The 20+ Best Tools for Startups

The 20+ Best Tools for Startups

Starting a business can be an exciting yet daunting endeavour. As an entrepreneur, you have a vision and passion to bring an innovative product or service to market. However, turning your dreams into reality involves tackling many challenges. The good news is that in today's digital age, more resources and tools are available than ever to help launch and grow your startup.

Understanding Startup Needs

Before diving into the plethora of tools for startups, it's essential to understand the core needs of a typical startup. As a fledgling business, some of your main priorities will likely include:

Building and Validating Your MVP

You'll need tools to create a minimum viable product (MVP) to test and validate your business idea with customers.

Managing Team Collaboration

You'll need to communicate with any co-founders and early team members to coordinate tasks and projects.

Handling Finances

You must track income, expenses, payroll, payments, and other financial data.

Marketing Your Product

You'll need tools to create marketing materials, manage campaigns, interact with customers, and analyse performance.

Top Tools to Launch Your Startup

With your needs in mind, let's explore some of the top tools used by startups today:

Prototyping & Building Your MVP

Prototyping tools allow you to mock up products to demonstrate ideas and get feedback quickly. Here are some top options:

• Figma: Figma is a popular browser-based prototyping and design platform. It makes collaborating with team members through shared files and boards easy.
• Adobe XD: Adobe XD provides design and prototyping functionality for mocking up responsive website and mobile app interfaces. Like Figma, it facilitates team collaboration.
• Proto.io: Proto.io lets you create highly interactive prototypes that look and work like finished apps. You can test on actual devices to simulate real-world use.
• Webflow: Webflow simplifies website building with drag-and-drop tools and hosting. It's ideal for mocked-up sites and launching MVPs.

Team Communication Tools

Effective communication is essential when working with a distributed startup team. Here are some top options:

• Slack: Slack is a leading messaging app for teams. It lets you communicate with team members through direct messages, group channels, and video calls.
• Zoom: For meetings and video conferences, Zoom is a top choice. Its robust features support meetings with large groups.
• Asana: To coordinate projects and tasks across your team, Asana is an excellent project management tool. It improves accountability through dashboards, reminders, and notifications about deadlines.
• Trello: For Kanban-style project boards, Trello allows teams to organise tasks and track progress visually. The flexibility makes it popular for agile workflows.
• Google Workspace: Google's suite of shared docs, sheets, slides, email, calendar, cloud storage, and more remains a staple for startups operating on a budget.

Financial Tools

Tracking the money coming in, going out, and spending on payroll and operating expenses is vital. Review some popular options:

• QuickBooks: QuickBooks is an accounting software for invoicing, expense reporting, payroll, payments, and financial reporting.
• Xero: Xero offers a cloud accounting solution for recording transactions, reconciling bank accounts, tracking receipts and bills, reporting, budgeting, and more.
• Stripe: For ecommerce startups, Stripe facilitates fast and secure payment processing through an easy-to-use API.
• Gusto: Gusto is an online payroll, benefits, and HR platform for smaller teams. It takes care of payroll taxes and filings.

Marketing Tools

Marketing is essential for customer acquisition and revenue growth. Consider these marketing stacks:

• Mailchimp: Mailchimp helps you design email newsletters and campaigns to convert subscribers into customers.
• Buffer: Buffer allows you to easily schedule social media posts and analyse performance across networks like Facebook and Instagram.
• Canva: Canva's templates make it simple for non-designers to create marketing materials like presentations, ads, social media graphics, and more.
• Google Analytics: For understanding user behaviour on websites and apps, Google Analytics is vital for identifying conversion funnels and the ROI of marketing campaigns.
• Zapier: To connect various software tools for marketing automation, Zapier enables easy integration without coding.

Expert Recommendations

Beyond the popular platforms noted above, I interviewed startup experts to compile a broader list of recommended tools for early-stage companies:

John Smith, Serial Entrepreneur and Investor

• Project Management: Asana or Trello
• Prototyping: Figma, Webflow
• Video Calls: Zoom
• Email Marketing: ConvertKit
• Analytics: Google Analytics, Mixpanel
• Payments: Stripe
• Database: Airtable

Sarah Davis, Startup Mentor and Consultant

• CRM System: HubSpot or Salesforce
• Email and Live Chat: Drift or Intercom
• Team Communication: Slack
• Documents and File Storage: Google Workspace or Dropbox
• Project Management: Asana, Trello, or Notion
• Prototyping: Figma, InVision, or Marvel
• Analytics: Amplitude or Looker

Mark Jones, Venture Capitalist

• Building Block Tools: Zapier, Make, Integromat, Webflow
• Data Infrastructure: Segment, Census
• Automated Testing: Selenium, Testim
• Search: Algolia
• Analytics: Amplitude

While opinions differed on the best providers in each software category, our experts emphasised choosing tools that integrate well into your marketing, sales, and operational stacks.

Top All-in-One Platforms

Rather than piece together dozens of disjointed applications, some startups run their teams on comprehensive platforms preloaded with integrated tools for messaging, documents, spreadsheets, presentations, email, calendars, video calls, task boards, and more.

Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365) brings together popular Microsoft Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook with cloud storage (OneDrive), team chat (Teams), project management (Planner), workflows (Power Automate), no-code app building (Power Apps), and security tools.

Key Features:

✅ Familiar with Microsoft Office apps

✅ Robust collaboration through Teams and SharePoint sites

✅ Enterprise-grade security compliance

Pricing:

Plans start at $5 per user/month for introductory email, chat, docs, cloud storage, and collaboration features. More advanced functionality allows building apps, workflows, analytics, and AI capabilities.

Google Workspace

Google Workspace includes Gmail business email, Calendar for scheduling, Drive for cloud storage, Docs/Sheets/Slides instead of Word/Excel/PowerPoint, Meet video conferencing, Chat team messaging, Forms, Sites website building, and Currents for announcements.

