In today’s work landscape, a whopping 12.7% of full-time employees have traded office desks for cozy home setups, showing us that working from home is no longer the exception but the norm. Also, 28.2% are rocking a hybrid work model, blending the best of both worlds.
Now, let’s talk about the magic behind these numbers – the remote work tools that are making this shift not just possible but downright awesome. It’s not just about working in pajamas; it’s about the fantastic benefits these tools bring to the table.
From breaking down office walls to giving us the freedom to craft our workday, these tools are turning remote work into a flexible and efficient game-changer. In this article, we will share some must-have tools remote work tools that will keep you and your remote team in sync and super connected!
Top 32 remote work tools for remote teams
Best project management tool
Some teams might try to handle everything via email which is particularly dangerous. Project management system solve the problem of virtual teams to help organize documents and tasks, to make it easier for the teams.
1. ProofHub
ProofHub stands as your comprehensive remote work tool, seamlessly blending project management and team collaboration into a powerful platform. It simplifies task management with an intuitive interface, enabling efficient assignment, setting due dates, and monitoring progress. The Board view simplifies tracking tasks from “To-Do” to “Done,” offering a dynamic visual representation of your project’s journey.
The platform’s adaptability shines through with the ability to customize workflows, ensuring they align seamlessly with your team’s unique needs. Task prioritization becomes a breeze with drag-and-drop simplicity, while Gantt charts offer a comprehensive visual overview of project schedules, promoting transparency and coordination.
ProofHub ensures everyone is on the same page with its shared calendar, making scheduling meetings and setting reminders a breeze. Communication is centralized with discussions, chats, and announcements, creating a synchronized environment with instant messaging. Also, it facilitates seamless collaboration with file sharing, proofing, and feedback features, eliminating the chaos of disjointed communication.
ProofHub’s user-friendly interface and mobile accessibility add versatility, ensuring productivity even on the go. It’s more than a tool; it’s a unified hub that empowers your team to manage tasks, communicate, and collaborate with ease in the remote work landscape.
2. Nuclino
Nuclino was inspired by the idea of a collective brain. It’s a unified workspace where remote teams can bring all their knowledge, docs, and projects together in one place, replacing multiple other remote work tools.
You can use Nuclino to build your company wiki, manage projects and tasks, share and work on documents in real-time, onboard new remote employees, and more – all without the chaos of files and folders, context switching, or silos. The List, Board, and Graph views help you organize your docs and projects in a way that best fits your workflow.
Nuclino stands out thanks to its uncluttered, clean interface, user-friendly design, and speed. It has everything you need to get things done, without clunky menus or rarely-used features to distract you. This makes Nuclino a great choice for those who value ease of use and speed over feature count.
Nuclino has virtually no learning curve and makes it easy for new users to get started.
3. Hubspot
HubSpot’s free help desk and ticketing software is a heavensend for remote customer and sales teams alike. With its intuitive interface and robust features, it empowers teams to efficiently manage customer inquiries and tickets from anywhere in the world.
The software offers a centralized platform where teams can easily organize, prioritize, and respond to customer/client inquiries promptly. Through streamlined ticketing workflows, agents can assign, track, and resolve tickets seamlessly, ensuring no customer falls through the cracks.
One of the standout features of HubSpot’s help desk is its automation capabilities. By automating repetitive tasks such as ticket routing and follow-up emails, teams can focus their energy on delivering exceptional customer experiences rather than getting bogged down by manual processes.
Moreover, the software provides valuable insights into customer interactions and ticket resolution metrics. With real-time reporting and analytics, teams can identify trends, monitor performance, and make data-driven decisions to continuously improve their support processes.
Essentially, HubSpot’s free help desk and ticketing software equips remote customer and sales teams with the tools they need to deliver top-notch support and drive customer satisfaction, no matter where they are.
4. Basecamp
Basecamp is another best remote work tools for managers, teams, freelancers, and agencies for its simple functionality, clean design, and elegant usability. It’s a project management and team collaboration software solution that helps you manage projects and communicate with clients in a meaningful way.
It offers a range of features and tools for sharing ideas, organizing conversations, and keeping everyone on the same page throughout the project.
