
- EmployeeBoost: $60 per month if billed annually. Includes 3+ user logins, cloud and desktop, all PartnerBoost features, virtual employees, scheduling roles, time card tracking, commissions and sales reports.
Final Words
Business management tools offer a wide array of features and opportunities for your needs. Choosing the right tools for teams can be challenging, which is why I’ve gathered this list of potential options.
The software of your choice will streamline project management. While an all-in-one solution will keep everything in one place, a bundle of necessary tools can also be more suitable with their affordable pricing plans.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a business management software?
A business management software is a system or an application designed to help companies manage, automate, and support their business activities.
What is the best software to manage a small business?
monday.com’s free plan is great for a small business just starting to establish its goals, and workflows. With a wide array of templates, monday.com helps you discover the fundamentals of business management.
Which software is used for business?
All-in-one software, in addition to single feature tools or bundles, is used for business.
Which software is best for management?
The best management software depends on your needs, budget, and goals. Comparing options before making a decision can be helpful for heading into the right direction. You can consider the tools, features, pricing plans, and security when choosing the software for management.
What are the 3 types of software?
The three types of software are system software, application software, and utility software.
What are the 4 types of application software?
Enterprise software, database software, content access software, and information software are four types of application software.
What is the most useful business tool?
There is no one-size-fits-all answer for the most useful business tool. However, you can consider project management tools, customer relationship management (CRM), email marketing, and communication and collaboration tools for making practical business decisions.
What systems do small businesses need?
Small businesses need time tracking, project and task management, collaboration and customer relationship management systems to increase their revenue.
How much is QuickBooks for small businesses?
QuickBook’s Simple Start plan is the best for small businesses. It costs €8 per month if billed for at least 3 months. 30-day free trial option is also available.