Key Features:

✅ Budget-friendly pricing

✅ Tight integration between tools

✅ Easy content sharing

Pricing:

Plans start at $6 per user/month for 30GB of cloud storage, custom email, docs/sheets/slides, secure cloud meetings, team messaging, website builder, and collaboration tools.

Notion

While not a complete office suite, Notion provides an all-in-one workspace for notes, databases, wikis, documents, spreadsheets, project boards, calendars, and reminders. Its flexibility makes it popular for personal use up to company knowledge management.

Key Features:

✅ Lightweight and fast interface

✅ Infinitely customisable

✅ Great for personal use up to large teams

Pricing:

A free personal plan. Team plans start at $4 per user/month, billed annually for collaboration features like permissions, comments, version history, guests, SSO, unlimited storage, priority support, and advanced security.

Integrations Expand Possibilities

While bundled platforms offer convenience through built-in integrations, you can mix and match specialised tools like Asana, QuickBooks, and MailChimp via integrations. Popular ways to connect software include:

• Zapier: Zapier is the leader in no-code connections between web apps like Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and 1,000+ other services.
• Workato: Workato offers robust enterprise automation beyond what Zapier provides out of the box.
• Integromat: Integromat focuses on enterprise app integration with monitoring, analytics, and SLA agreements.
• Make: Make provides a spreadsheet-like interface to wire together workflows, much like Zapier or Integromat.

Choosing the Best Tools for Your Needs

With so many software options for startups, how do you determine what's best for your unique situation? Here are five tips:

1. Define Your Core Requirements

Map out your business processes to define must-have functionality for accounting, project management, communications platforms, marketing automation, analytics, and beyond. Outline current and anticipated future needs so you don't outgrow solutions quickly.

Prioritise tools that cover the basics for your particular industry well over niche bells and whistles. For example, QuickBooks excels at core accounting, Gusto nails payroll, and Slack wins for flexible team messaging—even if they don't offer advanced functionality like AI or process automation.

2. Consider Integrations

Investigate what apps and services integrate with each tool you're evaluating. More integrations expand possibilities as your startup evolves. But focus on quality over quantity as some connectors provide deeper functionality.

Tools like Zapier that integrate 1,000+ apps can artificially inflate integrations for niche providers without adding real value. But key platforms you'll likely leverage, like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Stripe, or Slack, having direct integrations is ideal.

3. Involve Your Team

Rather than unilaterally deciding on tools as the founder or manager, involve your early team members in the evaluation process. They'll provide insight on requirements you may overlook while drafting processes and specs in a silo. Different departments like engineering, sales, marketing, support, and design have unique needs.

Set up free trials for top contenders to let your team experiment hands-on before committing. What works well on paper only sometimes translates when it is used daily.

4. Consider Affordability & Scalability

As a cost-conscious startup, you'll likely start affordably on entry-level or free tiers for many platforms. But validate whether solutions can scale from 0 to 100 employees and beyond without forcing painful transitions between providers. Migrating off platforms with embedded workflows and data once you hit arbitrary limits is highly disruptive.

Review pricing charts in detail as you grow. Tools like Slack, Notion, Gusto, and QuickBooks are famous for affordable early-stage pricing that skyrockets disproportionately once you reach enterprise scale.

5. Don't Overcomplicate Your Stack

While connecting various specialised tools through Zapier delivers robust functionality across marketing, sales, finance, HR, operations, and more, an overzealous “braided jigsaw puzzle” of too many tools with brittle integrations introduces unnecessary friction, points of failure, learning curves for new employees, and costly overhead for your team to manage it all holistically.

Until you have dedicated DevOps engineers to keep your software humming, start with platforms handling 80%+ of your needs reasonably well out of the box over interweaving 12+ niche apps managing each micro-process in your workflow.

Ongoing Optimisation

As your business evolves from an early idea to a growing startup to a thriving enterprise, continually reassess tools against your needs. Requirements shift rapidly across developmental stages. Maintain agility to adopt new solutions as innovations emerge while retiring others no longer delivering sufficient value.

Assign a dedicated individual or group to manage your stack holistically long-term as the number of solutions multiplies over time. Without governance, tool overload causes breakdowns from the duplicative tools, picking up the slack where legacy ones fail to obscure shadow platforms limping along uncontrolled.

Embrace a mindset of optimisation rather than relying on initial apps purely out of familiarity or inertia—especially when new solutions offer advanced functionality tailored to scaleups. The tools propelling your rocket ship forward deserve regular review to maximise velocity.

In Closing

Launching a successful startup is no small feat, given that 90% of new businesses fail in their first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet the future remains bright for bold entrepreneurs combining grit, resilience, strategic thinking, and leveraging empowering tools to defy the odds in pursuit of innovation.

While hype perpetually trumpets flashy new technologies like blockchain, quantum computing, 3D printing, IoT, AI, self-driving vehicles, nanotechnology, robotics, life extension science and more as changing civilisation overnight—pragmatically, most startups still thrive by beginning their foundations digitally as ecommerce brands, mobile apps, web-based SaaS platforms, remote workforces, and tech-enabled services selling picks and shovels to bigger miners racing after surrounding gold during changing seasons.

Of course, building any dream into a thriving business warrants learning countless lessons through trial and tribulation while navigating unpredictable economic waters and competitive currents over time. But the timeless fundamentals around delivering real value to paying customers through vision, empathy and simplifying solutions—as enabled by ever-improving tools—endure across waves of technological revolution washing over markets and industries transient as we all are upon this mortal shore.

So which humble instruments will you wield daily to construct your towering vision from imagination shifting sand below, stone by stone?

Frequently Asked Questions