At the same time, you get to experience limitations like no time tracking, no ability to archive topics, no subtasks, no professional team hierarchy, only outside integrations, etc. These limitations are the very reason why organizations and teams (especially growing teams) are looking for the best alternatives to Basecamp.
Well, no tool is perfect. At the end of the day, it is your specific needs that will decide whether or not a tool is ideal for your business. So, if Basecamp seems like a fair choice to you, give it a try.
5. Instagantt
Instagantt is a powerful tool for remote work that helps you visually plan, control, and schedule your projects. It’s a lot more than just a Gantt chart creator. When giving it a try, you’ll quickly notice you’re working with super intuitive and beautifully built software that allows you to develop an accurate illustration of your projects.
Communication is also a huge part of Instagantt. This software allows you to streamline your entire workflow and collaborate with your team members with instant messaging, making it a perfect fit for remote working, too.
Instagantt also comes with plenty of useful features such as the ability to create tasks and subtasks, templates for different types of projects, guidelines, milestones, notifications, baselines, critical path, and automatic project scheduling, all of which promote the feeling of being 100% sure of what’s going on with your projects at all times.
There are many advantages to using Instagantt, but one of the most important ones is being able to track meaningful details such as information related to deadlines, risks, priorities, and estimated hours and costs.
It’s also perfect for managing different types of projects, clients, and teams, or even for being able to keep track of how each person is managing their workload. It’s a good idea to give Instagantt a try.
Read on: Benefits of Project Management Software
Email marketing tools with analytics
6. EmailAnalytics
EmailAnalytics is a productivity tool for remote workers that visualizes your team’s email activity. You can see each member of your team’s average email response time, as well as how many emails each member of your team sends and receives every day. Sales and customer service teams use it to monitor and improve email productivity, and EmailAnalytics users see an average of a 42.5% improvement in email response time. That increased speed leads to a 16% increase in sales, on average.
To make things super convenient for team managers, you can get daily, weekly, and monthly email reports with benchmark data to compare your team against other teams, and watch your team’s improvement over time.
If your remote team uses email (and who doesn’t?) then your team needs EmailAnalytics. There’s no software to install, setup is done in just a few clicks, and you can instantly add team members and start tracking their email activity. It’s a must-have tool for any remote team.
Best team collaboration tool
With the rise in distributed companies, working with teams across borders is becoming a norm. Communication issues are bound to occur when the teams are not together in a room.
7. Troop Messenger
Troop Messenger is a compact remote work collaboration tool for small, medium, and large enterprises. This high-functionality, low-complexity tool addresses various domain specificities. Team members can interact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, location and file sharing, and by creating unlimited groups on the go.
This Slack alternative allows admins to add vendors, suppliers, and freelancers as orange members who get restricted access to the workspace.
Troop Messenger can be integrated with essential apps like Dropbox and Google Drive. With this collaboration tool, your team can migrate their files, and documents, and do a lot more than text. It is the best work-from-home communication tool your team needs to ensure business continuity.
8. Bit.ai
Bit.ai, the next-gen document management and collaboration platform is one of the most effective ways to collaborate across teams. Bit’s smart documents help you weave together digitally rich content into collaborative documents.
Enhance your communication and knowledge sharing across your team by attaching files, adding code blocks, and displaying rich media like Google Sheets, Typeform surveys, Airtable databases, Figma designs, and much more across 100+ applications into your documents.
The best part is that you can do all of this and more while collaborating in real time. Bit.ai is one of the smartest ways for your team to collaborate on internal communication, project documentation, technical docs, processes, training manuals, internal knowledge bases, client-facing content, a company blog, and much more.
A bonus feature is that your team can even collaborate with guests on documents and create workspace data rooms. This is really useful functionality if your workflows require you to collaborate with those outside of your organization like clients, consultants, vendors, etc.
Don’t waste a minute and start creating, sharing, organizing, managing, and tracking all of your team’s knowledge in one place with Bit.ai.
Read on: Importance of Collaboration In The Workplace
9. Slack
Slack is a messaging remote work tool that everybody loves. A digital space that helps in communication among teammates, allows them to share ideas, share comments in real time so everything moves swiftly. You can have all your team communication in one place wherever you go with a remote collaboration tool.
When the teams are remote, they can use Slack channels for instant messaging and collaboration. It will bring all your team communication in one place making managing remote employees a lot easier. This collaboration tool offers fully native apps for iOS and Android to give you complete functionality.
