As a startup, what do you look for in the tools you use?

With an abundance of clone-like resources present, the job of which one to pick can sound like an overwhelming task. So we compiled a list of all the tools any startup needs to know about.

When judging which tool to use, keep your decision informed:

1- Will it save you time and money?

2- Is it going to make your employees’ jobs easier?

3- Does it serve your business needs?

Tools to build your website

The first step to a legit business nowadays is a domain name and website. You can’t really do much without one, from company emails to an online presence. It’s a must-have.

1- LeanDomainSearch – A domain generator might not sound like much but many startup disputes can be over not truly nailing down the name. Like most decisions, there’s an art & a science behind finding a good domain. You need a domain name that will be easy to find, popular and available.

2- GoDaddy – The top domain name registrar. GoDaddy is a reliable way that powers platforms dedicated to small, independent ventures.

3- WordPress  – The #1 publishing platform for an easy way to customize your website.

4- Wix– When it comes to aesthetics, Wix is the place to go for a variety of beautiful themes and templates. It will also provide you with a free website for a lifetime if you don’t mind using a subdomain.

5- Shopify – If you are looking to sell online, this is the best e-commerce site to set up your store.

6- Instapage – Instapage is definitely the tool to use if you want to build a landing page for your marketing campaign. It also has features such as an optimization suite and a team collaboration tool.

Tools for more effective team collaboration

You would be astonished how much time and emotional labor goes into getting your people on the same page. For a more sane environment, get everyone on the same page in a literal sense. Get your team acquainted with these tools for better work collaborations.

7-  Trello – Trello is a very user-friendly platform that organizes your projects into labeled boards, cards and lists. It gives you a visual overview of who is working on what and how far along in the project are they.

8-  Teamwork – Teamwork is based upon the everpresent 3 in 1 trend. It’s a project manager, a helpdesk and a teamwork chat all in one software. Add a promise to be user-friendly and efficient serving any team from your marketing department to your creatives and software developers and we’ve got a very hard sell.

9- Asana – Asana is a choice if your work requires breaking down big projects into manageable actionable tasks. Where Trello can be used for about any type of project, Asana has a more task-oriented approach to project management and is used with bigger projects that have a more rigorous process to them.

10- MindMeister – Give planning and problem solving a more visual approach and encourage your team to use this mind mapping tool to collaborate on projects through a more entertaining and creative medium.

Want to make it interesting?

11- GetBadges – is a gamification software that integrates your project management software tools like Trello, Slack, Github into a gamified framework to help create a light competitive strike at work. With instant rewards, a motivational system and people to beat your task almost sounds like a video game.

Tools to Enhance Communication & Productivity

Saving time and money is the number one concern for any startup. Every minute counts, so invest in any and every platform that can help you save up on both.

12- Slack – Giving you a promise to be the place “Where work happens”. Slack is a work management platform used for communication, archiving and messaging. All organized by project, team, topic or whatever makes sense to you.

13- G Suite – This one probably acts as a foundation for all businesses. It includes Gmail, Calendar, Hangouts, Drive, Docs, Sheets, along with many others. All it’s platforms sync up together making it the most comprehensive tool on this list.

14- Boomerang for Gmail – The ever-growing pile of emails in your inbox can be considered the number one hassle of work communication. Boomerang will keep your inbox clean and manageable. From archiving emails and sending them back to you at the time of your choosing to scheduling emails to be sent later, and reminding you if you don’t get a reply back for an important email.

15- Zoom – Whether it’s a conference call or a one on one meeting, at times you will need to do stuff remotely. A video communication tool like Zoom where you get to conduct online meetings in real-time audio, video, and text will come in handy a lot. You can also resort to Skype or Google Hangouts but with Zoom, you don’t have to go through the hassle of creating or sharing contact information and accounts.

16- Evernote – A startup is a fast-paced environment where you might lose track of all the ideas and plans on the table. Evernote helps a business’s productivity by keeping all your notes, recorded meetings, memos, deadlines, and to-do lists in one place. It also helps team collaboration by acting as a virtual whiteboard where they can share and get feedback on ideas.

