Setting up and running a small business is no easy task, especially on a limited budget. Free online business tools can help small business owners jumpstart their companies, without having to spend piles of money on big-name software solutions. Here are the best free tools and software to start and grow your business.
Trello—The Best Free Project Management Software
Trello is the best free solution for organizing, coordinating, and tracking work as it moves through a workflow executed by a group of people. You can now sign up for a Free, Business Class, or Enterprise account. With the free account, you can make as many personal boards, cards, and lists as you want, although you are limited to no more than 10 team boards. Most importantly, file attachments are capped at 10 MB in size.
Trello uses the Kanban technique for organizing, tracking, and managing work, which is best described as a whiteboard covered in sticky notes.
Wave—The Ideal Accounting Software for Startups and Small Businesses
Wave is an award-wining financial software designed for entrepreneurs. It combines accounting, invoicing, and receipt scanning into one compact and straightforward package. The system is easy to set up and use and it comes with a simple and very navigable dashboard. Wave Apps is an excellent option for small businesses (less than 10 employees) as well as self-employed professionals including entrepreneurs, freelancers, and consultants.
Wave is 100% free, with no trials, no limitations, and no hidden fees. You can use it as much as you want, for as long as you want, and they won’t charge a cent.
Canva—Professional Graphic Design Tool
Canva is a web-based platform that enables small businesses to create customizable graphs, stylish prints and presentation slides with professional layouts, templates, frames, voice icons, and more. It’s easy to use and it automatically stores your photos for future use.
The free version offers a generous selection of tools and templates for optimizing and transforming your pictures. Moreover, it has an impressive range of free stock photography (accessible via the ‘Photos’ button in the left-hand menu).
Duplicati—Open Source Backup Software
Duplicati is a free open source tool for backing up your important data. Duplicati is configured by a web interface that runs in any browser (even mobile) and can be accessed from anywhere. It offers strong AES-256 encryption to protect your privacy and it can take incremental backups, meaning that it only copies data that has been changed or created since the previous backup activity was conducted, thus saving restore time and disk space.
Duplicati runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
LibreOffice—A Free Alternative to Microsoft Office 365
While there are several rivals to Microsoft Office, LibreOffice is probably the best out there. It’s very feature-rich and it’s compatible with Microsoft Word and Excel, meaning that MS Office documents opened in LibreOffice retain their formatting.
LibreOffice is open source and is developed by a huge team of enthusiastic coders who deliver regular updates and new features to ensure it keeps pace with premium office applications.
It features six-component programs that provide everything you need from an office suite: Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Math, Base.
MailChimp—Reaching Out to Your Audience
Mailchimp is a cloud-based email marketing solution that helps businesses of all sizes to design, automate, and manage marketing campaigns across various email platforms, ad channels, and more via a unified dashboard. With the free version, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month. If you’re a startup or even a small business, it’s highly unlikely you’ll ever need to send that many emails, but it’s good to know you’re covered.
MailChimp allows you to create custom email campaigns, landing pages, pop-up forms, and Facebook and Instagram ads.
Slack—Team Communication Software
Slack is a powerful team messaging app with a rich collection of settings and options. The solution is mostly appreciated for its intuitive interface, one-click video calls, and thousands of apps and bots available.
The free version is really free: you can sign up and add dozens of users and start using the app. Keep in mind that if you upgrade to a paid plan, their prices are a bit higher compared to other team messaging apps.
