With more and more professionals working from home, there’s a massive surge of interest in using SaaS collaboration tools.

But with so much choice available, it’s sometimes difficult for businesses to know which product to choose. Like looking for a film to watch on Netflix, eventually, you’ll hit a wall of confusion over the choice you have.

So, it’s useful to have some idea of what to look for. Well, we’re the Future of SaaS—we know a thing or two about this sort of stuff, and we’ve put together a list of the very best SaaS collaboration tools. Many of which are free! 🙂

Why SaaS collaboration is just the best

Before we get started, remember this. The products below aren’t just there to save your business a bit of time and money.

Sure, they do that. Which is great. And they’ll make your staff more productive, too.

But one thing businesses forget is they improve company culture, too. The products can get colleagues working together like never before, communicating and managing tasks effectively.

Low productivity? Bickering employees? No chance when you’re up and running with some of the best software solutions in the world.

Okay enough of that, here are the 10 best SaaS collaboration tools we rate big time.👇

1. Slack

Starting off with an obvious one (cough, cough, our FoSaaS community’s on it), Slack makes life a lot easier. It’s a chat tool, sure, but also brilliant for team collaboration. Any department can benefit from:

  • Project discussions.
  • Sharing documents in seconds (yes, so can email—but Slack is a little more convenient and free-flowing).
  • All your team in one place, ready to chat whenever necessary.
  • Instant chat, instant sharing, instant productivity.
  • Build online communities for your business—a pretty much invincible customer service tactic.

It’s free to use, there’s an app for your smartphone, and you can upgrade for a meetings solution package.

It’s an impressive piece kit, especially considering its freemium software.

And what are the business benefits of using Slack? A streamlined, popular, and enjoyable chat/team collaboration tool that lets you get work done faster.

2. ProofHub

ProofHub is a widely-used project management and team collaboration tool which helps project managers take charge of a project by letting them assign, edit, and track a team member’s progress with regards to a specific project. It provides you a centralized place to manage every project-related task with utmost ease.

Let’s get to know its some of the best features:

  • Task Management for easy collaboration with clients and team members
  • Live Chat for quick one-on-one or group conversations
  • Discussions for sharing opinion, project updates, and announcements
  • Kanban Boards to check the project team’s progress
  • Calendar for planning, managing, and sharing tasks with the team
  • Time Tracking to set time estimates for a project

It offers a free trial plan with all the features. However, if you feel like upgrading then choose from the Ultimate Control or Essential plan.

3. Zoom

One of the big hitters of 2020, this online meeting and webinar tool lets you:

  • Schedule meetings—or have them spontaneously.
  • Record video webinars.
  • Share screens with colleagues.

And more. Much more, actually.

That makes it great for remote teams, but effective for anyone who wants to make regular video calls. You do get some of the above features with Slack in #1, of course, but then Zoom also has cross-platform messaging.

It’s just another way to make sure your business is ready and waiting to deliver on projects, client interviews, project development, and whatever else you’re up to.

4. Trello

Project management software helps you to keep track of daily working life. And to do so easily. This way, you’re not missing out on anything. Simple as that.

And, yes, we think the very best of the lot is Trello. It’s easy to understand, has a user interface even a technophobe could understand, and it’s free to use.

You can even add stickers to the tasks you create. Maybe not the most important thing in the world, but it’s something else to add a skip to your step each day.

Ultimately, Trello provides a way to manage your business’ projects in one spot. It’s easy to use and keeps your workflow… flowing.

5. ClickUp

Billing itself as “the future of work”, here’s a digital smörgåsbord of an app. By which we mean ClickUp aims to do everything in one place. That’s:

  • Tasks.
  • Documents.
  • Chat.
  • Project management.
  • Spreadsheets.
  • Notes.
  • Reminders.
  • Time tracking.
  • Goal tracking.
  • Resource management.
  • Screenshots.

