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The top 10 productivity tools for small businesses in 2021

Ring Central Blog


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Updated Sept 2020

Want to make your small business grow faster? Of course you do.

But as a small business owner, your time is extremely limited. Between responding to customer emails, promoting your products, and managing your online store, there isn’t much time left to figure out efficiencies. 

The truth is, everyone could be more productive. That’s where productivity tools come in. Productivity tools aren’t just helpful add-ons but crucial must-haves for the growth and success of a business, no matter what size. 

The importance of productivity management tools for small businesses especially applies in today’s “new normal” that’s led to the growing popularity of remote teams and employees working from home. Businesses need to be flexible and have options for these folks to be productive, making sure everyone on your team is spending time on the right tasks and automating things that aren’t worth anyone’s time.

But there are thousands of productivity tools out there—how do you know what’s best for your unique business? As a company that’s helped more than a few small businesses grow, we’ve done the research for you and put together this list of the top 10 online productivity tools, the types of businesses they’re best for, and just how they can help up your productivity game. 

Check out the whole list of 10, or skip to the free ones:

Spoiler alert: a powerful team messaging platform might be the key you need to more productive work. Grab the free checklist to help you choose the right one for your team or business.

Happy shopping!

How to choose the best productivity tool for your small business

Not every business is the same, so not every productivity tool out there is going to work for every business. Here are a few key things that separate productivity tools that work for small businesses versus larger ones.


Small businesses have smaller budgets, and rightfully so, as they also have significantly fewer users than larger businesses. So, the right productivity tools should be low cost or even free.

Ease of use

The best small business productivity tools should be intuitive and easy to use. Unlike larger businesses, smaller organizations don’t have the time or resources to provide extensive training to employees on how to use complex software. So when browsing potential tools, look for clean, straightforward interfaces.

Ease of implementation

Similar to the previous point, smaller businesses also don’t have the resources to hire full-on tech teams to implement more complicated systems that larger businesses may use. Look for out-of-the-box solutions that your team can start using right away.

The tools below check all three of these boxes.

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10 best productivity tools for small businesses

Here are the top 10 productivity tools for overall productivity, personal productivity, productive meetings and emails, and a couple more freebies that’ll help take your company’s productivity to another level.

Best productivity tools overall

1. RingCentral

Best all-in-one team messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone tool for teams who need to streamline their communications.

RingCentral is a cloud-based all-in-one communication platform that gives you messaging, video conferencing, and a phone system—in one app:

It lets you connect securely with your team, prospects, and customers over the internet using your smartphone, tablet, or computer with enterprise-level voice quality.

Not only does this eliminate the need for a whole bunch of expensive office equipment, but it gives your customers the impression that you’re in a big office while in fact, you have the freedom to work from anywhere.

At RingCentral, we get that sometimes less is more when it comes to apps. Studies show that 69% of employees switch back and forth between up to 10 apps in a single hour, with some switching between up to 15 apps. If this sounds familiar, then you know all that context switching can overwhelm employees and kill productivity as a result. 

RingCentral’s app was designed to unify your team’s messaging, video conferencing, and cloud phone into a single platform, so employees don’t need to constantly toggle between different communications apps and instead focus their energy on the tasks that will ultimately grow your business (like closing deals). 

Oh, and not only do you have all your communication channels in one place, you can also create and assign tasks in the app. Set a due date, attach any files for context, even color-code the task if you need to:

task management in ringcentral's productivity app

Integration ideas:


Explore the RingCentral Advantage for small businesses:


2. Google Drive

Best collaborative file sharing and storage tool for teams that find themselves misaligned or lacking a source of truth.

google drive interface

Google Drive is the best free file sharing, document collaboration, and file storage tool out there. You get 15 GB of storage on the free plan, which is pretty awesome (beats Dropbox, another popular option that only gives you 2 GB on its free plan). 

If you’re going to use Google Drive, you may as well take full advantage of the suite of Google Workspace productivity tools that come with it, including Docs, Sheets, and Slides. Switch out your old-school Microsoft Office programs for these and enjoy real-time collaboration like never before, like commenting and team chat right on any document. All changes are recorded in the document history, including who made them and when, providing your team with a single source of truth rather than siloed documents on individual team member’s devices.

No more having to email documents back and forth and call it “collaboration.” No more confusion about which document is the most up to date. And a whole lot more productivity.

Google Drive also has a handy Backup and Sync feature that can automatically back up any files you save on your computer to Google Drive and let you access them without having to open the web app. Just another way Google Drive lets you find everything in one place.  

Integration ideas:

3. Trello

Best project management tool for teams with a lot of items in their backlog or a lot of pieces moving at one time to track where each task is at a glance.

trello's productivity tool

Perfect for visual organizers, a Trello board is made up of multiple swimlanes to represent the different steps in your workflow (e.g., “To do,” “In progress,” and “Done”). You can simply drag and drop tasks or “cards” to the appropriate swim lane as they move from one stage to the next, giving you a birds-eye view of where all your tasks are at. 

Cards can be assigned to people and be given due dates. They can be filled in with more details and even contain subtasks to break large tasks down into smaller ones.

Trello can help your team be more productive by serving as a centralized place to drop tasks into. Because everyone’s tasks are in one place, it provides great visibility to your team so they all know what everyone else is working on and stay on the same page. 

Your small business has big goals, and while those goals are easy to remember, the minuscule steps that go into making them a reality aren’t so much. Trello can help with that.

Integration ideas:

Personal productivity tools

4. Google Calendar

Best time-planning and scheduling tool for teams that struggle with finding time or that are trying to figure out where all their time goes.

google calendar personal productivity tool

Google Calendar is a beautiful, minimally designed calendar app that works on almost any device (it’s actually the default calendar on Android phones, but works great on iPhone as well). It integrates with a whole host of other apps, making it the perfect time planning app for small businesses. 

