What SaaS products does your small business or start up use that you couldn't live without?

Question

My company uses Mailchimp, Google Analytics, and a few others. I'm curious what other companies are using to make their lives easier.

Ilya Azovtsev 💌+🤖=🚀 · Accepted Answer

Even better than Hunter, covers our needs :)

Soujanya · Answer

Slack is a team communication tool, which will also allow to integrate Services We Already Use.

Rishi Athanikar · Answer

Perhaps the best SaaS product out there for accepting payments (and so much more)

Sebastian Dahnert · Answer

Zenkit is my go-to project management tool. I´ve been using it with my team for half a year now and it´s really affected our business in a great way. I can recommend it to anyone!!

ScrapeLogo · Answer

Build an audience with what you post in social - and not just with your own content. Soft-sell in a call-to-action that rides on pages you share to social. That's Rite.ly and is easily used with RitePush.

RitePush: $29/month. Use with RiteForge for social media post creation and scheduling or use with Buffer or Sendible for scheduling. Template your preferences, pull in content from 13 integrations, including Buffer, CSV, Feedly, Evernote, Pocket, Slack..., save your scheduling preferences, and generate up to 100 "enhanced" posts in seconds, then top up your social profile queues for days or weeks.

Soujanya · Answer

Just started using Lumen5, Free (Beta) and simple tool to convert the blog text into video.

Wilkins Foster · Answer

Whether you are working for a startup or a massive company, the fundamentals you need for work would never change. And I believe the most essential app/software you need to get work done is a seamlessly working document app. I tried many different note-taking apps and while they were all great, they did not support a team-based document base. We tried Google doc for a while but it was difficult to track things.

collabee lets you document your progress on any current projects. You can create tasks and events with a certain timeline and request for your managers' decisions on action items. On top of that, the document (they call it an "Issue") are co-editable which is a big yes for me. You can share your feedback in the comment section on the right and make a reference to the items written in the issue if necessary.

It's free too! Trust me and try it out!

Trevor Clifton · Answer

Who doesn't like switching back and forth from the apps? Well I know for sure I don't and if you are like me, try collabee. It's a major time saver!

Jakub Rogalski · Answer

We can't imagine our internal communication without Slack. On top of that, we use the tools like https://trello.com for task management, https://heapanalytics.com, https://www.hotjar.com/, and Google Analytics for different sorts of analyses, https://stripe.com/ and https://recurly.com/ for managing payments, and we also use our very own https://brand24.com for media monitoring.

Maknar Kaswarh Nikitin · Answer

good hunt

Yelin Lee · Answer

collabee is pretty great. I work with this tool on a daily basis and it has never failed me or any of my team members. The biggest perk will be that it's free. I also like that I do not always have to be paranoid about my inbox piling up with this tool.

Beth Hudson · Answer

Recruitee is for hiring all year round (which you should be doing!). The product focuses on collaborative hiring, so it encourages employee referrals and input in the hiring decisions (aka a better company environment in the long run!).

Naman Bhutani · Answer

I've been using Trello for almost 2 years now, I never had to micro-manage things manually. Trello does it all for me. It's an amazing project management tool which also lets me integrate with a lot of other services like Slack, etc to automate a lot of stuff and make it more useful, everyday.

Hope it helps. :)

Saketh Rasakatla · Answer

Agile CRM is a powerful solution with a unique value proposition in the market: It’s a comprehensive, end-to-
end CRM that allows companies to manage the entire customer journey, from marketing and prospecting, to deal closure,
customer support and bringing it full circle with the ability to better upsell to existing clients. No other company offers all
of that out of the box.

Hope I helped! :)

Tejas Kinger · Answer

We at Freshworks (formerly Freshdesk) rely on Autopilot for our email marketing. I'm a huge fan of the visual journeys. Makes it a cakewalk to view and implement customer journeys.

Ivan Zhao · Answer

Could replace: Google Apps/Docs, Evernote, an old school wiki, and even Trello or any other small team to-do apps. iOS app is just out too!

