The Best Tools for Small Business Productivity
Anyone who’s ever worked for or owned a small business knows there’s no shortage of hurdles and hoops on the road to success. For many, tools and technology represent one of the most impactful—and challenging—spaces to navigate. And with so many options available, finding the right business tools to add value and fit the unique needs of your company can be a real challenge.
Yet small business owners often have minimal resources, especially as inflation soars. Ramping up marketing, managing tasks, or expanding your workforce are still critical priorities, as failing in these areas can result in you being overshadowed by your competitors. But during lean times, you may just have to do more with less.
We understand the unique challenges that come with operating a small business. That’s why we’ve put together this helpful business tools guide. We’ll walk you through the best small business tools that could just make your life that little bit easier.
What are small business tools?
A business tool is an application or piece of software designed to help organizations conduct their operations efficiently and effectively. Not only can these tools empower businesses to stay connected with their employees and customers, but they also boost productivity and help you stay competitive in the marketplace.
With trends and markets rapidly developing and changing, the right business process management tools can help your team stay up-to-date and in control.
The 20 best tools for small businesses
When time and money are both limited, you need to make the most of what you have. Using the right applications and harnessing free small business tools can help you maximize your time without breaking the bank. So, which are the best tools for small business owners? We’ve rounded up some of the top business tools to consider.
The best business productivity-boosting HR tools
Human resources is another aspect of an organization that requires a great deal of tracking and organizing. With employee records, paid time off, benefits packages, electronic signatures, time tracking, and more, there's a lot to manage within the HR department.
Doing everything manually can be a huge time sink, and it may cost you in other, less visible, ways, such as poor employee experience or compliance violations.
HR management tools for small businesses can help you streamline the most time-consuming processes of human resources, freeing up your time for big-picture efforts, like building a great company culture.
1. BambooHR®
- Simplifies employee data management
- Centralizes PTO tracking
- Streamlines employee onboarding
- Creates and shares company values
- AI-assisted features
- Provides helpful insights for better decision-making
2. JazzHR
- Manage applicant tracking
- Rank, track, and assess candidates
- Automate hiring workflows
- Post jobs
- Schedule interviews
- Streamline offer-making and onboarding
- Analyze performance with reporting and analytics
- Candidate Relationship Management (CRM)
- Maintain security and compliance
3. Checkr
- Efficiently screen candidate backgrounds
- Get automatic background check ETAs
- Cut time on adjudication by more than 90%
- Maintain security and compliance
- Complete I-9 & E-verify on the same dashboard
The best AI tools for small business owners
AI is revolutionizing the way businesses across the world are running their operations. No your industry—from tech to manufacturing, education to restaurant, food, and beverage—you can boost productivity using this emerging technology.
Check out our ranking of some of the best AI tools for small business owners below.
4. Salesforce Agentforce Assistant
- Design and deploy AI agents
- Engage with customers 24/7
- Automate routine tasks
- Generate personalized content
- Analyze data for actionable insights
- Ensure security and compliance
- Pull lists of recent customer transactions
5. Adobe Express
- Create impressive marketing assets fast
- Enhance visuals with filters
- Use simple AI prompts to create and edit designs
- Apply branding features across all designs to maintain consistency
- Create videos and clips
- Use attractive text effects to improve visuals
6. Buffer
- Organize content
- Create captions fast
- Import assets from anywhere—Google, Dropbox, Canva and more
- Easily repurpose content for different channels
- Adjust tone where needed
- Speed up content creation
7. Otter
- Chat is transcribed in real time
- Time and focus are freed up from note taking
- All team members can engage fully in meetings
- No more lost notes or forgotten points
- Automated summaries and key points
- Help organize follow-ups
8. Microsoft 365 Copilot
- Write drafts and improve existing content (Word)
- Summarize long documents and extract key points (Word)
- Adapt text for tone, clarity, or style (Word)
- Analyze data to show trends and patterns (Excel)
- Suggest formulas and create charts and tables (Excel)
- Create and enhance presentations (PPT)
- Enhance design, layout, and formatting (PPT)
9. Quillbot
- Check grammar and spelling
- Check for plagiarized copy
- Detect AI use in content
- Humanize copy written using AI
- Adapt your tone as needed (so switching from casual to formal in an email, for example)
10. ChatGPT
- Analyze data quickly
- Generate or adjust copy
- Produce images
- Support with problem-solving
- Get inspiration for marketing and team benefits
The best marketing tools that can help improve productivity
To grow your business, customers and clients need to know who you are and how you can help solve their problems. That’s the core of marketing.
However, between email newsletters and social media posts, it can be hard to keep track of what you’re trying to say and who you’re trying to talk to. That is, it’s hard unless you have a business tool arsenal at your disposal.
Business marketing tools can automate the process of publishing content and help you keep all your channels in sync. Some business productivity tools also provide insights into how your campaigns perform, so you can tailor your strategy to your target audience.
Best of all, you don’t have to be a marketing expert to use these handy small business tools. Content marketing is a key factor for ROI, meaning there’s now a whole host of beginner-friendly marketing tools to help keep you on track.