It only takes a matter of seconds to create new events no matter what device you’re on, and you can invite others to these events as well with an option to RSVP so you can see who’ll make it. Your calendar will automatically sync across all your devices.

If you also happen to use Gmail (more on this app later), Google Calendar will even automatically create events based on the emails you receive, like travel itineraries or appointments. More time saved, less work for you.

Integration ideas:

5. Evernote

Best note-taking tool for employees who constantly need to jot things down.

evernote note-taking app

Evernote is a centralized place to store all your notes, documents, images, and brain dump into. It’s accessible on all your devices, so you can see your notes and make new ones from anywhere. The Evernote Google extension even lets you clip information from web pages right to your Evernote notebook. 

You can take notes either by typing them or through voice-to-audio. Evernote will automatically save and sync your notes to your account. This increases productivity by eliminating the need to cover your monitor with sticky notes—you can simply use the search function in Evernote and find exactly what you’re looking for within seconds.

Because you can access Evernote from anywhere, you can jot things down as they come to your head so you won’t forget them by the time you get back into the office. This is especially helpful if you’re constantly jumping between devices.

Integration ideas:

Meetings productivity tools

6. Slack

Best free team messaging tool for small teams that need to be able to reach each other quickly and easily.

slack messaging app

Slack is a popular instant messaging app that’s aimed at reducing the number of internal emails your team sends back and forth, which is its productivity factor right there. It supports voice, video calling, and screen sharing and is free for teams of up to 10 people.

Within the Slack app, you can create one or multiple channels, each of which can either be set to public or private to a few select team members. This helps keep conversations on one topic in a single chat. 

But the thing that really sets Slack apart from other messaging apps is its library of apps. Whatever functionality you can think of, there’s probably an app for it. From automatic meeting minutes and automatically saving attachments to Google Drive or Dropbox, to adding tasks to your to-do list manager. While some of these apps are paid, a large chunk of them are free making Slack a perfect, cost-effective option for small businesses.

Integration ideas:

Email productivity tools

7. Gmail

Probably the best email inbox tool for any business that uses email!

gmail interface

Email is infamous for killing time and productivity but Gmail actually doubles as a productivity tool, setting it apart from other email apps. It’s also free, and there’s a good chance you and your team are already using it, so there’s no learning curve either.

Gmail has a super clean interface that’s easy to use and not distracting. It also has smart features like the ability to create canned responses, meaning you don’t need to keep typing out the same message over and over again. 

What makes Gmail unique is it automatically sorts your emails into folders thus reducing noise and clutter, but you can also create labels to sort your emails even further. For example, you can create a label that automatically forwards any email with the word “invoice” in the subject line to your accountant. 

Integration options:

8. Sanebox

Best email organization tool for teams that have a whole lot of email and not enough time to sort through them or those that want to prioritize their emails automatically.

sanebox productivity and organization tool

Sanebox is the personal assistant everyone wishes they had to clean up their email inbox for them. It uses smart filtering to automatically sort your emails into different folders based on importance, so you can effectively focus your time on the high-importance emails first. 

It does this by analyzing your email history to figure out which emails you care about and which ones you don’t so much. It’ll then move the not-so-important emails to a @SaneLater folder which hides all your meh emails out of sight until you have time to look at them. (Or until you ruthlessly hit “Send to Trash.” Y’know, whichever.)

It also saves any email attachments in the cloud for you and gives you the ability to snooze emails until you’re ready to look at them, to help you avoid distractions.

Free productivity tools

9. LastPass

Best password management tool for teams that use a lot of apps and use different passwords for each of them to log in securely and automatically.

lastpass password management tool

Though many of us are guilty of it, no one should be using the same password for everything—especially not business owners. Why make things so easy for hackers? Don’t be so generous with your company’s data.

Thing is, coming up with good passwords can be tough, and remembering all of them is even tougher. With LastPass, you can generate lengthy, secure passwords that no one, not even you, would be able to remember. Which is why it also saves you passwords for you and lets you log in automatically to every site you need them on. Plus, LastPass can be used across all your different devices, letting you log into the programs you need from anywhere. The only password you need to remember is your LastPass one! 

LastPass comes with a free or paid plan. The free one lets you save login credentials for up to 20 accounts, which is generally more than enough for small business users. 

10. Grammarly

The best spelling and grammar checking tool for anyone who writes anything, including emails, documents, presentations, and so on.

grammarly tool

Grammarly checks your spelling and grammar for you as you type, so you always sound uber professional in all your written communications. Think of it as a proofreader that wants to make sure you sound as eloquent as possible.

For example, it’ll catch if you forgot to capitalize a name, miss a punctuation mark, or if your sentence could be clearer. It also evaluates the overall tone of your writing with an emoji. A dress shirt emoji means your writing sounds formal. A hug emoji means you sound friendly. And a peace sign emoji means you sound optimistic. Fun! 

One thing that sets Grammarly apart from a typical spell-check tool is it gives you a brief explanation of why something is incorrect, so you know what to avoid doing in the future. This not only makes Grammarly a great tool to double-check your writing, but it’s also awesome for developing your writing skills, meaning you’ll get more and more efficient at writing those emails and letterheads as time goes on. And therefore, be more productive. 

Start being more productive with these tools today

Having the right tools in your productivity arsenal will help your team stay focused on the tasks that’ll make your small business grow. All the tools we went over in this post are either free, have a free option, or cost very little to use, making them sound investments. 

The return on investment? More things done. 

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