Ken Rossi · Answer

Git based workflow for designers. No more final-final-final-no-this-really-final-this-time.sketch

Robert A. Skidmore · Answer

Just what is says in the tagline, BI without the overhead and exorbitant cost. An easy way to track everything that's going on in your business.

I'm a little biased because I work there now. But I know people who used it and my previous company had looked into using it before I left. :-)

Aidan Hornsby · Answer

Excuse my bias, but I'd like to recommend Flow ☺️

We recently totally redesigned the app and put a lot of thought into making it easy to take a high level overview of all the work happening across your teams/company, but quick to step down a layer to see team workloads and project-level boards, or zoom right in on an individual teammate’s tasks for the day, week, month, etc.

We use it internally to run our company, and our customers swear by it.

Matthieu ROBIN · Answer

Very helpful, thanks

Jayca Pike · Answer

Modern recruiting software for teams who want to hire awesome new teammates, faster, and with practically zero learning curve. Integrates with everything, saves hours of manual work a week, smart features, freemium tier, lightweight, what's not to ❤ ?

Brent J. Liberatore · Answer

Tried both Asana and Trello.  Asana fit our needs better at the time, but both are fantastic project tracking services.

Derek J. Sine · Answer

Keepin' it real here. We live and die by Google's Suite. However, we're constantly trying to refine our workflows and keep it lean without taking on too much technical/workflow debt. We focus more on organizational maturity through ideologies and delivery models and the tools we put into place streamline those processes. Management is agiler in our approaches whereas our labor force is locked into specific stacks + SOPs that are vetted. Love all the suggestions!

Alex Heeton · Answer

I'm a client (have been for a couple of years) and have brought it with me to new companies - everyone loves it.

James Villarrubia · Answer

Solid API.  Solid performance.  Connects to everything.  Libraries are free and easy.

Arthur · Answer

This app doesn't get the love it deserves. It's quite sophisticated and easy to use.

Derek E. Silva · Answer

This is tremendously easy to use, and it does a pretty good job of automatically selecting photos and videos.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

A wonderful tool that works really really well for collaboration.

Stephanie · Answer

Can fill a calendar with social posts in one sitting, and it has a preview feature for Instagram that lets you see what your queued images will actually look like in sequence.

Justin Jackson · Answer

Building our email list is the single most important thing we've done.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

Yet another wonder that we use at Buffer. It has changed our social media game for good! <3

Brian Peters · Answer

Thank you for the awesome feature, PH! We're grateful to all of you! 😊

Pooya Charmarai · Answer

We use it for our social media, fully recommended!

Ahfaz Ahmed · Answer

Best for social media automation.

Kévin · Answer

Automation on social networks

Matt Henderson 🚀 · Answer

Fundraising without an investor database like Investor Scout is a nightmare 😣

Derek E. Silva · Answer

It's just too darn easy to accept credit cards with Stripe, from the account creation process to integration, testing, and going live.

Kévin · Answer

Must have

Lalvir Singh · Answer

Must for SEO companies & freelancers in order to manage the day to day tasks of an SEO project. With built-in client reporting and invoicing modules.

Tomer London · Answer

Payroll, benefits and HR fully automated and trusted by tens of thousands of businesses ❤️

Simon Lind · Answer

Amazing insights into how users use your product and find usability issues.

Vasil Enchev · Answer

My team has been developing Ora for 4 years and we've been using it for 2, as a small business :D so give it a try!

Derek J. Sine · Answer

Great for building out teams using agile frameworks.

Ben Thompson · Answer

Airtable is the single most important tool we’ve found for managing our content pipeline. We use it for scheduling and staging content, and keeping everything moving forward smoothly.

Rakesh Singh · Answer

Foore is built for brick & mortar businesses that provide them top-notch features like Backup receptionist, 40% Facebook automation instantly, Appointment & Feedback bot, etc.

If you have a business that relies on appointments, Foore is the tool that you will ever need.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

We switched from Salesforce to Freshsales about a year and a half ago. You could say that we were pretty much the first large customers for Freshsales ourselves. :D For a fast-growing company that relies on high-velocity sales, Freshsales has helped dramatically increase the productivity of our sales teams by bringing multiple tools into one window. The simple UI helps too.

