In a globally connected workspace, online collaboration tools have become vital for everyday team interactions. They facilitate instant communication, smooth task management, and efficient project progress tracking.
Choosing the best collaboration software for your team is an art and a science. It demands an understanding of your team's unique needs and the tool's capabilities. The choice could make the difference between a well-oiled operation and a chaotic one.
In this article, we'll explore why do companies use online collaborative productivity software, along with all the best tools and their standout features.
Using collaboration tools, a team spread out from Singapore to Sydney can now work on a product launch or design brief together. Even with dispersed teams or different time zones, collaboration tools allow businesses to work together online to get more stuff done.
However, team collaboration softwares do more than help dispersed teams work together. They can create smarter workflows and give updates in real-time to keep projects on track. As you start planning which technology resources to invest in for your marketing team, online collaboration tools should be near the top of your list.
In this ultimate guide, we're going to look at 40 online collaboration tools to help distributed teams perform at a higher level. You'll learn:
Let's get collaborating!
Online collaboration tools are cloud-based software tools or apps that help you track projects, communicate with colleagues, and optimize every resource available.
your team is filled with talented designers, developers, and customer service members. However, the team is spread out across different cities or even countries. By utilizing online collaboration tools, you can effortlessly bring everyone together in a virtual environment where they can work cohesively toward a common goal.
Depending on the tool, you'll be able to collaborate online with your team using features like project management, time trackers, messaging, video conferences and virtual whiteboards.
Remote teams are the clear winners if you're looking to introduce an online collaboration tool into your workflow.
But even if you want to maximize in-house workflows, online collaboration tools are a great way to get teams working smarter and more effectively.
McKinsey found using online collaboration tools and digital workplaces can increase productivity by 20-30%. Another study by Aruba found 70% of employees attribute their collaboration efforts to the use of digital technology.
Using a collaboration tool can help your business in a lot of ways, such as:
It's clear: collaborating online makes everybody's job easier. They help cut out useless meetings and emails and get your team working together on the most important projects.
The question is… what tool is right for your business?
Ziflow is the leading tool for enterprise-level agencies and brands to proof their work online.
Using Ziflow, teams can upload and collaborate on projects easier without having to send email trails. With over 1,200 file types supported, all an agency needs to do is upload their file, have their team review it, and act on feedback.
Ziflow has all the tools a team needs to collect and share useful, actionable feedback. The result? All your projects stay on track, remain compliant, and get delivered on time.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Plans start at $40 / user / month. Ziflow offers annual & monthly plans. There is also a free personal version available.
InVision is used by digital product designers to track and optimize the delivery of projects.
Used by tech companies like Netflix and MailChimp, InVision helps designers navigate every stage of the product design process, from ideation to development. Designers can begin a project using the freehand tool to sketch out their idea, like this:
When inside InVision's dashboard, teams can control the entire design process through feedback loops and notifications.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $15 / user / month
Asana is a simple tool that helps teams coordinate and manage their workflows.
Whether your team is made up of five or 500 people, you can plan any tasks or projects on Asana, and then assign responsibilities to each team member.
It has a bunch of pre-built templates team leaders can use to build anything from marketing campaigns to product launches. Or, you can use the KanBan view to create a simple pipeline to track projects or workflows from start to finish.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans starts at $10.99 / user / month
Basecamp is a project management platform that combines group chat, to-do lists and task assignment, scheduling, and file sharing to help get collaborative team projects out of email communication and disparate apps and into one central workspace.
Team-wide visibility into task and project status allow managers to plan, adjust, and assign team workloads across projects. Individual views into to-do tasks and deadlines keep every team member organized and accountable for their work beyond planning meetings.
The customizable project environment makes Basecamp an appealing choice for businesses that want to use one project management tool across many different teams (design, marketing, development, etc.) and manage tasks that involve internal-external collaboration.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: $99 / month for unlimited projects and users.
Monday.com is project management geared towards busy creative teams with project templates and use cases for marketing, public relations, agencies, agile development, and more.
