15 Affordable Small Business Tools to Simplify Running Your Business

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Running a business is hard work, but it doesn’t have to be because there are loads of tools that can help make your business processes run more efficiently.

From web development to accounting software and project management platforms — successful entrepreneurs have tools that help them reach their business goals.

In this post, we’ll explore 15 of the best small business tools, and we’ll give you a rundown of their uses and pricing.

Let’s dive right in!

Why do small business owners need business tools?

There are many benefits to using software that helps make your hiring process, project management, or any other business task, more efficient.

Here are some of the many ways that these business tools can make all the difference to small businesses like yours:

They optimize your teamwork by making collaboration and communication easier
The risk of human error is reduced in tasks that can be easily automated
Your business operates more efficiently when you streamline your processes
You reduce avoidable errors and wasted time by keeping your data organized and your teams in sync
Tedious tasks are automated to save you time and energy so that you can focus on more strategic business tasks

Let’s get into our list of 15 of the best small business tools that’ll help improve your business’ performance.

15 must-have small business tools

Our list of small business tools includes:

1. All-in-one software (systeme.io)

2. Search engine optimization (SEO)

3. Project or task management

4. Team communication

5. Video conferencing

6. Content marketing and social media

7. Time management

8. Design collaboration

9. Payments

10. Document management

11. Scheduling

12. Customer service

13. Research

14. Contract management

The business tools that follow are all easily accessible, and in many instances, free or really affordable.

Let’s get started!

Systeme.io: The perfect all-in-one solution for small businesses

systeme.io logo

Systeme.io is a tool that makes managing your entire business easy.

As an all-in-one platform, we have a complete toolbox of features built-in to help start-ups launch and scale their businesses:

systeme.io’s features

Forget about having to pay for separate tools.

From blogging to ecommerce and business automation features — you have everything your small business needs in one neat platform.

We also have a Free plan that is free forever, and no credit card details are required to get started.

With it, you get:

Space for up to 2,000 contacts
Unlimited email sending
1 blog with unlimited blog posts
1 course with unlimited students
Unlimited file storage space
1 workflow, tag, and automation rule to automate your marketing

And more!

As your business grows, our plans also offer you an affordable solution to your business’ every growing need:

systeme.io’s pricing plans

For just $97/month (an absolute bargain compared to our competitors), you get unlimited everything on our Unlimited plan.

Imagine what no limits can do for your business! When you plan ahead for your business, nothing beats systeme.io’s value for money.

Let’s dig into 3 of the main features on offer with systeme.io:

1. Email marketing

2. Our website builder

3. Sales funnels

Email marketing

Out of all the tools for small businesses, email marketing is by far one of the most important — and with an ROI of 4,400%, this is no surprise!

Although the average email marketing tool costs $26/month, systeme.io offers email marketing and more, absolutely free.

With systeme.io, you can:

Send unlimited emails on all of our plans
Create campaigns and newsletters
Automate your marketing with IF/THEN automation rules and workflows
View in-depth statistics related to your marketing efforts
Segment your list to send targeted (personalized) emails to your customers

Our editor will also automatically optimize your emails for mobile devices.

Website builder

As a start-up or small business owner, having a website is crucial to your business’ success.

Thankfully, with systeme.io you can craft the website of your dreams without the hassle, and in literally 10 minutes.

No design or coding skills are needed, and it won’t cost you a cent — plus, with our Free plan you can also have 1 custom domain.

With our drag-and-drop website builder, you can create your website by simply dragging the elements you want onto the page:

systeme.io’s drag-and-drop editor

Start from scratch or use one of our many templates — simply customize the elements to fit your branding and you’re good to go!

Sales funnels

systeme.io’s funnel builder

A sales funnel is a very useful tool that guides your leads through the entire sales journey, towards your end goal.

With sales funnels, you can yield 72% higher conversion rates by simply giving leads what they need based on where they are in the buyer's journey.

