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It’s easier than ever to work from home and use software to collaborate online and keep your team focused, organized, and on task.
We bring you the best online tools your team can use to communicate and collaborate efficiently on projects.
Article Overview
- How Many People Work Virtually?
- Best Tools By Category
- All Tools Reviewed
- Should I Use More Than One Tool?
- What About Security?
- Why Use Online Collaboration Tools? (Video)
- Which Tools Do We Use?
A virtual team – whether across the street or across the world – is a team whose members simultaneously work together to a common purpose, while physically apart. -Yael Zofi
How Many People Work Virtually?
Working from anywhere has never been easier thanks to WiFi, cloud computing, smartphones, and online collaboration tools. Building relationships is also easier and faster due to social media.
Did you know that approximately 20-25% of the workforce teleworks1 at some frequency? Of course, these figures were pre-COVID-19. With most office workers still operating from home during the coronavirus crisis, online project management tools are more important than ever.
We Rock Your Web has been testing and using various tools throughout the years to keep our virtual team connected and productive from locations around the world.
What Are The Best Online Productivity Tools?
What Are The Best Online Productivity Tools?You have tons of options for your online collaboration needs. Some have overlapping features; however, each offers a different type of service. Some specialize in task management, while others are better for instant messaging.
You may find it best to use multiple collaboration tools (like we do at We Rock Your Web). For that reason, we’ve chosen a winner for each category rather than our typical top 3 picks. Read the reviews below to see what each company specializes in and how these tools can help your team.
Best Productivity Tool By Category
- Project and Task Management
- Virtual Team Communication
- All-In-One Team Collaboration
- Document Collaboration
- Cross-Platform Collaboration
- Collaborative Brainstorming
All Tools Reviewed
Airtable | Asana | Basecamp | Google Drive | Microsoft Teams/Yammer | SharePoint | Slack | Teamwork | Todoist | Trello
Additionally, to prevent this review from becoming unwieldy, these tools are reviewed on our overflow page:
ClickUp | Glip | Jira Core | Kanban Tool | LiquidPlanner | Monday.com | ProofHub | Samepage | Sococo | Wrike
Best For Project And Task Management
Teams of any type (virtual or not) require you to use tools to manage tasks and projects of all sizes. The challenge is getting everyone on board with the same system. You want something that’s complex enough to give you options and flexibility yet not so complicated and overwhelming that you spend more time learning the system than getting work done.
At We Rock Your Web, we’re suckers for Basecamp (and many others are too), but from the recent research we’ve done, it seems more teams are migrating toward Teamwork Projects because it has more features than Basecamp. But we also review two project management tools that are growing in popularity, Todoist and Airtable.
Teamwork Review (Winner)
Best For: Project and task management for more experienced users
Ideal Team Size: All company sizes
Teamwork is super easy to use and intuitive. It’s similar to Basecamp except that it has a few more features, including the ability to give tasks priorities, create milestones and invoices, and track time. It also has a desktop timer you can download to your PC or Mac to track hours by project and task.
You can view what’s on your plate by checking out the calendar or see a list in an activity log format. It also shows workloads and a snapshot of tasks and milestones that are past due. You can customize Teamwork to fit your team’s specific needs.
Teamwork continually makes updates and improvements to their service. In 2018 they introduced advanced features like bulk-editing, historical information on changes for each task, and the ability to exclude tags from searches. In 2019 and 2020, they added CRM, project time budgeting, and other features to their growing list of capabilities.
If you like Teamwork for project management, it even has its chat and help desk products so you can keep everything under one roof. Teamwork is an affordable option for looking for a collaboration tool with basic yet functional project management.
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Pricing
- 30-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Free Forever: $0/month for 100MB file space, 5 users, and 2 active projects
- Pro: $10/month per user billed annually ($12.50 if billed monthly), minimum 5 users, 100 GB space, unlimited client users, 300 projects, and more
- Premium: $18/month per user billed annually ($22.50 if billed monthly), minimum 5 users, 250 GB space, unlimited client users, 600 projects, and more (save 20% if billed annually)
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing, 500+ GB space, unlimited users & projects, and more
Coupon
Read Our In-Depth Teamwork Projects Review
Basecamp Review (Honorable Mention)
Best For: Task management for everyday users
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized companies
Are you looking for an essential, easy-to-use, and straightforward project management tool? Look no further than Basecamp. You can track projects and tasks via to-do lists, host written discussions, embed media files (images, videos), and more. Basecamp 3 is our primary project management tool at We Rock Your Web.