Instead of spending time on project setup, the platform helps creative workers track the entire marketing campaign lifecycle by managing requirements and priority setting, assigning tasks across creative groups, and using timeline views to track the status of marketing campaign planning and launch. For agencies juggling client projects, the platform can also be used to connect project orders, briefs, and invoices to internal tasks related to the client campaign.
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Jira is an agile project management tool that helps teams track and manage agile and software development projects. The simple project boards allow teams to allocate product issues, assign tasks and track activities to make sure they meet deadlines. It's also mobile-friendly, so it's easy to keep track of projects even when you're away from your desk.
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Notable Clients
Price: Starts at $10 / month
Trello is perfect for project management if you prefer kanban-style lists.
The visual organization of projects makes it easier for teams to collaborate and see where projects are at. At its core, Trello is a digital version of sticky notes on a wall. Under each note, team members can post comments and attach cards to keep tasks grouped together.
The beauty of Trello is its versatility. Whether you need a tool to onboard new team members or plan an event launch, you can create to-do lists for just about anything.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $9.99 / user / month
When it comes to online collaboration tools, ProofHub reigns as the absolute best. With its sleek interface, extensive feature set, and user-friendly design, ProofHub empowers teams to work together seamlessly and efficiently. It's like having a virtual workspace where you can communicate, collaborate, and stay organized all in one place.
ProofHub stands out from the crowd with its intuitive project management features. You can easily create tasks, assign them to team members, set deadlines, and track progress effortlessly. Need to have discussions? No problem! ProofHub offers real-time chat and built-in proofing tools, making feedback and collaboration a breeze. Plus, with file sharing, document management, and robust integrations, everything you need is right at your fingertips.
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Notable Clients
Free trial for 14 days. The Ultimate plan costs $89/month, billed annually with unlimited users.
We're willing to bet you've heard of Slack. It's one of the most widely used messaging apps used by teams around the world.
Teams communicate with each other inside channels. These channels can be assigned to departments or issues and used to track and archive conversations to help teams get more done.
Team members can also search channels, as well as integrate with apps like Ziflow, Google Calendar, Zoom, and DropBox, to maximize time efficiently.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $8 / user / month
Microsoft Teams is a video conferencing and online meeting platform that combines the power of high-quality audio, video, chat, and screen sharing options to create one hub for collaboration before, during, and after team meetings.
The platform can be use to facilitate everything from 1-1 meetings and private team meetings to live events hosting thousands of internal and external participants. Because the platform works with Microsoft conferencing and A/V devices, enterprises are using Microsoft Teams to create a seamless connection between physical meeting spaces and remote meeting participation.
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Notable Clients
Price: Office 365 Business Essential plans starts at $5.00 per user / per month.
Let's get one thing straight. Skype was one of the first tools to help businesses host video meetings for free.
Although it's now being rivalled by tools like Zoom, Skype is still worth a place on our list because of its features. Using Skype, you can have audio and video calls with team members around the world on multiple devices. You can also use Skype to host group calls, where you can talk to a bunch of team members at a time. Think of it as a way to hold a worldwide group meeting—digitally.
Key Features
Price: Free version available. Paid plans start at $5 / month
Zoom is a cloud-based video and web conferencing platform for teams and customers to conduct online meetings. The tool also allows you to share your screen (and files) to collaborate on any project in real-time.
You can also connect multiple conference rooms and add in remote attendees to meetings, so you no longer need a physical location to host those important meetings with clients.
Zoom also integrates with a bunch of tools like Google Calendar and Workplace, so once a session is booked on your calendar, a join link will be emailed to the attendee automatically.
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Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $13.99/month
Stormboard works differently to other tools in this section because it helps you brainstorm and plan a meeting before it happens. Using Stormboard, you can set up your meeting beforehand, discuss your ideas in real-time, and then assign tasks after the meeting wraps up to keep projects on track.