17- idonethis – Things are easier when your teams can keep track of what’s going on. Idonethis can hook into the tools you use, such as Slack, Github, even email, and turn your team’s daily updates and check-ins into an easy status update report done automatically.

18- Pingboard – In this day and age doing anything done manually is a waste of time. This tool helps you design your organizational chart, keep it updated and connect employees together with ease. With Features such as syncing employees contact information to your phone, Pingboard is an optimal tool to have.

Tools for Coding & Collaboration

Software development is such a sensitive subject when it comes to the actual work or collaborating on projects, that’s why we recommend tools that are specifically designed and have an understanding of a developer’s needs.

19- Jira – is the #1 tool your software developers will need to collaborate on projects. It’s highly customized and can fit any workflow. You can plan, track and manage all your agile development projects in one place.

20- GitHub – makes it easier to contribute to your open-source projects. It offers several collaboration features such as reviewing code, bug tracking, and managing projects.

21- Atom – is a free text editor from Github. It’s a code collaboration tool that allows you to choose from thousands of open source packages.

23- PhpStorm – It’s one of the best full-featured web development IDE. It has all of WebStorm’s features, supports PHP and it has database/SQL support on top of that. PhpStorm supports code completion, documentation and lint has Zencoding support and can be extended with numerous plugins such as VimEditor.

 24- Jenkins – Helping automate the non-human part of the software development process. Jenkins helps you with finding and solving defects in your code as well as doing tests and reports on it.

25- Elasticsearch – If your startup is based on a large database, lag in search can ruin your customers experience altogether. Elasticsearch enables you to manage huge amounts of data and increases the search result response. Providing you with features like Auto-completion, auto-suggestions and data aggregation.

26- AWS Elastic Load Balancing – Traffic is a hazard in any type or form. This tools will automatically distribute incoming application traffic and scales resources to meet traffic demands.

Platforms to keep your web developers informed

27- Stack Overflow – It’s the largest online community of developers where they can share their knowledge through a question/answer based framework.

28- W3school – If you want to effectively communicate with your web developers, you’ve got to learn their language. And since venturing into the world of web development might seem like a daunting task. This website offers you tutorials and references on HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, PHP, Python, AngularJS, SQL, Bootstrap, Node.js, jQuery, XQuery, AJAX, and XM.

Design & Graphics Tools

No matter what field you are in, your visual identity is a key factor in how your stakeholders will perceive you moving forward. After all, if you want to get the part, you have got to dress the part.

Tools for Image-Editing & Graphics

29- Canva – If you lack design expertise and found yourself too lost in the whirlpool that is Photoshop but still needs to get stuff done, Canva is perfect for you. It’s the easiest most effective tool for producing visual content using a simple drop and drag format.

30- Invision – It’s a prototyping tool created for designers that allows you to create quick and easy interactive mockup for your design. You can then share and discuss them with your team by leaving comments right from inside the app.

31- 99Designs – If you can’t afford a full-time designer just yet but still need your logo or website design done right. Through this platform, you can either work directly with a designer or create a competition for your project. Once a contest is created, you submit a brief and choose the value that will act as your price then get to choose the winner from several submitted designs.

32- Logaster – It can help you create logos in a matter of minutes.

33- Flaticon – The designing process is a time siphon, want to make it less time-consuming? A resource like this can help you look through an abundance of free high-quality vector icons.

Tools for UI/UX Design

34- Figma – An interface design tool that combines UI/UX Design, prototyping, brainstorming, wire-framing and feedback in one place.

35- Sketch – Sketch is a vector based digital design app that can be used for UI, mobile, web and even icon design. It has a growing list of advantages over Adobe’s creative suite from the abundance of plugins to it’s easy to use interface, small size files and quality of render.

Tools for finding the right team

The building block to any organization is its employees. For this, you would need a capable recruiter and a wide pool of applicants to choose from. These platforms got you covered in the variety of applicants department.