Answer

Lionn is the best solution for SEO, has a free trial & 6-month refund guarantee. :)

Answer

A must when it comes to WebApp security, especially for SaaS businesses!

John Alvarez · Answer

Sophisticated digital marketing tool!

Jason · Answer

We use Zigpoll to get feedback on all of our e-commerce sites. People tend to engage with it a lot more than typical surveys and it's super flexible so you can use it in a lot of different ways. It's amazing what people will just tell you if you ask...

allen smith · Answer

Great for collaborating with small team!

Better than any other software. It's way easy to use.  I love the ease of organizing and managing updates. I also think that collabee does a great job of being a team collaboration software. I think it works best not only as a gathering people and content, but as a managing tasks and projects for small team. You can set collaboration with as many or as few people as you want.

Nikita Bhatia · Answer

I have been using Foore for quite a while now and being from Beauty & Wellness industry, I am very adamant that our staff is technically challenged to use Slack or similar tools.

Foore came to the rescue with their tool built for brick & mortar businesses.

Features:
1. Backup Receptionist - Handles all my missed calls
2. Team Collaboration - Better than Slack
3. Facebook automation - No coding required
4. Appointment bot so that my customers can book directly from their Facebook messenger.

Askar · Answer

Great tool to integrate push notifications that are kind of smartly delivered.

Seema Thakur · Answer

I would highly recommend AeroLeads for lead generation and building a database of prospects. It fetches the email addresses and other details of the prospects in real-time and builds the list within a click. 
It also verifies the data and exports the files within one click to Salesforce, HubSpot CRM, Pipedrive, etc.

Marcus Gosling · Answer

Just the right amount of features.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

Trello is absolutely a must-have. We use it extensively at Freshworks and cannot imagine a life without it.

Vijay Dylan Kumar · Answer

This portal helps to get business found for keywords (e.g. footcare wholesale asia) on Google for a fraction of the cost of normal SEO. As low as $10 / mth

Gal Dubinski · Answer

Intercom will help you manage communication with your clients

Lukas Mehnert · Answer

Works even for websites!

Stephen Barrow · Answer

Slack, Front, and, most recently, Nuclino. It's essentially an all-in-one tool for internal collaboration, all of our docs and projects are there and it's a pleasure to use.

Esmeralda Martinez · Answer

Great analytics platform for understanding entire picture of customer behavior like feature usage, best marketing sources, churn, etc

Ravinder Mahori · Answer

Built from ground up for SMBs and supports web, facebook, SMS and voice channels for customer communication. Automates 40% of customer queries on day 0! Coverts missed calls to appointments!

Ivan Burban · Answer

Stripo helps to reduce email production time up to 60%!

Michiel · Answer

We couldn't live without Workweek. It's our tool to keep track of what everyone's working on each week. Super easy to use, each week you add your to-do's for the week (Optionally adding a label or due date to a task). Once your colleagues are part of your team you can also see their weekly tasklist (and they'll see yours). Best of all when you complete a task, it rains confetti! 🎊 Haha, give it a try! ;)

Derek J. Sine · Answer

Zoom has legit integrations with Google Calendar + native features across Desktop/Mobile devices.

Jose Augusto Montiel Urribarri · Answer

Highly intuitive and easy to use, quick setup.

Nick Berry · Answer

Can do 100% of my outbound calling, emails and marketing from one place.

Soujanya · Answer

Drift is a messaging app (Live chat) that lets you talk to people on your website.

Peter Toth · Answer

Zapier or similar tool for automation. As small business you have limited resources so whatever can be automated should be automated.

Nick 🇳🇱 · Answer

With Figma we got a really tight feedback loop with the team, and are instantly able to build new features when the design's are hot off the press

Daria Zwierz · Answer

A simple ticketing system that lets you handle customer communication.

Deborah Kay · Answer

Videos look DIY but it works like magic on Facebook.

