Starting a small business is hard work, requiring a lot of knowledge. You need to know the ins and outs of things like marketing, sales, accounting, and human resources. The secret to success lies in the ability to stay organized; this helps you manage your time, be more strategic, and collaborate with others more effectively.
In short, if you can keep all your ducks in a row, you’ll find yourself better positioned for growth than your competition. Luckily, there is a wide range of SaaS for small businesses available to help manage every aspect of your business easier than ever before. With just one application or platform, you can create documents, organize your calendar, and even run payroll—all from one central location. So, take the time to get familiar with each and every tool on this list—it’ll pay off handsomely in the long run.
1. Litmus
Litmus is an email marketing platform with a number of features to help you create and send professional-looking emails. It’s a great SaaS tool for small businesses that might not have the resources or time to build their in-house email builder.
The Litmus Email Designer allows you to choose from over 500 design templates and customize them with colors, fonts, images, etc. The service also allows you to schedule your emails so that they go out at the right time without having to worry about setting up multiple accounts or managing different settings across different devices.
2. Canva
Canva is a free tool that has been dubbed “the Photoshop of the internet.” That may be a little unfair, but Canva does bring a lot to the table. If you’re looking for a good graphic design platform to create social media posts and other content, infographics, posters, or presentations, then Canva is worth checking out.
The user interface is simple and easy to navigate, so it won’t take long before you get used to it. You can use different fonts and images from their library if needed, but we would recommend uploading your own so that you have full control over how the content looks in the end product.
Canva also has templates available, depending on the type of image/graphic design you need, making this tool even more versatile and easy for beginners who don’t know where to start when creating designs from scratch.
3. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a marketing automation tool that helps you create, send, and track email marketing campaigns. It allows you to create and send email newsletters, event invitations, and event RSVPs. You can also use the tool to monitor and communicate with your customers using social media channels like Facebook and Twitter.
The Core plan comes with 500 subscribers for $9.99/month. Additional features are offered at additional costs, such as analytics tools for tracking campaign performance as well as mobile apps that allow users to access their accounts on the go.
4. ConvertKit
ConvertKit is a tool for bloggers, podcasters, and small businesses. It helps you create landing pages, email automation, and forms to collect emails from your visitors.
ConvertKit has many great features like A/B testing and email templates that will help you grow your business. If you’re looking for an affordable and easy way to set up an email marketing strategy for your company, ConvertKit is the right choice.
5. Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service that offers users cloud storage, file synchronization, and personal cloud capabilities. Users can create a special folder on their computer, which Dropbox then synchronizes with its own servers and with other computers and devices that the user has authorized. Files placed in this folder are automatically uploaded to Dropbox’s servers, where they are encrypted and compressed. These files may then be accessed from any device linked to the user’s account.
The basic service is free, but you must pay for additional space if you need more than 2GB of storage.
6. Hello Bar
Hello Bar is a SaaS tool for small businesses that can be used to create popups and popunders. The tool allows you to gather leads, email addresses, and phone numbers. It also allows you to create landing pages and popup campaigns using the same platform.
Hello Bar’s Starter plan is free forever, while the Growth plan starts at $29 per month for unlimited popups and subscribers per month. However, the free plan will only work if your monthly views are under 5,000 or 60k yearly.
7. Hubstaff
As a small business owner, you likely have a lot on your plate. Time tracking and employee management can be stressful tasks. Thankfully, Hubstaff is here with the tools you need to keep track of your employees’ time and schedules so that you can focus on running your business.
The key features include:
- Time Tracking: Hubstaff allows businesses to monitor their employees’ work hours from anywhere through an easy-to-use web dashboard or mobile app.
- Employee Monitoring: Employees must be working while they clock in or out at each session—or else they won’t get paid for the time.
- Employee Scheduling: Supervisors can easily create customized schedules for workers based on projects or hourly pay rates.
- Employee Management: Managers have full access to reports that show exactly where their team members spend their time so they can see if there are any bottlenecks in workflow processes.
8. Intercom
Intercom is a customer communication platform that helps businesses understand their customers and deliver real-time messaging and automation.
Intercom allows you to connect with your customers effectively, which is important for small businesses. The tool lets you see who your customers are, what they’re doing on your website, where they live, and more. You can use this information to create targeted messages based on the specific needs of each individual user. For example, if a client has made three purchases but hasn’t enquired about any of them yet, it would be useful for you to send them an email asking how they’re finding their experience so far.
9. Google Apps for Businesses
Google Apps for Businesses is a suite of applications that includes Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, and Slides. These tools offer basic business functions like email and file sharing but can be easily integrated with other applications using Zapier or IFTTT.
Google Apps for Businesses also includes Hangouts, which allows team members to collaborate on documents or presentations in real-time.