Our forever Free plan lets you build 3 sales funnels with 10 funnel steps — this includes squeeze pages, order forms, “thank you” pages, etc.

Even if you’re a newbie, your automated funnel journey can be set up in a matter of clicks with systeme.io.

SEO

Search engine optimization is super important, especially for small businesses that need to expand their reach to bring in new customers.

On average, 40,000 Google searches happen every second!

If your website isn’t developed with SEO in mind, then it won’t be displayed in the search results when your audience inputs keywords related to your business.

Neglecting the importance of SEO will be a costly mistake that can take a lot of time to correct.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics logo

Google Analytics is a tool that allows you to get insightful data that’ll tell you how well your website and content is performing:

View how many people viewed your site, where they click the most, where they’re from, and the duration of their visit
Increase traffic to your website and understand your audience better with valuable customer data insights
Learn which of your pages are performing well and which ones aren’t

You can also track the success of your marketing or social media campaigns, and there are helpful charts and graphs to help you process the data:

Source: NeilPatel.com

Having this data at your fingertips is invaluable, and better yet, it’s completely free — perfect for your small business needs!

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest logo

Ubersuggest is an SEO tool that allows small businesses to gain insight into their traffic and improve their search engine rankings.

Plus, it offers small businesses, like yours, a means to get a competitive edge over others in your industry.

This is because Ubersuggest lets you:

View hundreds of keyword suggestions, the keyword volume, competition, and seasonal trends
View your organic keywords, monthly traffic, domain score, and backlink score
View which of your pages are performing the best (and the source of the traffic)
Compare your website with your competitors who are targeting the same keywords
Access in-depth SEO reports for insight into your cost-per-click (CPC) model, buyer intent, estimated visits, etc.

Ubersuggest has affordable paid plans for small businesses, and they all come with a 7-day free trial:

Ubersuggest’s paid plans

The Individual plan is perfect for small businesses, with it you get:

100 reports/day
3 projects
100 tracked keywords/project
1,000 pages crawled/report
20,000 keyword suggestions
2,000 content ideas
2,000 rows of data exporting/report
Track 5 competitors and 20 similar websites

And more.

Project or task management

Having everyone on the same page is crucial for productivity, even more so with remote teams.

A project management tool can help improve your business’ collaboration and communication on team projects.

Trello

Trello logo

Trello is one of the best tools for small businesses because of its visual interface and collaboration features.

Whether you’re launching a new product or planning your content strategy, Trello lets you simplify complex tasks with boards, lists, and tasks:

Trello’s visual interface

You can assign tasks, set due dates, and add checklists to a card to keep track of who’s doing what and of the progress of a project — all in real-time.

Trello also allows you to:

Add comments to communicate with teammates
Add attachments or images
Customize the look of your boards
Add labels to cards
Set the priority of your projects

And more.

These are the 4 pricing plans on offer:

Trello’s pricing plans

You can set up a free account, and with it, you’ll get:

Up to 10 boards/workspace
Unlimited cards
Unlimited storage (10MB/file)
Custom backgrounds and stickers
2-factor authentication

And more!

Team communication

Communication tools can help small businesses foster a culture of inclusivity that encourages:

Team collaboration
Employee engagement
Productivity and problem-solving

Poor communication, on the other hand, can make a small business crumble.

Slack

Slack logo

Slack’s popularity is no surprise, it’s a very useful tool that allows you to set up a communication channel for your entire business.

With Slack, you can:

Have all of your business communications in one place
Set up different channels for different segments of your business (i.e. a channel for marketing, another for sales, customer support, etc.)
Control who gets added to which channel
Send and receive messages, files, images, videos, and more (either in private 1-on-1 conversations or in group chats)
Team members can control their notifications so that irrelevant communications don’t disturb their productivity

Slack is the perfect communication solution for businesses of all sizes — it’s easy to use, and there’s a free version as well as 3 affordable paid plans:

Slack’s pricing plans

For free, you get:

1 workspace
Access to 10,000 recent messages from your team
10 integrations (Google Drive, Microsoft Office, and more)
5GB storage space
1-on-1 voice and video calls

And more.

