Running a small business means bearing a thousand responsibilities at once. Every entrepreneur knows the struggle of trying to wear multiple hats, from accounting to marketing, all while trying to grow their business. The good news is, small business applications are here to help.
These apps are your right arms, helping to streamline your workflow and boost efficiency. Understanding the higher demand for these apps, Designveloper compiled a detailed list of the top 10 must-have apps for small business management.
But first, let’s take a quick look at how to choose the right apps for your business.
There are six key factors to consider if you want to choose the right apps. They include:
Budget: Small businesses often operate on tighter budgets than large enterprises. Therefore, it’s important to consider the cost of the application. It’s not just about the upfront cost, but also about the ongoing expenses like subscription fees, maintenance costs, and potential upgrade costs. Look for applications that offer good value for money in the long term, without compromising on quality and functionality.
Features: The features of the application should align with your business needs. Additionally, it’s beneficial if the app offers customization options, allowing you to tailor the features to your possibly changing requirements.
Ease of Use: The app’s user interfaces should be intuitive and easy to navigate. As such, your team should be able to use the application without extensive training. It’s because a complex app can slow down your operations and lead to unexpected costs, negating any benefits it may offer. So, look for small business applications known for their user-friendly design.
Scalability: Your needs will change when your business grows. So the app should scale with your business. This means it should have the scalable capacity to handle increased workload and complexity as your business expands.
Integrations: The app should be able to integrate seamlessly with the other tools and software you’re already using in your business. This ensures a smooth workflow and prevents disruptions in your operations.
Security: The app should have robust security measures to protect your sensitive business data. This includes encryption for data at rest and in transit, regular security updates, and compliance with industry-standard security protocols.
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The global small business market is on fire, projected to grow 8.5% annually (CAGR) between 2021 and 2026, reaching a staggering USD 3,120 billion by 2026.
The rising demand for small business applications primarily drives this impressive growth. Therefore, tools such as customer relationship management and sales force automation are becoming increasingly popular for their ability to streamline business processes and boost productivity.
So, with the market booming, what are the essential applications you should invest in? Let’s explore them in this section!
Project management (PM) applications help your business plan, organize, and manage your projects efficiently. Besides, they provide a structured approach to project management, enabling your teams to track their progress, collaborate effectively, and meet project deadlines. For this reason, these small business applications can help streamline operations, improve productivity, and reduce costs.
Trello is well-known for its simplicity and flexibility. This popular PM software includes a variety of core functionalities to serve project management, meetings, task management, and more.
In particular, it employs a system based on cards, with each card symbolizing a specific task. Besides, you can create boards for different projects, add cards for tasks, and move them between lists to track progress.
Further, Trello also features its Butler – a built-in automation tool that empowers your teams to automate repetitive tasks and workflows, essentially functioning as a digital assistant for your Trello projects. Without coding knowledge, you can set up automation for Butler to move cards between lists, add labels, set due dates, manage checklists, and more.
Trello shines as a project management tool for small businesses due to several key strengths:
While Trello is a great tool, there are other project management apps that small businesses might find useful:
Regardless of scale, any business requires a comprehensive tool to facilitate real-time interaction, information sharing, and teamwork among individuals and teams. This is where communication and collaboration apps come into play. They provide core features (e.g., instant messaging, file sharing, and task management) to enhance your team’s communication, collaboration, and productivity.
Slack is a widely used tool that brings all your team’s interactions together in one place. It offers features like channels for group discussions, direct messages for one-on-one conversations, and the ability to share files and documents. Besides, this tool allows you to integrate with a variety of external sources (e.g., GitHub, Google Drive, or Trello).
Slack is known for its Slack AI, which helps you make smarter searches, summarize your conversations immediately, and more.
Another noticeable AI-powered functionality is Workflow Builder. It allows for creating custom automated processes with a drag-and-drop interface and automating repetitive tasks within Slack. These tasks can include sending welcome messages to new team members, collecting information from your team, or reporting issues.