What’s great about Basecamp is its simplicity. There are few distractions to take you off task. Basecamp cuts down on email when you set up your notifications, so you only receive alerts or emails when a specific task or discussion is relevant to you.
It also keeps you organized by stringing discussions together in one task. You can tag people and assign the task to whoever’s court the item goes to next (or multiple people). Basecamp 3, the newest version, gives you added control over these notifications.
Our Experience
Kimberly A., We Rock Your Web, has been using Basecamp since 2013, and here is her experience with it.
I’ve used a handful of various project management tools and I must say, Basecamp is one of my favorites. I found Teamwork to be a little overwhelming and Basecamp to be more straightforward. I like that Basecamp has a simple layout with nothing flashy to overcomplicate things. Teamwork, on the other hand, has more colors and distractions for me, so I was more confused when I used it. However, I know some people may like the color coding options that Teamwork offers.
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Pricing
- 30-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Basecamp Personal: Free for 1GB storage, 3 projects, and up to 20 users
- Basecamp Business: $99/month for 500GB storage and unlimited users and projects
Coupon
Read Our In-Depth Basecamp Review
Todoist Review
Best For: Task management and project scheduling
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized teams
Looking for an easy-to-use, reasonably priced, and simple task management tool? Todoist has become a go-to tool for over 100,000 teams. It bundles project scheduling, task management and document management together in one platform.
It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that you’ll find with advanced tools like Asana, but its simplicity could be just what you need. The potential downside? If your team requires a large number of tasks, Todoist may not be the tool for you since they have caps on the number of projects with all plans (unlike Basecamp).
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Pricing
Todist offers a free 30-day trial.
- Free version, up to 80 projects, up to 5 people per project
- Premium: $4/month or $36/year, up to 300 projects, up to 25 people per project
- Business: $6/month/user or $60/user/year, up to 500 projects, up to 50 people per project, team and admin features
Coupon
Airtable Review
Best For: Project management (especially for marketing, advertising, creatives)
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized teams
Airtable is a visually appealing collaboration platform that combines the flexibility of a spreadsheet with rich features like Kanban card stacks, file attachments, calendars, and reporting. In Airtable, you create a spreadsheet/database for each project. These “bases” have highly customizable tables and fields. It’s like Excel on steroids.
Powerful filtering, sorting, and grouping features allow you to arrange and view your work projects differently. If you have the Pro or Enterprise plan, you can also add what they call blocks to your bases. Blocks are creative palettes of app-like functionality that allow you to add maps, video chat, multimedia, and other content to boost your workflow.
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Pricing
You can save 17% off the following pricing if you pay annually. All plans, including the free version, include unlimited bases.
- Free version: 1,200 records per database, 2GB attachment space per base
- Plus: $12/user/month for 5,000 records per database, 5GB attachment space per base
- Pro: $24/user/month for 50,000 records per database, 20GB attachment space per base, advanced calendar features, custom branded forms, user permissions
- Enterprise: must contact for pricing, includes unlimited records per database, 1TB attachment space per base, dedicated customer service, individualized onboarding, and training
Coupon
Best For Virtual Team Communications
When you have a virtual team, good team communication is critical to collaboration, but sometimes an important text can be disruptive and scheduling a phone call can be impossible. Luckily, there are more options than ever before. Virtual team communication tools give you a dedicated platform to make up for the lack of a shared physical environment.
Slack Review (Winner)
Best For: Virtual team online chat communications
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized companies
Slack is a souped-up chat platform created by one of the Flickr founders. Our team started using Slack in early 2015, and we’re big fans. The desktop (and web-browser) app is intuitive and straightforward yet useful.
It has all the same features as other chat platforms that you know and love but creates a virtual hub to put all your communications in one place. Drag and drop a file into a chat window. Host an impromptu virtual meeting with one of its many integrations and search conversations.
You can also search the chat history and star important messages. It has a user-friendly interface, and you barely need any training to start communicating and collaborating with your team. You can @mention people (similar to Twitter) to call things to their attention in a private message or on one of the “channels.”
We use Slack for quick questions to help eliminate unnecessary emails and texts. It’s also a good tool to chat about non-work-related things and have some fun with your team (including custom emojis). Lastly, it has a strict privacy policy that makes us a lot more comfortable sharing sensitive information than on some competing platforms.
Our Experience
Kimberly A., We Rock Your Web, has been using Slack since 2015, and here is her experience with it.
