Through the wonders of the Internet and cloud computing, an increasing number of remote teams are quietly changing the way the world works and lives from their ersatz offices in cafés, co-working spaces, and living rooms.
Working remotely or hybrid is no longer a luxury but rather an everyday reality for teams from all industries. Statistics show that 70% of global workers are working remotely at least once per week, and this number is likely to only grow over time.
The composition of creative teams is also changing drastically, and now you have more opportunities than ever to work with talented individuals from all over the world.
While many businesses are taking advantage of remote working, several productivity issues can get in the way of collaborative teams maximizing progress.
Luckily, with all the team productivity apps available nowadays, you can quickly transform how your teams work together and get things done.
Team productivity tools can help boost your team’s productivity by streamlining communication and online collaboration.
This article will explore the six best team productivity applications available today that can help you in many aspects, from note-taking to time tracking and project management.
We’ll review these seven tools and their key features, pricing, and customer ratings on different platforms like G2 and Capttera to help you decide which productivity app is suitable for your team.
What are productivity tools?
Productivity tools help individuals and business teams work faster and more effectively while making project management easier for business leaders. Office productivity tools feature the latest options, collaborate between your entire team members, and reduce bottlenecks by simplifying and automating routine tasks. Increasing efficiency is one of the most crucial goals when working and these tools help you do exactly that.
After identifying your needs and goals, you should decide which tool will be the most useful for your teams.
Why Do You Need Productivity Tools?
These tools can assist businesses in various ways, from scheduling daily tasks to CRM systems or cloud-based collaboration tools like monday.com to make sure everyone involved in a project is on the same page.
Here are a few more reasons why you should consider implementing horizontal productivity tools in your business:
- They enhance your data security
- They make it easy for teams to collaborate
- They’re customizable to fit your team’s ideal workflows
- They unify information across apps by offering seamless integration
1- monday.com
monday.com is one of the best project management software on our list that can boost your team’s productivity and change how they collaborate significantly.
Featuring intuitive dashboards with hundreds of customizable templates, this task management software shows project cycles, estimates, prioritize, and resources based on due dates.
Why monday.com?
With monday, you can manage projects using multiple views, including the Kaban dashboard. Similarly, you can create tasks, group them, assign them, and add due dates. Using labels such as “to do,” “working on it,” “stuck,” and “done,” the entire team members can describe the status of tasks.
monday.com also has several other advanced features that can help your teams perform better such as:
- Progress tracking
- Weekly task loads
- Easy file sharing
- Smooth automation features
- Real-time Dashboards
- Easy integration with other apps
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 Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“I appreciate the automation and the fact that we can do everything from gathering feedback and displaying it in a chart to assigning automated project assignments. It’s been a great help in keeping our teams focused on what they’re strong at while staying on target. The capacity to collaborate with the entire team members in numerous ways and conveniently track project progress. It’s convenient to be able to add an informal checklist to a pulse or subpulse for further job management.”
“I honestly struggle to come up with anything important that I actively dislike about Monday.com. There are a few minor annoyances, such as that archived items are hard to find and search, and that there’s (so far) no built-in synchronization with Google Contacts. However, overall we are very satisfied customers!”
monday.com Pricing
Individual plan: $0 Free Forever (Up to 2 seats)
Basic plan: $6 per seat / per month (Total $18 /month billed annually)
Standard plan: $10 per seat / per month (Total $30 / month billed annually)
Pro plan: $22 per seat / per month (Total $66 / month billed annually)
Enterprise plan: To get the detailed price for all enterprise-level features, get in touch with sales.
G2 Rating: 4.7
2- GetResponse
Saving you tons of time by supporting your sales funnel with automations and increasing revenue, GetResponse is a great marketing tool that you could use to your advantage when it comes to team efficiency.
Why GetResponse?
‘Cause it promises many things that you could benefit from in the name of marketing, especially marketing teams.