The tool also has built-in templates for project management techniques like agile, and work can be instantly exported using the tool's reporting options. For more technical meeting needs, this tool is a good fit.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $5/month
GoToMeeting is a web conferencing tool for teams who need to host larger meetings.
Using GoToMeeting, you can host a meeting for up to 100 people, and attendees can share any application on their computer in real-time. It also works with a bunch of different devices like Mac, PC, iPad, iPhone or Android.
It's simple enough to use. Meeting organizers can schedule meetings in advance or create regular meetings for their teams. Then, attendees can join the sessions by clicking on a link sent to them over email or message.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Starting from: $12.00/month
Google Hangouts is used by thousands of businesses across the globe who are on a budget.
It's similar to the other tools we've mentioned here because you can host video chats, as well as voice calls with your team. As it's integrated into Google+ and Gmail, there is also an app for iOS and Android device your team can download to join meetings easier.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free, with G Suite pricing for business ranging from $3 to $25 per user per month.
Learn how to use online collaboration tools to improve marketing content review with a copy of our free ebook "The Definitive Guide to Online Proofing"
Learn how to solve daily production roadblocks and manual tasks to get creative work into finished stages with online proofing.
Imagine having a digital whiteboard you could use to build and collaborate with your team on projects. Well, that's exactly what Miro does.
Miro is a tool distributed teams can use to collaborate as if they would in person using a digital whiteboard. Teams can use Miro to brainstorm, build processes and make decisions in one place.
On each digital whiteboard, teams can upload videos, files and build processes using templates. Then, you can use Miro to host video meetings and discuss projects or problems to keep workflows on track.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans starts at $8 / user / month
Zeplin is a collaboration tool used to bridge the communication gap between designers and developers.
For product teams, Zeplin can be used to automatically handoff designs between collaborators with accurate specs, assets and code snippets. Product designers can export and store their designs in Zeplin as a project, and work on them from anywhere in the cloud. When team members need help, they can invite their colleagues using a share link to boost collaboration and get projects delivered faster.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $17 / user / month
Are there any dispersed teams out there that don't know about Google Docs?
Google Docs is an online word processor teams can use to create, comment and edit documents using share links. Using Google Docs, teams can create work from a blank document, or use a suite of pre-made templates.
Writing content, building proposals and sending out meeting notes has never been easier.
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Notable Clients
Price: G Suite Basic starts at $6 per user per month.
Also a primary player in the file-sharing game, Box is a cloud-based storage solution for teams who need to access their work from anywhere, anytime.
Box works on any device, so team members can access documents, project plans, presentations and videos easily. It's also built to make life easier for administrators; its dashboard makes it easier to view every piece of content on file.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $5 / user / month for 100 GB
This is Dropbox's answer to Google Docs.
Dropbox Paper is used by everyone from creative and product teams to remote workplaces to create content and exchange ideas. Using the tool, teams can assign to-do lists, set up projects with due dates and action people on a task by mentioning them in the doc.
Dropbox Paper also has a ton of other features like attributions and emojis to help teams give each other feedback enjoyably.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free
Process Street gives businesses a way to create streamlined workflows in a non-technical way.
Using the tool, teams can create and customize checklists with text, images and video. But it's more than just a checklist tool. Process Street's approval process combines conditional logic, automations, and integrations.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Plans start at $12.50 / user / month
Etherpad is an open-source, web-based editor that teams can use to collaborate on text documents.
As it's a real-time editor, multiple users can access a document at the same time and edit it together. And each author's text is given their own color, so other team members will know who is editing what.
Etherpad is open-source, so anyone can download it and integrate it into their workflows using API—for free.
Key Features
Price: Free
Tettra is a wiki that helps software teams collaborate more effectively.
Tettra is suited for teams who use a bunch of tools like Google Docs, Dropbox, and GitHub. It gathers everything in one place, so teams can find what they need using a single hub.
Its Slack integration is also worth a mention: whenever a page gets created or updated, your entire team will get notified in Slack.