Video conferencing

Nowadays, more and more of our business tasks are going online — and sometimes face-to-face communication is needed.

Whether you’re holding meetings, conducting interviews, or discussing important matters with international clients, video conferencing is the answer.

Zoom

Zoom logo

Businesses of all sizes use Zoom to meet up from around the world and discuss important matters where email, text, or phone calls simply won’t do.

As with all of the small business tools we’ve discussed so far, Zoom also has a free version in their Zoom Meetings package.

With it, you can:

Host up to 100 participants
Hold group meetings for up to 40 minutes with a maximum of 100 participants
Unlimited 30 minute 1-on-1 meetings
Screen sharing capabilities

Here’s what scaling with Zoom Meetings will cost you:

Zoom Meeting’s pricing plans

Depending on your video conferencing needs, Zoom’s free version might do, but scaling to a paid version can be costly.

Content marketing and social media

Managing your social media marketing can be a time-consuming task if done manually — but that doesn’t mean that you should give up on it.

Social media platforms allow you to expand your reach and they can play an important role in customer service too.

Crowdfire

Crowdfire logo

With a social media marketing tool like Crowdfire, you can manage your social accounts without needing to hire several social media managers.

This platform gives you the power to:

Automatically discover relevant content that you can share to keep your audience engaged
Save time and effort by pre-scheduling all of your content to ensure it reaches your audience at the right time
Use a template, or create custom reports and schedule your weekly or monthly reports to be sent directly to your email
Refine your strategies with detailed insights into each post — Your engagement, followers and fans, and the number of posts shared
Compare your strategy against that of your competitors with an overview of their performance, top posts, etc.
Provide excellent customer support with automatic notifications sent to your team inbox for every mention, comment, or reply

Crowdfire has a forever Free plan, which includes:

3 linked accounts
Support for multiple social networks
10 scheduled posts/account
Unlimited article and image recommendations
The ability to curate content from your blogs, YouTube videos, etc.
1 day of social and advanced data analytics

Opting for a paid version might also be worth considering, especially because it won’t cost a fortune:

Crowdfire’s pricing plans

The Plus plan gives you some advanced features, such as:

A custom posting schedule
30 days of social data analytics
90 days of advanced analytics
Post analytics

And more.

Time management

Time management is important to any small business because wasted time impacts your productivity and, of course, your bottom line.

Time Doctor

Time Doctor logo

Time Doctor is a tool that’s perfect for performance management because it tracks the time spent on a particular project, task, or client.

Whether you’re billing clients for your time or paying employees based on their tracked time, Time Doctor monitors the time by the second:

Time Doctor’s dashboard

Productivity tools like Time Doctor are perfect for remote teams — the flexibility empowers employees to work when, and where they want to.

Here’s what Time Doctor can do for your small business:

It encourages a work-life balance, as well as accountability
Monitor productivity with in-depth weekly and monthly reports of the time worked, and the breaks taken
Gain insight into how well your departments and individual employees are performing
Automatically process your payroll and billing
Integrate with over 60 other apps (Slack, Trello, and many others)
Use automatic screenshots to track activity and have reminders pop up when websites irrelevant to work are used

Although Time Doctor only has a 14-day free trial, it does offer an affordable solution to monitor your business’ productivity.

The pricing of the plans are dependent on the size of your team — the following is for a team of 15 people:

Time Doctor’s pricing plans

The Standard plan is worth it if you’re looking for the basics, plus some of the more advanced features such as:

Payroll
Daily email notifications
6 months data storage

The Basic plan only gives you:

Time and activity tracking
Tasks and projects
Unlimited screenshots

Design collaboration

Hiring a professional graphic designer isn’t always necessary or financially feasible for small businesses.