Patrick Bollenbach · Answer

Just started using this, wow. Great tool.

Charles Kwang · Answer

user friendly

Alexander Tutungi · Answer

Dubsado! It is the most incredible Client Management System to run and automate literally EVERYTHING you need to run your business! It's affordable, 100% customizable and the customer support is out of this world! Manage leads, create forms and contracts, handle bookkeeping, get paid and more all in one place!

Joe d'Elia · Answer

It would be very tough to put food on my table without this!

Deborah Kay · Answer

Can't live without it

Joshua Dance · Answer

Knowing what the most important numbers are, and where they are headed, is super valuable for a Saas company.

Siddharth Kaushik · Answer

Mailupnext provides reliable and affordable bulk email sending service that ensures delivery of your promotional emails

Sergio Florez · Answer

DailyBot is a chatbot that helps to adopt the daily follow-up practice for remote teams, for an improved communication and a more effective team when it comes to identify and solve problems. It is totally inspired on the Scrum Standup meetings practice, but adapted for remotes that require more asynchronous communication and multiple time zones. It integrates a vacation mode and a team motivation tracker 😃.

Your team will never lose a daily standup anymore! There is always access to the history with search and filters through the web dashboard.

It's a huge team assistant!

Sneha Mittal · Answer

Great for managing your scheduling tasks, like accepting group bookings for workshops, classes, events, great for one on one scheduling like meeting scheduling, providing demo sessions, etc. It also works amazingly well for service type businesses, like salons, therapists, medical practice, wellness clinics, etc. SuperSaaS offers a free forever trial which is perfect for small businesses. You setup the system for free and contact the support team in case of any questions, and then purchase the paid version when you grow. Plus, the paid version is s cheap it starts at just $8 per month, which is the cost of a coffee almost.

Bernardo de Castro · Answer

To save time in managing team email signatures. I am a suspect because I am the founder. There are good alternatives too.

Amy Ahrens · Answer

As a freelance writer, I couldn't live without Google Drive and Docs for sharing drafts w/ clients for easy real time editing and feedback.

Simon Benfeldt Jørgensen · Answer

Because you will be noticed in the media.

Mike Cuesta · Answer

This should be the hub for your company's communications, document management and productivity.

Brett Hellman · Answer

It's all about the people 👨‍🚀👩🏾‍⚖️👨🏼‍🎓 People make businesses successful. The best people embrace a growth mindset which is powered by hearing feedback from your peers. Matter puts you in control of receiving feedback from your peers versus passively waiting for feedback once or twice a year. Oh! And it's free and fun to get started.

Paul Stephenson · Answer

Flow has always been great for team task management but the latest version now solves our project and resource planning too. It's pretty much a 'goldilocks' solution for us - not too simple, not too complicated.

maxime berthelot · Answer

I couldn't live without Cloudapp ❤️

Peter Forret · Answer

Love the custom status pages, so you can create a subdomain status.<yourproject.com> and see if all the services are still up

Sneha Mittal Sachdeva · Answer

Use SuperSaaS for meeting scheduling and organizing group events in my organization. Simple and easy and quite helpful in reducing admin work + no back and forth emails. Automated email/SMS reminder system is amazing.

Peter Schroeder · Answer

Troops is a great way to keep your sales reps in Slack. Our sales reps are in Slack all day long, and keeping them in their workflow is critical for their productivity. We can inject account/opportunities info right into conversations (when I ask them about opportunities), get Salesforce notifications in Slack, and they have an impressive virtual gong with some crazy fun Gifs for when you win opportunities.

Julie Tolosa · Answer

It's integrated with the apps a start-up/small team would need like task manager and chat. It has built-in AI work coach to remind everyone to stick to their deadlines. It's also social and gamified for added engagement. It's an all-in-one app but still very user-friendly.

Luis Vegerano · Answer

CoSchedule combines all you marketing, blogging, and social media promotion in one place. Need I say more!!!

Ahfaz Ahmed · Answer

The best email marketing solution for small businesses.