36- WUZZUF – When it comes to finding the right candidate for your startup, Wuzzuf offers a great pool of applicants to choose from. With the added benefit of a CV screening search and 24/7 support, your chances at finding your next employee are made easy and efficient.

37- FORASNA – The search for a blue collar employee is the most frustrating of all. Forasna will provide you with the largest pool of blue/grey collars with the click of a button.

38- Fiverr – If you need a quick job done and don’t want to go through the hassle of hiring someone. Fiverr is the world’s largest freelance online marketplace where freelancers get to offer their services for a pre-set price that can start as low as 5 dollars.

Tools for Managing Money and Cloud Accounting

Automating the way you manage or make money can save you a lot of time, effort and spreadsheets.

Tools to Manage Money

39- Quickbooks – Tailored mainly for small and medium-sized businesses. Quickbooks is an accounting software that tracks income and expenses, runs payroll and manages bill.

40- Xero – This is an accounting software that’s known for its simplicity, their constant new features and fast-paced functionality. And with a bold competitive move such as offering to transfer all of your Quickbooks data to Xero and in only 3 hours, you get how fast they work!

41- Odoo – Mostly used for its stunning financial management feature, Odoo is also a comprehensive suite for any business offering assistance in aspects such as sales, CRM, project management, human resources, and many others.

42- KashFlow – Another accounting tool is designed to help you track the financial ins and outs of your business through an easy-to-use system.

43- Bkper – As part of the G suite entourage, Bkper is a collaborative bookkeeping workspace where you can keep track of your financial through real-time account balances and with bots helping with the heavy bookkeeping work.

Tools to Make Money

44- Google’s AdSense – It allows you to display ads that are relevant to your content on your website and Google pays you per click or impression done on the Ad.

Tools for E-payments

45- PayMe – If your business is based on online selling, Payme would allow you to collect payments online through various platforms such as: Fawry, credit card, mobile wallets or even cash collection from home. It has zero setup fees and only 3.5% commission per sale.

Marketing Tools

Tools to Manage Your Social Media

46- Buffer – It helps you manage all your social media accounts whether Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Linkedin through a simple interface. Enabling you to schedule posts and track their performance with ease.

47- Hootsuite – Another social media management tool to help you keep track of all your accounts. For the bootstrapping bunch, Hootsuite has lots of features in its free edition including free analytics.

Tools for Better Insight

48- Optimizely – One of the leading A/B testing websites. It lets you test and retest your website until you reach your desired goals and traction. The great thing about Optimizely is that it lets you test for marketing & growth as well as for product development.

49- Hotjar or CrazyEgg – These can act as heatmapping tools for tracking where exactly your website visitors are coming from and what’s working or not working for your audience.

50- Google Search Console – It provides information about how search engines are interacting with your website. It’s useful and important to track how Google is indexing your website.

51- Inspectlet – This allows you to record and playback what your visitors do while on your site, every mouse movement, scroll or click with features such as eye-tracking heatmaps and click tracking heatmaps.

Tools for Analyzing Performance

52- Google Analytics – The most popular and powerful tool that helps you segment and track your visitors. It can get you specific details about your audience like age, gender, interests, device, and location.

53- MixPanel – In a way MixPanel picks up where Google Analytics leaves off. It monitors user-behavior in more focused analytics and in real-time.

Tools for Email Marketing

54- MailChimp – MailChimp got you covered from designing your email newsletter to collecting, managing and segmenting the right email lists for your business.

55- SendGrid – This tool allows you to send your marketing emails without the cost that comes with maintaining your own email server.

Tools for Content Creation

56- Grammarly –  Spelling and grammar mistakes give an indeication of error and incompetence, things you don’t want to be associated with. Grammarly is a browser extension for editing anything you write in your browser from your emails to your google docs.

It should be noted that what works for other companies might not be what works for you. Find the tools that fit your pace, workflow, and preferences. These tools are meant to make things easier for your team, so always be on the lookout for the best fit for them.