Thankfully, there are design tools that allow anyone to create professional designs with ease.

Canva

Canva logo

Canva is a popular design platform that offers:

A large library of free pre-formatted templates, elements, and fonts
A simple interface to easily bring your creative ideas to life
Easy sharing and live commenting and editing so that team members can collaborate
Brand kit creation to ensure that your team stays on brand when they create their designs

With Canva, you can create anything from business cards to marketing flyers, reports, slide presentations, and so much more:

Canva’s templates for a large number of applications

Canva also offers professional courses online — these tutorials by Canva’s Design School teach you how to use Canva to its full potential.

Canva is free for classrooms and nonprofits, and it has a Free, Pro, and Enterprise plan:

Canva’s pricing plans

The pricing of the Pro plan depends on the size of your team — it can go up to 50 members, and there’s the option of custom pricing.

With a free account, you get:

250,000+ free templates
100+ design types (slide presentations, social media posts, etc.)
Hundreds of thousands of free images and graphics
5GB cloud storage
Collaboration features

Payments

Receiving, issuing, and managing business payments can be a real pain to do manually, but it doesn’t have to be.

Both Stripe and PayPal are great for monitoring and automating your business’ payments, but PayPal is considered better for small businesses.

Platforms like systeme.io also have built-in integration with these payment gateways to help you manage your entire business from one platform.

PayPal

PayPal logo

PayPal is an online payment system that allows you to accept all major forms of payment, including credit card, debit card, or PayPal payments.

Although PayPal is a free tool in terms of monthly, setup, or cancellation fees, they do charge transaction fees.

If you’re accepting payment from outside of the US, the transaction fees increase:

Online transactions — 2.9% + a flat-rate fee of 30 cents, or if outside of the US, 4.4% + a flat-rate fee depending on the currency used
Store transaction — 2.7% + a flat-rate fee, or if outside of the US, 4.2% + flat-rate fee depending on the currency used

PayPal also lets you:

Send invoices with multiple payment options, and set up recurring or subscription-based systems
Add a checkout to your website or online store
Track and manage your billing with reports
Add additional users to your business account

By providing a secure and fast means of sending and receiving money, PayPal is a popular option for businesses of all kinds.

Document management

Having all of your documents and files in the cloud is a safe way to store, sync, and back up all of your important data.

Data management and file sharing are important for small businesses to ensure that all the files are easily attainable for those who need them.

Google Drive

Google Drive logo

Google Drive is a cloud-based software solution for storing and sharing data.

It’s invaluable for small businesses because of its collaboration capabilities and its price — it’s completely free for up to 15GB of storage space.

This helpful tool lets you:

Create, store, and share files such as spreadsheets or images
Edit the privacy settings to have certain files kept private
Have access to the latest version of the files at all times and across all devices with automatic syncing
Integrate with Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc. that you can use to suggest edits in real-time instead of back-and-forth emailing

If you need more storage space, there are 4 paid options available with Google Workspace:

Google Workspace’s pricing plans

The Business Starter plan gives you:

30GB cloud storage/user
Video meetings with a limit of 100 participants
A custom and secure business email
Security and management controls

You can set up a Drive for your entire office, and have all the important data in one cloud to help your team save time and collaborate with ease.

Scheduling

Scheduling a meeting or an appointment can take more time and back-and-forth communication than what’s necessary.

And, of course — time is money.

Calendly

Calendly logo

Calendly is a great tool for time management — it allows individuals or teams to:

Schedule meetings or appointments without wasting time discussing each other’s calendar openings
Integrate with existing Google or Outlook calendars
Automate tasks with workflows and Zapier integrations
Pick your availability times and days, and set a break time in between meetings
Automatically factor in different timezones
Send your Calendly link or embed it on your website
Have automatic meeting reminders, rescheduling, etc. sent to the relevant participant(s)

Calendly has 5 plans on offer, including a free option:

Calendly’s pricing plans

With the Basic plan, you get the following (and more) for free:

Have unlimited 1-on-1 meetings
Stay in sync with automated reminders
Add branding to your booking page
Add Calendly to your website

Here’s how it looks:

Calendly’s scheduling interface

Here are some of the premium features available on the Professional plan:

Customizable email reminders and notifications
Text meeting notifications
Automated workflows
Remove Calendly branding
Custom and Zapier integrations

Customer service

Customer service is the backbone of any business — you need to ensure that with every interaction, you’re providing excellent customer support.