Answer

Create amazing proposals super fast and get paid!

Allan Caeg · Answer

Email remains to be my primary way of communicating with prospects and clients.

From influencer outreach to closing a deal, it's important for me to understand if folks are receiving and engaging with my 1:1 emails.

Stephanie · Answer

Super granular list management.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

A nice, easy to use tool for your A/B testing needs.

Askar · Answer

Tried everything from Trello to Asana to sticky notes...and finally, this one stuck! A great tool to maintain your backlog, run active development boards, and pretty anything that involves some sort of a workflow.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

If you're looking at powerful customer support tools, look no beyond Freshdesk. It comes with a very generous free tier that gets you unlimited customer support agent seats.

Tejas Kinger · Answer

A quick to setup, easy to use tool to streamline your customer support.

Mohan Prajapati · Answer

love it

Alen Komljen · Answer

For any product, you need a great monitoring and logging solution. It helps you to boost your productivity and to focus on your SaaS app instead of troubleshooting everything manually around it.

Jonas · Answer

A quick and simple way to provide great search experience on any product.

Ricky Shafier · Answer

Let's you find relevant new clients!

Jay Vics · Answer

Social Media Automation, scheduler, content finder, and posting tool with a built-in image editor... For FREE. There is a pro version for 27 a month too, but you can connect unlimited accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Google+ for free forever.  "Hootsuite + Canva + Buzzsumo = MySoPro!"

(Full disclosure - My company owns this product, but we use it every day and use it to manage clients accounts as well - and its free.)

Answer

Imagine Slack+Dropbox+Asana+Intercome+GSuite+Salesforce in one and free. That's how good Bitrix24 is.

Stefan Theofilos · Answer

Sixty helped me with my website and they are great!

Rebecca Pollard · Answer

I'm biased because I work here ... but when you're starting your business, you should definitely consider email marketing as one of the first strategies to implement. AWeber is a great solution for small businesses. We've been in business for over 18 years, have 100,000 customers, award-winning customer service, and love helping our customers get educated on how to be better marketers. Check us out for sure!

Rebecca Pollard · Answer

Just released from the team at AWeber. Automatically segment audiences based on opens and clicks.

Anthony Da Mota · Answer

I totally recommend this as it's way more effective and productive than any other management tool (Asana, Trello…).

Arun Sathiya · Answer

OneSignal is a great tool for push notifications! And, did you know that they're free for a lifetime for any number of subscribers? Mind it, they collect your data though.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

Freshchat is one of the finest live chat solutions. They have a very generous free tier that gets you 10 agent seats! Now, who else does that?

Arseny Stefanov · Answer

To grow quickly you need to know how to achieve and repeat your success. Managing tasks and their results helps to do this.

Thomas DIDIER · Answer

Forest is a back office solution (www.forestadmin.com) which allows you to manage and visualize data.
Developers are saving time -no design, dev. & maintenance- and can focus on the customer-facing product. Business teams get more autonomous and efficient.

Gregory Orton · Answer

So simple, but it could really help you with seeing inside the black box of all your server tasks and making sure you know exactly when or why your jobs have failed, saving you a lot of time and money in the process.

Answer

A must-have when it comes to security and vulnerability detection in my opinion!

Paul Gordon · Answer

This is my own product .. but I do use it every day to manage my startups presence and reputation online. It tells me everything that has changed since I last looked and I use it to followback anyone who has followed my account and keep on top of whats happening on my website without having to log into multiple tools.

John Lane · Answer

Easy Project Management with a daily email of to do list tasks.  Super easy Project Portfolio Management; mobile app component.  Low learning curve for my team and they are making constant improvements.

Arun Sathiya · Answer

We use G Suite yet again at Freshworks. It's our daily-driver for a range of activities and cannot live without it.

Ivan Burban · Answer

Stripo helps you reduce email production time up to 60%! We have 300+ Free responsive email templates and greate Drag-n-Drop&HTML editor in one!

Prateeka · Answer

Don't have to think about expenses anymore!