Using Tettra is one of the easiest ways to make sure your whole team stays on the same page.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $39 / month
Sync.com is a secure cloud storage solution for both personal and business users that emphasizes data privacy and compliance.
Enterprise grade security infrastructure and end-to-end encryption on both the platform and its apps ensure that only the user can access their data in the cloud. Business users can securely share links to content with clients and outside users while controlling access with passwords, expiration dates, and other security features.
Sync.com is a great option for users looking for additional control over the fidelity and accessibility of their content in the cloud.
Key Features
Price: $5 / $15 / Enterprise plans per month, depending on team size
Google Drive is a cloud-based file storage platform teams can use to store and share their documents, photos, videos, spreadsheets and presentations with each other. Using the tool, you can create separate folders and invite others to view, edit, download, and collaborate on any file or project you might be working on.
All without having to send a single file through email.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Your first 15 GB of storage are free with a Google Account. Then 100 GB for $1.99/month
Dropbox pioneered the industry of cloud-based file sharing and storage.
The tool allows teams to store, manage and access their files across multiple devices from anywhere they want. Using Dropbox, every file uploaded to the cloud-based server is automatically synced across all connected devices, so they'll be available to your whole team instantly.
Over 300,000 businesses use the platform across the world, including more than 50% of the Fortune 500 industry.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free trial. Standard plan starts at $12.50 / user / month for 3TB of storage
Do you often have to send files to your team that are huge?
You need DropSend. It allows users to send large files via a small desktop client. All you do is upload the file online using a DropSend account, and then the person you're sending the file to will receive an email with a download link.
From there, they can download it straight onto their device. No more messing around with huge email attachments.
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Price: Free plan available. Premium plan starts at $5 / user / month for 15 sends
Egnyte provides IT teams will the tools to protect business assets contained within all cloud and on-premise content repositories created throughout the enterprise. The platform combines secure file sharing with proactive monitoring of content labeling, use and access. Automatic classification of sensitive information stored in content repositories, identification of abnormal individual permissions, and flagging of inappropriate external content sharing enables IT teams to gain real-time snapshot of data security and prevent threats before they occur.
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Notable Clients
Price: $8.00 / month/ user
GitHub is a hosting tool built for software developers to manage software development version control for public code.
Millions of users trust GitHub as a place to discover, share, and contribute to software. It's not just for developers, though. Project managers can use GitHub to coordinate and track projects, so they stay transparent and on schedule.
Every time a change is made or a tool is updated, team members will be notified.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $7 / user / month
Bitbucket (also owned by Atlassian) is a version control solution that makes it easier for teams to collaborate and manage versioning for private coding projects.
If you have a software team, Bitbucket gives them a place to collaborate on their source code, and it can become a base to implement development workflows. It also integrates with JIRA Software, so it's even easier to track a project from ideation all the way through its deployment.
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Notable Clients
Price: Plans start at $15 / month
CodePen has grown enormously in the online development community as the go-to place for testing user-created HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets.
It works as an online code editor as well as being a place where developers can go to learn code in an open-source. Developers can create code snippets and then use CodePen to test them. It's for both front-end designers and developers, and it's a perfect tool for your team to use to sharpen its coding skills.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $8 / user / month
SourceForge is for developers who need to control and manage open-source software projects.
This one is a simple web-based tool developers can use to develop, download, review, and publish open-source software. SourceForge's dashboard also has a ton of impressive features like download statistics and free analytics, so developers can track how popular their software is.
The tool tracks whether the software is being downloaded by Windows, Mac, or Linux users, so developers can see what platform is the most popular.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free
GanttPRO
GanttPRO is an intuitive project management tool based on Gantt charts. It helps project managers and teams from all over the world assign and track tasks and their progress, collaborate on projects, track time spent on assignments, and smartly work on workload.
At its core, it is an easy-to-understand software that project participants can rely on starting at a planning phase and throughout the whole project lifecycle. The learning curve is really short, so it will take up to 10-15 minutes to start working on tasks even for new team members.