Slack is one of my favorite tools we use on our team. It’s great for quick questions, and it’s a fun place to catch up with coworkers too. I appreciate the different Channels our team has created, so we can easily organize discussions around specific subjects like editorial changes, tech issues, and more.
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Pricing
- Free: 10,000 searchable (most recent) messages/month and 10 third-party apps or custom apps
- Standard: $8/user/month (billed monthly) or $6.67/user/month (billed annually) for unlimited searchable message archive and unlimited apps and service integrations (sign up using the link above for $100 in free credits)
- Plus: $15/user/month (billed monthly) or $12.50/user/month (billed annually) for SAML-based single sign-on and 99.99% guaranteed uptime SLA
- Enterprise: must contact for pricing (includes unlimited workspaces, HIPAA-compliant messaging, and more
Coupon
Microsoft Teams & Microsoft Yammer Review (Honorable Mention)
Best For: Companies who already use Microsoft products and programs
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized teams (Teams), Large companies (Yammer)
Dubbed the “hub for teamwork in Office 365,” Microsoft Teams is perfect for those who already use Microsoft products and services like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, etc.
The Teams platform puts all of Microsoft’s online collaboration tools under one roof, including chat, conference calling, customized dashboards, and more. It’s geared toward small team collaboration within an organization. For example, your marketing department could use Teams to work on specific projects.
Yammer is meant for larger, company-wide communications, including announcements, town halls, training, cross-departmental meetings and more. However, you can create private groups in Yammer. Many companies use both Teams and Yammer since they serve different communication purposes.
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Pricing
Teams and Yammer are free services, but you must have Microsoft 365 to use them. Microsoft 365 has 4 pricing options:
- Essentials: $5/month per user (with annual contract)
- Business Standard: $12.50/month per user (with annual contract)
- Business Premium: $20/month per user (with annual contract)
- Apps only: $8.25/month per user (with annual contract)
- View all options
Best For All-In-One Team Collaboration
Team collaboration platforms combine communications, task management, project tools, and more all under one roof. Instead of doing one specific task exceptionally well, team collaboration tools do a lot of things pretty well.
You might sacrifice certain features, but you get the benefit of having an all-in-one product that consolidates everything into one place versus logging in and out of multiple platforms. We chose Asana as the clear winner for the best team collaboration category.
Asana Review
Best For: Team collaboration
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized companies
Asana claims to be “teamwork without email,” and it is just that. It looks and acts like an email inbox, but groups projects to add due dates and “likes” and stars for essential items in one place. It integrates with several third-party sites, including Google Drive and Slack. Many well-known organizations like Salesforce, Meals on Wheels, and Deloitte use Asana.
However, it does take some getting used to if you’re not very tech-savvy. There are several bells and whistles users can take advantage of, including the ability to create custom themes and shortcuts.
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Pricing
Asana offers a 30-day free trial.
- Free forever for up to 15 users
- Premium: $13.49/user/month (billed monthly) or $10.99/user/month (billed annually)
- Business: $30.49/user/month (billed monthly) or $24.99/user/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: contact Asana for pricing
Coupon
Best Tool For Document Collaboration
When you have a document that needs editing and feedback, it can be a challenge to go back and forth between versions and confusing to know which is the latest copy. Also, files attached to emails can go unnoticed in email chains and weigh down your email server space. Enter: Google Drive.
Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) is widely used by many virtual teams, government agencies, non-profits, and businesses of all sizes. When you have your document hosted on a cloud-based editing platform like Google Drive, you have only one copy of a document, yet you can go back to restore previous versions if needed.
Google Drive Review
Best For: Document collaboration
Ideal Team Size: All sizes
Google Drive’s functionality is similar to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. What’s different is that you and your team can collaborate on a project together in real-time via the cloud. Team members can edit, view, and comment simultaneously without worrying about version control. You can also share folders and restrict user access through Google Drive and access your documents on the go using its laptop and mobile apps.
There is 2-step authentication to ensure your documents’ security. It’s important to know that Google offers its tools at no cost, but you’re giving them the ability to see and use your data for their R&D purposes. So in a way, you’re paying with your privacy.
Be sure to check your documents’ access levels and be especially careful with sensitive data. We use Google Drive for active documents and archive older documents to a safer, more private location.
Our Experience
Kimberly A., We Rock Your Web, has been using Google Drive since it first launched in 2012, and here is her experience with it.