Deborah Kay · Answer

Enabling Stripe and Apple Pay boosted our ecommerce conversion rates by 600%

Matthieu ROBIN · Answer

We use it from our platform for credit card payments, very easy to use.

joshua bradley · Answer

Stripe all day.

Nevada Dyer · Answer

Very intuitive UI, allows me to work exactly the way I want.!

Lukas Mehnert · Answer

Works even for websites!

Syd Bakshi · Answer

I have been using this product for my clients and it has made my life easier. Most of the things can be automated and with the appointment booking feature, I can actually help my clients generate more leads & conversions. A must try tool for businesses like Salons, Spas, restaurants etc.

Hugo Fauquenoi · Answer

I'm biased because we build Twist, but it's become Doist's operating system. We're a fully remote team of 50 and couldn't live without one shared place for asynchronous communication

Answer

We use it for email marketing and web pushes mostly. The best thing is that it's quite functional with minimum restrictions even for free mode, and web pushes are totally free. Simple to use, SMTP server and API, bulk SMS - I haven't tried it yet though. And it's good for businesses with small email lists - less than 2 500 subscribers - and you can have 15 000 free emails and 12 000 transactional emails.

vyshnavi basuthkar · Answer

Troop Messenger has been specially designed for team collaboration to provide seamless work-flow routines among diverse teams.

The teams working on various client projects need to collaborate at one single interface for all the project tasks and updates.

So as to ensure this Troop Messenger has defined a beautiful feature stack to extend all the chat support services.

vyshnavi basuthkar · Answer

Excellent Tool for Team Collaboration

Veronica Belmont · Answer

This has been an absolute game changer for us!

Deborah Kay · Answer

Love this app. So useful

Ola Rybacka · Answer

Some of the hunters below mentioned Asana and Trello - we use both of them, integrated with TimeCamp that provides accurate time tracking, budgeting, invoicing and stats for productivity improvement.

Ian Mikosz · Answer

Tidio has live chat and chatbots which are both available in a free version with upgrades available. Makes handling customer questions so much easier. Chatbots can answer the same questions and even generate leads.

Rossi Ana · Answer

Love it, helps schedule ahead on all the social media channels we use. Also, helpful analytics.

Thiago Gomes · Answer

This product helps you as a manager to do your role like a "skills developer", register feedback e evaluate your team.

Damian Nurzyński · Answer

The team at Asana definitely found a sweet spot and delivered a powerful tool without compromising on simplicity.

Carlo Nicora · Answer

Super flexible task management that can help in product development as well. Also, you can start with the free version, which makes it super interesting for startups!

Teo Tokis · Answer

We use it for the team's communications. Super intuitive!

Shamit Khemka · Answer

Slack is the best collaboration software for keeping professional teams connected.

Lucas Hanson · Answer

Yeah, love Drift.  I'm a one person support team, so Drift is free for me, which is about all I need.

Vineet Gupta · Answer

There are so many tools that are required every day, but one of the very important tools for us is ProProfs Chat as it has been helping us in knowing our customers better, resolving their concerns and overall improving the revenue.

Rod Danan · Answer

Teams combine Skype, Slack, Google Drive, and more into one easy to use tool.

I have separate teams for Marketing, Product Dev, Customer Support, and more. You can create channels in each one with their own conversations, files, and other tabs. I use Planner for Project Management and you can add tabs for each project the team is working on.

I have pretty much all the essentials included with my Office 365 Membership making bootstrapping much easier.

Antoine G · Answer

Central and simple to use for every business willing to enhance their customers' relationship

Claire Lacompte · Answer

Amplitude is nice analytics stack for SaaS

Arun Sathiya · Answer

Buffer definitely gets a word here. They're having how social media marketing is done. 100%!

Deborah Kay · Answer

Love the Buffer team so much!!

Natalie Brucker · Answer

If you want to get read of manual task that is the place to go. :)

Natalie Brucker · Answer

If you want to get read of manual task that is the place to go. :)

Peter Toth · Answer

Zapier or similar tool for automation. As small business you have limited resources so whatever can be automated should be automated.