With GetResponse as your all-in-one marketing software, you can:
- take your email marketing service to the next level by making use of features like email creator, autoresponders, email analytics, bulk emails, transactional emails, and list management
- build an online place to promote your own business via website builder with the help of features like AI-powered creator, predesigned templates, drag-and-drop editor, forms and popups, and domain management
- automate your workflow, thanks to tags and scores, automation flows, abandoned cart emails, website visitor tracking, and product recommendations
- hold webinars to attract your target audience by using screen sharing, call-to-action button, on-demand webinars, whiteboard, and polls and surveys
- make use of paid ads that call for social media integrations, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Google—all provided by GetResponse
- create landing pages that generate revenue, thanks to Facebook Pixel, signup forms, popups, countdown timer, and e-commerce tools
- be in constant contact with your audience to improve user experience by utilizing live chat that includes customization tools, chat availability, visitor capture forms, chat notifications, and chat analytics
- send automatic notifications to your visitors and keep track of the rates easily via custom prompts, unlimited notifications, web push analytics, and automated notifications
- get into SMS marketing and automate the whole process by using SMS editor, URL shortener, and SMS reports
GetResponse Reviews
Pros:
“I’ve been a Get Response customer for over a year, possibly longer, and I originally enjoyed its features. When they announced a new website builder, this piqued my interest more due to my plans to create two websites. If I had to give positives, they have a lot of useful resources, although accessing them can be frustrating as they sign you out whenever you go into the Resources library. That said, you can add Get Response lead magnets to your funnels when you start out.“
Cons:
“When first starting there is a lot of different terminology that I had to remember and understand. After that it was much better😊”
GetResponse Pricing
- Free plan: $0 (up to 500 contacts)
- Email marketing plan: $15.58/month when billed annually (up to 1,000 contacts)
- Marketing Automation plan: $48.38/month when billed annually (up to 1,000 contacts)
- Ecommerce Marketing plan: $97.58/month when billed annually (up to 1,000 contacts)
- Max plan: For this plan, please contact sales.
*All the plans above include a 30-day-long free trial, making it possible to try them out before committing to an annual purchase.
**The pricing structure above is based on 1,000 contacts only. GetResponse’s pricing plans alter according to the number of contacts you have—the more contacts you have, the more expensive the pricing plan gets.
G2 Rating: 4.2
3- Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a robust team performance management and productivity tracking tool on our list that can be used by all-size businesses to increase productivity across the organization.
Why Time Doctor?
Using this time tracking tool, managers can find out where their teams excel and where they need assistance, allowing them to improve their overall performance.
Time Doctor also generates a wide range of real-time detailed reports, such as attendance, timelines, and activity summaries.
Additionally, Time Doctor offers easy integration with some of the most popular task management platforms available today.
Let’s look at a few of Time Doctor’s main features:
- Track time
- Team performance reports
- Hours Tracked Report
- Timeline detailed reports
- Projects & Tasks Report
Time Doctor Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“The screen recording feature. It allows for the ability to see group by group details, as well as down to the singular level of each employee. ALSO, I love how easy it is to deploy, we have our IT department click on a saved link, which launches the download in the background, boom done.”
“There are times where the response time to reports may cause errors and you have to reload, otherwise not large enough of an issue or occurring frequently enough to cause concern.”
Time Doctor Pricing
Basic plan: $7 / month / 1 User
Standard plan: $7 / month / 1 User
Premium plan: $7 / month / 1 User bf
G2 Rating: 4.4
4- Todoist
Todoist is a popular to-do list app with a simple interface that lets you manage tasks across multiple projects to increase productivity.
This software will allow each team member to organize, plan, and collaborate on different tasks and projects.
Why Todoist?
Todoist offers advanced features like task views to view all the essential details about a task, including task title, due date, and subtasks.
Furthermore, you can access the platform since it supports Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.
Todoist also offers a recurring due dates feature that will help you remember deadlines.
The following are some additional key features of Todoist:
- Real-time notifications
- Seamless third-party integration
- Detailed task record and history
- Easy task tracking with a productivity graph
Todoist Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“The application gives you heaps of ways of cutting up your lineup for the day, for example, top choices, different need levels and lables, the association, variety coding, names/tabs, arranging, and review insight into this application all are solid highlights. The plan is spotless and clear, and every little thing about it is comparably straightforward.”
“There are some features that are lacking such as inability to add details to your tasks, limited entries and even some basic features such as reminders are not available in the free version.”
Todoist Pricing
Free plan: $0 for starters with 5 active projects
Pro plan: $3 for power users
Business plan: $5 for teams
G2 Rating: 4.4
5- Evernote
Evernote is a note-taking app that helps your organization take notes digitally – and syncs them across all your devices. You can use this app as a digital filing cabinet to organize all your notes, such as recipes, work plans, or daily diaries.
Using Evernote, your team members can access, edit, upload, and share meeting notes and files from any device – even while they’re offline.
Why Evernote?
Aside from taking notes, Evernote allows you to create to-do lists, add images, scan documents with your camera, and take handwritten notes.
The visual bulletin board feature allows you to filter out irrelevant information and focus on the things that are most important.
Each team member is able to sync themselves to the current situation and manage tasks easily while increasing productivity.
The following are some of Evernote’s key features:
- Multi-device note synchronization.
- Top-tier organizational system.
- Powerful advanced search.
- Comprehensive formatting.
- Collaboration tool for productive teams.