It does a lot. The benefit for your business is you don’t need multiple accounts across other SaaS collaboration tools.

Just the one app and everything’s there for you. This can help limit confusion when, otherwise, users are spread across dozens of platforms and trying to remember obscure passwords.

It’s cheap as well. While there’s a pretty limited freemium version, for less than $5 a month per user you get the full lot. 👍

6. Confluence

With its swish name, this is a pretty legendary open/online shared workspace. It’s from Atlassian and many businesses across the globe revere it. Atlassian describes it as:

“Your collaborative workspace where teams and knowledge meet to achieve great things.”

As with ClickUp, it’s remote-friendly, and you can use it to:

  • Gather your team’s knowledge to easily solve problems and projects.
  • Advanced project planning.
  • Incorporate team participation into a flexible workspace.
  • Get the conversation flowing to solve problems.
  • Build in your company culture (in a good way).

You also get a bunch of best-practice templates, so you’ve got a helping hand with some of the business world’s more immediate issues (like remembering what you’re supposed to do on any given day).

7. Google Analytics

Here’s a big hitter. It’s one of the most used SaaS tools across the world—Google Analytics (or just GA, if you prefer abbreviations).

While not strictly a collaboration tool, it does provide data for your business that your teams can share. And learn from. Plus, use to improve website productivity.

Google Analytics is all about user insights and performance analysis. With it, you can quickly work out who’s visiting your website, for how long, and why.

Google Analytics is also free, so your business has an easy way to check out how much traffic is coming onto your site. And there are a lot of benefits to this. Deep breath, here we go:

  • You get a solid understanding of the first impression you’re making on visitors. If you have a high bounce rate, for example, you can identify the pages where it’s happening.
  • Easily see where your visitors are from—you get a geographical breakdown.
  • There’s a feature that lets you set your goals, which is super useful if you’re looking to track monetary value to specific events.
  • Learn about your keywords for SEO benefits.
  • Use your data to work out what your customers like about your site/product.

Google Analytics is a must have for any business. If you’re not using it, start doing so now.

8. Canva

An awesome design tool 👨‍🎨, it’s free to use and has some nifty collaborative twists. After you sign up, you can go off and make professional level content. That includes:

  • Presentations.
  • Videos.
  • Posters.
  • Infographics.
  • Social media posts.
  • Business logos.

The collaborative bit starts when you invite people to your designs. Then they can view designs, make suggestions, and edit.

The benefits for your business? Well, you get a brilliant free tool where your employees can create high-quality marketing content.

The result? No need to hire freelancers or get a web designer in. Just sign up to Canva and it’s pretty self-explanatory from there.

9. Mockplus

Stepping things up over #7, Mockplus helps developers, designers, and product managers to work together as one. In harmony, if you will.

This means you connect your product design workflow, right through from the early stages of brainstorming through to development. Some of the best features are:

  • Source file management.
  • Code snippet generation.
  • Backup.
  • Versioning.
  • Rp and iDoc integration.

Your designers can upload wireframes and visual designs, with the bonus of handing them over to developers with assets, specs, code snippets, and interactive prototypes.

As Mockplus puts it, “Design Faster. Collaborate Better.” It also claims you can save an hour a day using its SaaS software. Bonus!

10. Figma

Another awesome tool for designer collaboration, this is an all-in-one design tool where your employees can:

  • Do their design stuff.
  • Prototype like crazy.
  • Co-edit where necessary.
  • Gather feedback.

And that’s all in one place. It’s kind of like a whiteboard replacement tool. One with a free-flowing feedback loop—where collaborating and idea development are good fun.

Business benefits? You’re looking at a super fast way to make designs, design systems, and deploy. Minus much of the usual hassle.

Got any suggestions?

Of course you do! So why not let our SaaS Slack community know? Sign-up (it’s free) and share your suggestions. Share, debate, and learn!

Or add new content with our SaaS create and contribute section.