I’m a huge fan of Google Drive. I use it for work as well as personal things. I planned my wedding thanks to Google Drive and I keep my research organized for work-related tasks stored here too. It’s super simple to use and easy to teach others how to use as well.
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- Free: first 15GB
- Basic: $6/month/user (up to 30 GB cloud storage)
- Business Standard: $12/month/user (up to 2 TB cloud storage)
- Business Plus: $18/month/user (up to 5 TB cloud storage)
- Enterprise: Contact for pricing (as much storages needed)
Best Tool For Cross-Platform Project Collaboration
Change can be difficult, and it can be a challenge to get everyone on board with a new way of doing things, so the last thing you want to do is cause tension in your team.
So why not take your existing software and systems and integrate them to work together? Thanks to SharePoint‘s cross-platform project collaboration you can do just that.
Microsoft 365 SharePoint Review
Best For: Cross-platform project collaboration
Ideal Team Size: Mid to large-sized companies
SharePoint is great for companies that use Windows since it’s part of the Microsoft Office suite. You can connect with other employees using Microsoft’s technologies like Word, Excel, and Powerpoint. Large companies commonly use Sharepoint to integrate with existing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools and applications like DocuSign.
Another option is SharePoint Server OneDrive for Business, which syncs files and folders (similar to Dropbox).
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Pricing
- SharePoint Online Plan 1: $5/user/month
- SharePoint Online Plan 2: $12.50/user/month
- Office 365 Enterprise E3: $20/user/month (annual commitment)
- View all options
Coupon
Read Our In-Depth Microsoft Sharepoint Review
Best Tool For Collaborative Brainstorming
Brainstorming can be a challenge when you’re not all sitting in a conference room together or chatting over coffee. That’s where collaborative brainstorming tools like Trello and Kanban Tool come in. They allow you to share ideas, manage to-do tasks, and more, visually. It’s like using a giant virtual whiteboard to post sticky notes, tape ideas, and assign tasks.
Trello Review
Best For: Collaborative brainstorming
Ideal Team Size: Small to mid-sized companies
Trello is a basic to-do list service you can use to collaborate with team members. There are minimal options to assign tasks, but you can tag “cards,” create alerts and add photos to “boards.” Think of Trello as an online whiteboard with a bunch of high-tech sticky notes.
The free version provides most of the features as the gold/upgraded version, and the functionality is more or less the same. Trello is great for anyone looking for a visual way to virtually brainstorm ideas and display your thoughts in a stream.
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Pricing
- Free for (up to 10MB per file attachment and 10 team boards)
- Business Class: $9.99/user/month when paid annually (up to 250 MB per file attachment and unlimited boards)
- Enterprise: $17.50/user/month (or less) when paid annually (up to 250 MB and unlimited boards, additional features)
Coupon
Should I Use More Than One Collaboration Tool?
Probably yes. Think about how you’ll be using your online collaboration tool. All these products offer various benefits, and you may find that using a combination of these services will work best for you. For example, we use Google Drive, Slack, and Basecamp regularly.
Finding the optimal combination of these products to meet your team’s needs is key. Below are some additional online collaboration tools that you may want to consider for your team:
- Time Doctor – employee time tracking
- Google Meet – video auto-switching (free)
- FreshBooks – cloud accounting, send invoices, track time, capture expenses
- Skype – video conferencing/chat/get your own # (good for travel)
- Join.me – super simple screen sharing
- Shoeboxed – mobile receipt organization
- Voxer App – voice texting/walkie-talkie
Security And Privacy For Your Virtual Team
Whether you’re a company or an individual, your data is at risk of being hacked or lost. It’s important to take advantage of the security and back-up features these online collaboration tools offer.
Some have built-in security features, while others require configurations (read their privacy policies carefully to learn who has access to your data and what’s they do with it).
No matter what, make sure you aren’t at risk for hacks or server crashes (read our article on website security and optimization on ways to protect yourself). Ensure the data you’re passing between platforms is secure and that your information backs up.
For example, it’s a good idea to use a secure service for signing important documents. If you’ve been compromised, we recommend a service like Sucuri to clean up the mess. Lastly, check and make sure your email server wasn’t blacklisted as a result of the incident.
Video: Why Use Online Collaboration Tools?
We made this fun, one-minute video to show you how these tools can help supercharge your team’s productivity.
Which Collaboration Tools Do We Use?
Find out exactly which tools we use at We Rock Your Web in our companion article, tips for managing your virtual team.
What tips do you have for collaborating online? Do you have a favorite software or tool?
Sources: [1] Global Workplace Analytics
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