11. Canva
- Helps create picture-perfect campaign graphics, posters, and banners in just a few clicks
- Choose from a range of quick and easy templates
- Remove backgrounds with one click
- Turn initial ideas into polished posts, slides, or documents
- Easily erase unwanted elements from images
- Adjust, clean, or crop any photo with just a few clicks
- Write clear, engaging content with the help of AI
12. Intercom
- Enables efficient and streamlined customer comms
- Allows live chat and messaging
- Provides omnichannel customer support
- Fosters proactive messaging based on customer behavior
- Reusable workflows for boosting efficiency
- AI-powered chatbot deals with common support requests
13. MailChimp
- Speeds up email creation with AI-assisted writing
- Keeps content and design features on brand
- Provides valuable feedback on email content
- Saves time by eliminating manual design
- Useful analytics allow you to track trends, get data-driven insights, and create campaigns that appeal to target audiences
- Works with GDPR regulations in mind
The best analytics tools for boosting productivity
Of course, you won’t be able to determine if your marketing efforts are working or not without measuring the results. Analytics tools can help you do exactly this across all your marketing channels.
They can gather, organize, and display your data, so you can spend more time making informed, strategic decisions. Without this kind of analytics support, it can be near-impossible to find and dissect all the metrics that help you evaluate the effectiveness of your digital content.
14. Amplitude
- Promotes AI-backed decision making
- Enables businesses to analyze, test and get clear results
- Creates end-to-end user flow maps
- Lets you experiment with A/B testing and gain valuable insights
- Segments user behavior for better analysis
- Provides real-time alerts for unusual changes
15. Google Analytics
- Provides intricate insights only Google can get its hands on
- Helps you clearly identify and target your audience
- Offers a deeper understanding of website and app performance to enable more informed decisions
- Offers data that helps businesses refine their digital strategy and optimize campaigns
- Allows you to track data in real-time
- Allows companies to predict user behavior
16. Hotjar
- Identifies opportunities for optimization
- Highlights any issues with the customer experience
- Allows businesses to prioritize the most effective changes with valuable insights from real users
- Provides unbiased information on what users need
- Lets you monitor trends in user behavior
- Enables businesses to schedule and run user interviews for better insights
Productivity-boosting project management tools
To-do lists are useful, but they can only stretch so far before you become overwhelmed by the number of things that need to get done. Growing a small business is, ironically, no small job, and it takes your whole team working together to achieve success.
However, there are many moving parts, even in the smallest teams. Keeping track of who’s doing what and when is tricky without the right small business tools to help.
Business project management tools can help you keep everyone on task and on schedule, even as your team expands and your bandwidth increases. The best platforms can help you set up workflows for each project and foster collaboration between your team members. This will help to keep bottlenecks to a minimum and get your organization moving full speed ahead.
17. Asana
- Organizes tasks and projects in one place
- Lets team members assign tasks with due dates and priorities and timings
- Automates repetitive tasks when built in rules are applied
- Provides calendar view, timelines, lists and boards
- Enables businesses to manage team capacity and workloads
- Can be integrated with other tools and platforms like Zoom, Slack and Dropbox
- Can use AI to write summaries, create tasks and suggest next steps
18. Freedcamp
- Uses the power of checklists, charts, and progress reports to let businesses whiz through tasks with efficiency
- Helps streamline projects, processes and workflows
- Can tracks time spent on tasks
- Generates invoices
- Identifies and tracks issues
- Tracks progress with Kanban boards, calendars, and Gantt charts
- Allows teams to save time with reusable project templates
19. Trello
- Customizes tasks with checklists, due dates, attachments, and labels
- Lets teams manage and track every task, idea, or responsibility—no matter how small
- Simple drag and drop system to show project progress
- Allows users to add comments, attachments and labels for context
- Enables teams to break projects into manageable tasks
- Users can set deadlines, reminders, and checklists to stay on track
Accounting tools that can boost productivity
Keeping track of key numbers, like revenue and business expenses, is vital for building a successful organization. But there’s a lot that goes into running a business, and manually tracking all those figures invites human error and potentially costly mistakes.
Most small business owners don’t have an accounting background, so taking on the responsibility of tracking finances can be quite a challenge. After all, you opened your garden store because you have a passion for gardening, not logging inventory.
The best accounting tools for small businesses (like the ones below) can save you time while helping you maintain more accurate records.
20. Dubsado
- Automates client onboarding
- Automates invoices for smoother payments
- Lets you schedule appointments with built-in calendar tools
- Allows teams to manage leads and clients all on one system
- Tracks projects and deadlines
- Generates reports to help businesses monitor finances and performance
- Enables teams to communicate and collaborate effectively
21. Sage Accounting
- Offers streamlined accounting solutions
- Culminates advice from industry experts
- Simplifies tasks and reduces manual work
- Lets businesses manage finances easily and securely
- Delivers real-time insights to facilitate growth
- Automates expense tracking
- MTD compliant so you can manage VAT and submit taxes directly to HMRC
22. QuickBooks
- Automatically tracking your ingoings and outgoings
- Can run your entire business using your mobile with the QuickBooks mobile app
- Record expenses, produce invoices and send reports anywhere
- Allows users to run profit and loss reports
- Lets you run payroll and calculate taxes
What tools should you use for your small business?
While these recommendations are a good place to start, only you can determine which small business tools are right for your organization. You probably have a list of tasks in your company you’d like to solve or simplify, be it running payroll or assigning projects.
Part of growing as a business is discovering new challenges and finding solutions along the way. So, how can you decide which tool is right to solve your top problems today and support your progress in the future? Start with our HRIS buyer’s guide below!
You can also find your own that supports your organization in precisely the way you need. Either way, with the right tools and strategy, you can grow your business—even on a small budget or with limited time resources.