Best Collaboration Tools for Small Businesses

Many collaboration apps have been designed with the specific needs of small businesses in mind. Although there are plenty of inexpensive options, it’s usually worth the extra dollar to splurge on the right tool that will be most useful for your company. We’ve scoured through hundreds of applications to narrow down some of what can be considered the most ideal applications to streamline efficiencies for small businesses.

Here are some of our top collaboration app picks below:

AffinityLive

This customized system is a one-stop shop for managing your business, clients, employees and projects. Affinity can easily integrate with other mainstream applications like Facebook, MailChimp and all Google Apps. Its features include project management, accounting, scheduling, task mastery, as well as becoming a central index for keeping track of client communication.

Cost: Basic membership is $29/month per user or advanced membership at $59/month per user.

Desk Away

This web-based collaboration tool syncs up teams in your small business and provides a central location to organize, track and manage work.

It’s possible to restrict permissions by user and decide which information is public or private by each user’s individual allowances. Similar to AffinityLive, DeskAway is easily integrated with Google Apps, Twitter and other favorite apps. A unique differentiator for DeskAway includes creating and viewing project milestones and history, creating reoccurring projects, tracking employee hours as well as providing secure backup for all documents and files.

Cost: Basic membership includes 25 users for $25/month up to $179 per month for unlimited users and projects.

Huddle

Instead of being web-based, Huddle is a 100 percent cloud-based platform that allows team members to share files and work together on a variety of projects.

Although Huddle is similar to DeskAway, one of the key differences is that all data and information is made available on mobile devices in real-time.

Cost: Basic Membership starts at $20/month per user.

Box

Box is an online service that offers file sharing and collaboration for small and large businesses alike.

While many companies are familiar with competitor Dropbox, Box has much more breadth and granularity of function – especially for businesses. Box Business and Enterprise accounts also provide a central location for salespeople and prospective clients to share information.

Cost: Starter plans run for $5/month per user with Business Plans at $15/month per user.