Also Read: 26 Best Slack Alternatives for Team Communication (You Cannot Live Without)
10. Hypercontext
Hypercontext is a shared agenda app for remote teams that empowers managers and their teams to be high-performing by combining quarterly priorities, weekly meetings, and engagement measures, all in one place.
With Hypercontext, teams can collaborate on meeting agendas for 1:1s, team meetings, and cross-functional meetings. With access to 500 conversation starters and over 180 goal examples, the platform helps you run meetings that are productive and meaningful. After each meeting, you’re kept accountable with clear next steps. Plus, managers get conversation analytics to better understand communication blindspots, and real-time employee feedback to track meeting effectiveness over time.
Hypercontext provides integrations with Google Suite, Chrome, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and more! So you can easily streamline objectives, meetings, and morale, all in one workflow.
Best cloud storage service
Cloud storage is a perfect sharing tool, especially for remote Cloud Storage & Collaboration, documents, and multimedia files are too large to send by email.
11. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud storage platform for remote teams to keep all files in one secure and centralized location. The remote workers can store and share documents, spreadsheets, and slide presentations. It can be used for reporting on weekly metrics. Additionally, Google Drive files can be synced across devices, so individuals can view and update them from anywhere.
12. Dropbox
It doesn’t work so well to share large files over email, therefore, Dropbox is a modern workspace that offers various features for managing remote employees. Remote workers can easily sync, share, and collaborate on documents. This cloud storage system has an API that makes it useful for remote collaborators. It allows for sharing big files – PowerPoint, photoshop, sketch with anyone.
Also Read: 17 Best Alternatives To Dropbox You Need To About In 2024!
Best productivity tool
Remote productivity is a crucial part of remote workers. Managing remote team workers greatly means making sure everyone is as productive as they can be.
13. Krisp
Krisp is a noise-canceling app that helps remote professionals and teams be more productive. It removes background noise on both sides of the call, so you and your call participants can take important calls from anywhere. You can use it with any communication app (Zoom, Skype, Slack, and many others) and enjoy more productive remote meetings.
14. Todoist
Todoist is for you if you are looking to geek out on the organization of tasks for your remote teams. It gives all the core features that include tasks, and subtasks, lets you create projects, add notes and upload files, set reminders, flags, and a productivity chart.
Read On: How to be More Productive at Work
15. Blink
Blink is a comprehensive app that empowers communication and enhances productivity for remote teams. It is designed to transform employee experience as a mobile responsive and unified communication platform.
Blink offers a range of features like calendar management, discussion boards, employee directories, news feeds, etc. – all to create a work-friendly digital environment that facilitates productivity and team cohesion above all else.
At the same time, it also offers tools to create micro-applications within the Blink platform. Through this, your business can create its own employee communication and collaboration solutions without the need for technical knowledge.
These micro-apps support absence management, automated timesheets, payment cards, network searches, and more. However, the biggest charm of these micro apps is that they can be optimized for desktops, mobiles, and tablets.
Blink is the ultimate employee app for organizations that want to support their mobile teams and keep them informed even when they are on the move.
Best VoIP service
16. CallHippo
CallHippo is a cloud-based virtual phone system designed to help teams stay in touch with each other and their customers from anywhere. It offers a simple user interface with features like Power Dialer, a mobile app, and detailed call reporting. CallHippo empowers sales and service teams, enabling them to communicate with customers, adding to their satisfaction.
This advanced call center management software helps teams connect via phones and desktops and provides features such as contact management, auto dialing, and predictive dialing to simplify your calling needs. It also offers seamless integration, advanced analytics, and 24*7 support that help boost growth.
Best call center software
17. Dialpad
Dialpad is a unified communications platform that provides an AI-powered contact center, calling, video, and web conferencing. With built-in Voice Intelligence, your team can now make smarter calls from any device, with features like call transcription, and automated note-taking, plus integrations with G Suite, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more.
Dialpad Contact Center allows you to build an efficient call center to intelligently route calls and reduce customer wait times. Since everything is on the cloud, calls can be taken by your remote team from anywhere, instead of being tied to a traditional desk phone.
For customer service and sales teams, Dialpad helps them excel at what they do best — without worrying about taking notes or forgetting how to reply when a specific issue is mentioned during a call.