GanttPRO is a good fit for any industry. Moreover, the software offers a bunch of ready-made professional templates for dozens of spheres.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: The Individual plan starts at $15 user/month. Team plans start at $4.5 user/month.
Bitrix24 is an entire collaboration suite.
Gantt charts, visual project management, and customizable KanBan boards are some of Bitrix's best features for teams needing to boost their workflows.
It is a house of collaboration tools including CRM, files sharing, time management, calendars, and a ton more. It's based in the cloud, however, if you prefer an on-prem solution, there is source code access for that as well.
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Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $55.20 for 6 users
Confluence is a tool that helps bring all your teams together in a welcoming space. Think of it as a digital coffee room.
Confluence markets itself as a shared workspace that connects teams and helps build momentum behind their ideas. It's not a file-sharing tool, but an open collaboration tool; teams can create projects and openly collaborate on them from a single dashboard.
Using the dashboard, team members can search for projects and collaborate on anything from product launches to marketing campaigns. It's an Atlassian tool, so it integrates seamlessly with any of their apps in their product suite.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Starts at $10 / user / month
Just one of many tools from the company, Zendesk Collaboration is an add-on feature that helps administrators and agents talk to each other about support ticket-related issues.
Using Zedndesk's "side conversations" feature, teams can collaborate internally and externally on support tickets without interrupting the actual conversation happening with a customer.
It's the easiest way to solve tickets collaboratively. And the best part about it is, your customer won't know there was a whole team working on getting the issue solved.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Varies based on needs
Using Helpjuice, you can put all your information into a single knowledge base, so everybody in your company (as well as your customers) can access it. The knowledge bases are searchable, so your customers can find a solution to their problems without contacting your customer support teams.
It's also customizable. You can add your logo and colors, and tag your documents with keywords to make them easier to find.
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Notable Clients
Price: Prices start at $189 / month
Toggl helps you to track your time so it's easier to bill your clients.
This tool is built for smaller businesses, as well as freelancers and consultants. You can track the time you spend on projects and break down each one to see how profitable they are per hour. At the end of the project, you can create invoices based on projects within the application, and get paid electronically.
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Notable Clients
Price: Starts at $9 / user / month
Traqq is a comprehensive time tracking software designed to meet the needs of remote employees and businesses of all sizes. The tool efficiently captures and syncs the recorded hours to the user's profile in real-time. Even if your internet connection drops unexpectedly, you can trust the time tracker to keep running and accurately record your work hours.
Key Features
Price: Free plan is available for freelancers and teams of 2-3 people. Premium plans start at $6 / user / month
Parakeeto is new to the time-tacking scene.
This time tracking tool helps teams smartly bill projects. It tracks projects using flat, recurring, or hourly fees and then helps you quickly build budgets and import your time tracking data. It then gives you real-time insights into every client, project, and team member so you can easily see exactly where you're making money.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Currently in its early access stage, you can request access to Parakeeto here.
Harvest describes itself as a tool that "makes time tracking easy".
With clients like Vayner Media and Ashton, Harvest is one of the best time tracking apps on the market. All you have to do is start a timer from your desktop, phone, or browser, and Harvest will track your time to different clients and projects.
If you have a bunch of team members who are being paid per hour, you can see where they're spending their time, and track it against their budgets.
When a project is completed, you can create an invoice, send it to your client, and get paid online from Harvest's dashboard.
It integrates with a bunch of other collaboration tools like Asana, Basecamp, and Trello.
Key Features
Notable Clients
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $12 / user / month
There you have it, folks. 38 of the best online collaboration tools on the market to get your team working smarter.
No matter if your team is spread out across different countries, or just separate office cubicles, online collaboration tools can be a great way to get everybody working on the same page.
Of course, every tool on the list has its own perks. Some are geared towards designers, and some are built for developers. But all of them have one thing in common: to make your life at work a lot easier.
So, what tool on our list are you looking forward to trying?
Learn how to use online collaboration tools to improve marketing content review with a copy of our free ebook "The Definitive Guide to Online Proofing"