This is even more important for small businesses where your reputation can either send your business skyrocketing or crashing.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk logo

Customer relationship management tools like Freshdesk are vital to the success of your business.

With a helpdesk software solution like Freshdesk, you can:

Offer support to customers regardless of their channel choice (live-chat, mobile, etc.)
Track and manage support tickets across various platforms, including social media, all in one inbox
Set deadlines for ticket response time
Create pre-formatted replies to common queries
Monitor the status and progress of tickets
Link related queries together to discover the most common issues your customers’ experience
Auto-assign tickets based on agent availability
Gain insight into the workload, agent performance, customer satisfaction, etc.

And more.

CRM software like this usually comes at quite the price, but not with Freshdesk:

Freshdesk’s pricing

The free option will stay free forever, and with it, you’ll get:

Email and social ticketing
Team collaboration
Trend and performance reports
Workflows to automate routine tasks

And more.

Callhippo

Callhippo was established in 2016. In a few words, Callhippo can be described as an intelligent business phone system that uses AI to assess calls.

Can also broadcast support messages to a group of customers at the same time.

With Callhippo you can:

Use local phone numbers in 58 plus countries with no desk phone
Forward your call to your team within seconds in case you’re not available
Manage teams, clients and collaborate with them.
When customer calls on the business number, the entire is notified of the call.
You can record the calls to provide better customer experience.
Your customer can send you voicemails
Track and monitor calls for improved customer support. Keep a lid on missed calls.
Keep them engaged with music when they are on the call.

You can integrate the calls with your CRM for better customer management.

You can also benefit from the Interactive Voice Recording System.

With IVR customers will be greeted with an automated voice. Callhippo has multiple integrations.

Research

Small businesses looking to connect with their customers or employees, can use methods like surveys to gain invaluable insight into how to do just that.

Google Forms

Google Forms logo

Google Forms is a great tool for small businesses looking to create professional surveys and forms with ease.

Besides surveys and forms, you can also create a poll, collect email addresses, and more.

Google Forms is completely free — here’s what else it can do:

Brand your forms and surveys or choose a pre-made theme
Choose from several question types such as multiple choice or drop-down menus
Add images and YouTube videos
Optimize your forms and surveys for all devices
Analyze the collected responses in real-time in charts or on Google Sheets
Use file-sharing to collaborate on your surveys and forms
Reorder the questions by simply dragging them

You can also embed your forms on your website, share them with individuals or on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

Contract management

When it comes to legally binding documents, no business can risk neglecting the importance of taking contracts seriously.

This is where contract management software comes in — allowing you to manage your contract creation, execution, and analysis, all in one place.

Anapact

Anapact logo

Anapact is a tool that allows businesses to organize all of their contract documents in one database.

Managing these documents is essential, and it often proves to be a difficult task for small businesses.

Tools like Anapact make your contract administration and management process far easier — it helps you:

Ensure legal compliance and reduce risk to your business
Easily document and manage all of your contracts (i.e. legal or employment contracts)
Search the database to quickly retrieve the latest version of an approved contract
Authorize certain editing permissions depending on the employee’s role (i.e. clauses can only be edited by your legal team)
Easily track your red-lines, renewals, and terms of your contracts

And more!

Anapact offers a simple scaling pricing model, starting at $1,000/year for 1,000 contracts and up to 10 users.

Although this software isn’t free, having a handle on your contracts will reduce your risks and improve your business relationships and revenue.