Features like real-time sentiment analysis alert managers when negative sentiment is detected so they can immediately provide in-call guidance to improve your customer experience. With Dialpad, you can quickly set up your inbound or outbound call center within minutes.
Best business phone software
18. CloudTalk
CloudTalk is one of the most popular cloud-based call center software, which allows your people to work from anywhere in the world. It offers more than 50 features to simplify the job for customer support and sales teams.
Some of the most useful features are advanced IVR (Interactive Voice Response), predictive dialer, call forwarding, skills-based routing, and international numbers.
All of those advantages help your team to provide the best service for your clients whilst improving employees’ performance at the same time.
Apart from the mentioned features, CloudTalk offers integration with many popular tools and CRMs, making it easier for companies to deliver first-class customer experiences and to achieve growth in overall business profitably.
CloudTalk subscriptions start at $20/month (billed monthly). However, they also offer a free 14-day trial on any plan.
Best quick feedback tool
When working with remote teams, remote feedback is equally important as collaboration. Getting feedback makes teams grow as professionals.
19. Chimp or Champ
A good manager should be inclined toward their team’s happiness. Chimp or Champ allows managers to connect with their team in a simple and best way. It is an anonymous weekly employee happiness meter for checking the team. Improve employee well-being and achieve better results. You can go straightforward on purpose to get feedback.
Best time management tool
When it comes to time management working with teams particularly becomes a challenge. Remote time management tools bring a better way to remote team management.
20. Kickidler
Kickidler is the employee monitoring software of the next generation. It has a powerful set of tools that help increase the dedication of your team members.
Kickidler features include time tracking, employee productivity analysis, and efficiency dynamics as well as an unlimited number of real-time screens and the option to record the history of actions on the computers.
In 2020, the software developers released an update called Autokick that helps make staff monitoring more democratic. The update includes automatic notifications and a self-monitoring interface. Now the program will automatically notify workers that, for example, they’ve been reading the news for too long. It will also allow them to see their productivity statistics.
21. Teamwork
Track every hour to boost your team’s productivity. The tool lets you invoice all tracked time and expenses. You can create custom time reports of time logged on the project. Export your report and time log entries as Excel, CSV, or PDF.
Further Reading: Teamwork Alternatives 2024: Best 16 Project Management Solutions
22. Hubstaff
Hubstaff will make you more productive and will make your time work for you. You can keep track of where employees are spending their time and what tasks they are working on at a given time.
Its eye-catching features include online timesheets, employee scheduling, screen recording, employee monitoring, payroll software, GPS tracking, online invoicing, project budgeting, and many more.
23. Time Doctor
Time Doctor is a team time-tracking application. It helps to keep track of how each person is keeping track of their time and hence makes them accountable for their working hours. You can even use alerting and other features to avoid distractions for extra productivity. It includes desktop software, a mobile version, and even a Chrome app. It even offers a free 14-day trial without the need for a credit card.
Best video calls and screen-sharing tool
When you’re not in the same room (working remotely) you need a tool to discuss visually with the teams.
24. Nextiva
Nextiva is a cloud phone system that empowers teams to communicate with customers and colleagues regardless of their location. The platform offers a host of features such as a mobile app, call forwarding, call groups, web conferencing, website live chat, and more – designed to give your team the ability to connect with people on the go, from their office phone, smartphone, laptop, or tablet. See why Nextiva was just rated the best overall business phone service by the U.S. News and World Report. Get a free trial for your business.
25. Appear.in
Appear.in lets remote teams stay productive with easy video collaboration. Teams just have to create a room link, share the link by email or chat and that’s it. You are on the go to have a video discussion with your team.
Other features:
- No registration or downloads
- Group video conversations
- Simple screen sharing
- Join from any device
26. Zoom
Zoom is a group calling app with amazing quality of the video. It is easy to use, most affordable and has straightforward pricing. During remote Meetings, web conferencing, and Video Chat, you can record any call with a full-length video. You can share your screen with teams for combined discussions. Other Zoom solutions include video webinars, meetings, Zoom rooms, business IM, and voice sharing.
Best work-life balance tool
The key to keeping the remote team productive is the work-life balance. Keeping a balance in both is important for personal health, relations, and improving work performance.