Evernote Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“ I like that my notes are available on multiple platforms, and that’s what first attracted me. I access it on my phone, work computer and home laptop. I also like the notebook/folder structure and tagging opportunities. I use the Stacks to separate work from personal notes, and then in each stack I have additional folder structures. It took a while to figure out my system, but once I did, it worked well.”
“The biggest downside might be the cost, which is relatively expensive compared to other collaboration/organization/project management tools.”
Evernote Pricing
Basic plan: Free with limited access and storage
Personal plan: $7.99/month
Professional plan: $10.99/month
G2 Rating: 4.4
6- Zapier
Zapier is another excellent tool on our list that helps you automate repetitive tasks and workflows by connecting the apps and services you use. As a result, you can automate certain tasks without having to construct these integrations yourself.
Zapier’s “zaps” allow teams to set triggers and complete routine tasks automatically, so you can focus on getting work done. Regardless of where you are or which team you are on, you can automatically access any data you need in the app.
Why Zapier?
Zapier allows you to create an application within the app to make the process more efficient. Zapier also enables developers to create a custom app based on the user’s needs and automates the workflow if the feature is not included in prebuilt apps.
With Zapier, you can connect thousands of apps to create customized automated workflows. You can integrate with web apps such as Facebook Lead Ads, Slack, QuickBooks, Google Sheets, Google Docs, & many more!.
Here are some of the best features you can find using Zapier:
- Access controls and permissions
- Third-party app integration
- Custom automations
- Compliance management
- Multi-Step Zaps
- Search Action
Zapier Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“With Zapier in your solution set, no knowledge of code or programming languages is required to automate work across a broad array of applications and services. It’s easy to use, impressively reliable, cost-effective (especially when compared to adding headcount or hiring out custom development), and on the rare occasion it’s needed, support is both responsive and genuinely helpful.”
“When you have to repeat workflows with several steps over and over, costs go up quickly and in some cases, the solution is no longer cost-effective.”
Zapier Pricing
Free plan: $0 per month with 100 tasks
Starter plan: $19.99 USD with 750 tasks
Professional plan: $49 USD with 2K tasks
Team plan: $299 USD with 50K tasks
Company plan: $599 USD with 100K tasks
G2 Rating: 4.5
7- Slack
Slack is a workplace communication tool on our list that connects users to the people and tools they use every day, regardless of where they are or what they do.
Slack boosts productivity by making communication as easy as possible for your team.
You can organize your team’s communication into a project, department, or office location channel.
As a result, users can easily follow the topics they’re interested in. In addition, public channels allow everyone on the team to see what the designers are working on, sales to know the product team’s roadmap, and new hires to get up to speed without having their email inboxes overflowing.
You can also benefit from the following Slack features:
- Access controls/permissions
- Activity tracking
- Calendar management
- Collaboration tools
- Commenting and notes
- Real-time synchronization
- Document management
Why Slack?
With Slack, businesses can integrate the countless tools and services they already use and centralize notifications, files, and data from hundreds of apps.
With this, you won’t need to look through emails for a follow-up, switch between tabs or dashboards constantly, or juggle numerous tools, each with its login.
By providing information and context needed to make effective decisions quickly, Slack helps teams work smarter and more productively.
With Slack, everything is automatically indexed and archived so that companies can create a comprehensive knowledge base with no effort.
Slack Pros & Cons
Pros:
Cons:
“Alerting notifications from ChurnZero to Slack; huge win for CSMs to receive high-risk Alerts within dedicated Slack channels. Compared to other CS platforms, this capability offers extremely effective UI and easy enablement.”
“If you have a large community then it might get hard to handle it on slack even though slack provides some bot support to tackle this situation but it is not an easy task to set up a bot for your channels. Moreover, every time you make a workspace on the desktop version it will redirect to the browser and then you will do work on the web, these all things should be integrated into the app only.”
Slack Pricing
G2 Rating: 4.5
Bring Your Team Together with the Best Productivity Tools
Communication is at the heart of any business, and that’s why it comes as no surprise to discover that customer service, project management, and team collaboration tools are among the most popular and valuable apps for businesses in 2023.
The key with productivity apps is to ensure you’re using them correctly. Start by assessing your team’s efficiency, where bottlenecks occur, and what can be improved.
Whether you need tools to avoid distractions, collaborate on projects, automate repetitive tasks or coordinate your team’s meetings, you will surely find the right tools for your team in this list.
Once you have selected the right tool for you, consider how you will use it so that it enhances your productivity rather than distracts from it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 5 most commonly used productivity tools?
Here are the most commonly used productivity tools for your workflow:
1- Monday.com
2- GetResponse
3- Evernote
4- Zapier
5- Slack