10. Moz Pro
Moz Pro is a suite of tools for SEO professionals. It’s ideal for anyone who wants to improve their search engine presence and drive more traffic to their website, but it can also be used by small businesses as a way to keep track of and manage their content marketing efforts. Moz Pro has features that help you monitor competitors’ visibility in search results, create keyword lists based on what people in your industry are searching for on Google (and Bing), identify opportunities for link building from other websites, and generate monthly reports on site performance and more.
Moz Pro is used by small businesses all the way up to large enterprises like IBM, P&G, and others who want an integrated solution that makes managing multiple channels simple with one dashboard view into all elements of digital marketing performance at once.
11. PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a cloud-based document creation and collaboration platform. It’s a great SaaS for small businesses to create proposals, contracts, and other business documents. PandaDoc also allows you to easily create marketing collateral like brochures, flyers, and presentations that you can share with your customers.
PandaDoc offers an online editor (similar to Google Docs) where you can write your content and then publish it as a PDF or Word file. This makes it easier for multiple people in your organization to work on the same document at the same time without having to worry about keeping track of each other’s changes. You can also easily send emails from PandaDoc with embedded links that allow recipients to view or edit the original file directly within their browser window.
12. Pingdom Tools
Pingdom Tools is a website uptime monitoring tool that you can use to keep track of your website’s performance. It allows you to monitor your websites, servers, and APIs for downtime and identify the causes of problems.
You can use Pingdom Tools to:
- Monitor the availability of any website—web applications, e-commerce stores, and even social media accounts such as Facebook or Twitter—from anywhere on the globe with just one click.
- Generate reports from uptime data collected over time that illustrate how reliable your site has been over various periods of time (e.g., last week or this month).
- Get alerts when something goes wrong, so you know when there’s an issue before it gets out of control.
13. Slack
Slack is a messaging app for teams. It’s a tool for communication, collaboration, and productivity. Slack is also a great project management tool for software development teams and other groups of people who work together on projects.
Slack is made up of channels, which can be set as public or private, private chats (one-on-one messages), direct messages (private messages between two members), group conversations (up to 9 people), and 10 integrations, including Zendesk, Google Drive and Dropbox. Its free version includes all its basic features, but you’ll need the paid version if you want to use more advanced ones like the searchable history of past messages or live search across multiple channels.
14. Stripe
Stripe is a payment gateway for businesses and developers. It’s an easy-to-use platform that lets you accept payments online through a wide variety of processors, such as Visa, MasterCard, Apple Pay, and more. The Stripe API can be used to build any kind of ecommerce website or mobile app—from startups to Fortune 500 companies like Target and Twitter—and it integrates with most major accounting software systems such as Xero or QuickBooks Online.
15. Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey is survey software that allows you to create, publish, analyze and share your surveys online. It is a great tool for collecting feedback from customers.
Survey Monkey offers free plans for individuals or small businesses (1-5 users) and paid plans for larger organizations (5+ users).
16. Trello
Trello is a web-based tool that helps small business owners manage their projects and tasks. It’s free for use, which is always a plus for cash-strapped small businesses. The tool organizes projects into boards, cards, and lists; each can have its own labels, descriptions, and details. Trello also allows you to attach files inside the app, so it’s a great way to keep all your important documents in one place from start to finish your project or task.
17. Freshbooks
Cloud-based accounting software Freshbooks has been helping people manage their finances and track their time since 2003. It’s perfect for small businesses and freelancers alike, allowing you to invoice clients on the go.
The free version of Freshbooks offers the same features as its paid plan (minus advanced integrations), so if you don’t need those extra perks, it’s a great choice. You can also try out this tool before committing with a 14-day trial.
18. Wrike
Wrike is a project management software that helps you organize your work, communicate with your team, and get more done. Wrike offers both cloud and on-premises versions. The cloud version of Wrike has a free trial for 30 days.
Once you’re ready to start using the full power of Wrike, you can choose from four different subscription plans:
- Starter (free) – Simple task management for 1 user.
- Professional ($9.80/month per user) – Unlimited number of tasks, advanced analytics, and reporting features.
19. BambooHR
BambooHR is a cloud-based HR software that helps businesses manage their employees, payroll, and benefits. BambooHR has a suite of features that help you manage your employees, payroll, and benefits. Features include employee onboarding, performance reviews, time-off requests, and more.
You can also use BambooHR to create policies such as paid time off (PTO) for vacation requests or sick days for employees to take when they are ill. The tool will keep track of these policies and send out reminders when an employee is close to reaching the limits set by the company.
20. Sisense
Sisense Business Intelligence (BI) is a business intelligence tool that helps companies make better decisions. It helps you analyze data, create dashboards and reports, and share information with your team.
It integrates with hundreds of data sources, including Google Analytics and Salesforce.
Conclusion
We hope you’ve found this roundup of SaaS tools a useful starting point as you look for SaaS for small businesses that can help you be more efficient. We didn’t include every tool we could find here, but these should give you a good idea of the kinds of solutions out there and how they work together. There are so many options available, so be sure to set aside the time to research the right ones for your company—it will definitely be worth it in the long run.