27. Timezone.io
Many global remote employees are spread across different time zones. With a record of what time remote workers are around the world will help them manage their work and personal lives.
28. 10to8
10to8 is scheduling software for remote teams that want to make appointments happen. 10to8 enables teams to arrange virtual staff meetings and online appointments with clients.
What’s more, the native Zoom integration allows you to jump on video calls straight from your calendar. 10to8 can handle teams spread across multiple time zones and the 2-way calendar sync with most calendar apps ensures that double-bookings don’t happen.
The automated reminders will help your team keep track of meetings and show up on time and so eliminate wasted time and confusion.
Best note-taking app
To make sure you get quality work done, note-taking makes it a beautiful experience to take inspiration.
29. Evernote
Evernote is a great note-taking solution for teammates working remotely. You can keep all your notes organized, and sync them automatically across all your devices. Evernote is an application that serves as a notetaker, PDA, to-do list, and pocket notebook.
Also Read: Evernote Alternatives: 12 Note-Taking Apps You Should Be Using Today
Best employee rewards tool
Celebrate your team’s accomplishments.
30. WooBoard
Wooboard is an online platform that recognizes an employee for their good work. You can create reward programs for sending and receiving unlimited recognition. Employees can celebrate their success and initiate conversations through WooBoard’s social engagement features.
Best accountability and reporting tool
Remote workers will feel part of the team when they are held accountable for their responsibilities. Having the right tools in place to keep teams accountable.
31. iDoneThis
iDoneThis is a place where managers can keep an eye on the big picture to know what is being done daily. The team members will have to just check in daily, in their browser, or via email. They can add their robust reports and get along with the project effectively. With remote workers across the world, this tool compensates for the need for daily check-in meetings.
Best help desk tool
32. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a powerful multichannel help desk software that’s also rated as the #1 live chat software for SMBs in 2020. It helps every business exceed customer expectations through personalized customer support.
The software is packed with over 180 help desk features, including a ticketing system with a universal inbox, live chat, a built-in call center, integrations with social media, customer portals, and knowledge bases.
Besides these features, it also allows you to use gamification features, spam & fraud protection, detailed analytics, various filters, SLAs, and the option to use LiveAgent in 39 different languages.
The software automatically distributes incoming tickets to departments and agents, making it the perfect workflow automation tool. The advanced live chat feature enables you to chat with your customers in real-time and also lets you see what are they typing on live chat before they hit send, so it allows you to prepare your answers and exceed your customer’s expectations.
LiveAgent allows you to talk to your customers over the phone but also supports PC-to-PC calls via its call center. If your business has social media profiles, you’ll be able to monitor keywords, answer Tweets, and respond to comments and messages on Facebook and other social media networks right from your LiveAgent dashboard. Using this help desk software will improve your agent’s productivity and efficiency while increasing your customer’s satisfaction.
Best time converter tool
Working with remote teams requires freedom of time and place to boost productivity. You need to find an easy way to communicate and collaborate while working across different time zones.
33. World Time Buddy
World Time Buddy is a remote work software with a time converter for distributed teams. It is a convenient world clock and an online meeting scheduler. Its design lets people compare multiple time zones, and plan conference calls, and web meetings for business.
How to manage remote teams
Managing remote teams is becoming the need of the hour and it requires clear communications, trust, clear expectations, timely feedback, etc. As a project manager, it becomes your responsibility to set up the path for your team’s success.
The growing trend in remote working
Here are the main reasons why remote working is growing in trend.
- Setting your working schedule
- The comfort of being at home
- Chance to travel more
- Less stress
- Better time management for personal life
- More Satisfying
There are many advantages of getting your business into remote working but you will have to explore the best practices for remote team management.
Conclusion
In conclusion, remote work tools are not just about navigating the challenges of the present; they are the compass guiding us toward a future where flexibility, collaboration, and productivity coexist harmoniously.
Whether your team is already thriving remotely or you’re contemplating a shift to a remote work model, these tools are more than worth considering – they are the key to unlocking a world of efficiency, collaboration, and seamless communication.
As you navigate the digital terrain of remote work, let these tools be your trusted companions, empowering your team to not only adapt but thrive in the ever-evolving future of work.
So, gear up, explore, and embrace the transformative potential of these tools for a fruitful and successful remote work experience.