Slack is a good choice for your small business due to its robust features and integrations. With these built-in capabilities, you can:
In addition to popular tools like Slack, small businesses should note the rapidly evolving landscape of communication software. With shifting workplace needs and emerging technologies, it’s valuable to consider several Slack alternatives designed for enhanced collaboration, unique integrations, and budget flexibility. Platforms such as Blink, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, and others are continuously upgrading their offerings to improve employee experience across remote, hybrid, and frontline teams. For a complete overview of what’s available in the coming year, including a side-by-side comparison of top competitors, discover *several Slack alternatives* that can empower your small business in 2025.
In addition to Slack, here are other small business applications serving your communication and collaboration:
These tools help your business schedule shifts, track time, and manage payroll by automating administrative tasks, reducing scheduling errors, and improving employee satisfaction. They offer some common features like shift scheduling, time tracking, payroll processing, and employee communication.
Gusto is a comprehensive employee scheduling and management tool that simplifies administrative tasks. It offers features like automatic payroll, benefits administration, and HR management.
Beyond recruitment and onboarding, Gusto assists your business in nurturing and expanding your talent pool. With its talent management tools, you can assess workforce performance and foster a positive culture that encourages proactive feedback exchange.
Besides, Gusto stands out with its Insights & Reporting capabilities. These functions help you understand HR expenses and workforce satisfaction through features such as customizable reports, anonymous team surveys, and automatic compliance alerts. This enables you to make data-backed business decisions and enhance your profitability.
Gusto stands out as a helpful platform for small businesses for a few key reasons:
Apart from Gusto, you can consider other best small business applications to manage your employees as follows:
CRM software aids your business in overseeing and scrutinizing customer engagements and information throughout the customer journey. Equipped with a multitude of inherent features, these tools assist in bolstering your business relations with customers, boosting customer loyalty, and propelling sales growth.
As a free CRM tool, HubSpot CRM offers fundamental features for businesses of all sizes to handle unlimited customer data and up to 1M client contacts. These functionalities include custom dashboards & reporting, pipeline management, email marketing, and integrations with other HubSpot products and external platforms.
Noticeably, HubSpot CRM offers cutting-edge AI features to streamline your workflow and boost your marketing and sales. The first one is ChatSpot. This AI companion enables you to communicate and manage your CRM data, hence gaining valuable data analytics on companies and keywords.
Besides, its HubSpot AI helps you automate repetitive tasks and gain actionable insights across HubSpot CRM. In particular, you might leverage AI-powered capabilities to craft a professional single-page website, high-quality content, engaging social media captions, and compelling blog content with just a few prompts.
HubSpot CRM offers several advantages that make it particularly suitable for any small business:
If HubSpot isn’t your choice, consider other best solutions like:
With the support of marketing & analytics applications, your business can understand, measure, and optimize its marketing efforts. As such, these tools integrate with various marketing data sources (e.g., CRM systems or website analytics) to collect, manage, and analyze data. Such data then provides insights for informed marketing decisions and increased sales.
As one of the popular small business applications, Mailchimp offers a wide range of features to manage marketing campaigns, track customer data, and implement analytics. They include an email builder for creating impactful emails, a customer journey builder for automating campaigns, and a campaign manager for streamlining omnichannel marketing.
Mailchimp also features advanced features like Intuit Assist. This GenAI capability works across the Mailchimp platform to automate manual marketing tasks and create personalized drafts. Further, it analyzes past performance data to offer recommendations that optimize your marketing strategy and improve future campaigns.
Mailchimp caters particularly well to small businesses for several reasons:
Other alternatives to Mailchimp also offer robust marketing and analytics features:
The 2024 HubSpot Report crowns social media as the king of ROI in marketing channels. This dominance is fueled by the rise of social commerce, with a whopping 43% of marketers naming it their primary channel. Furthermore, 87% of marketers selling on social media reported its effectiveness in 2023, and 59% saw a surge in social sales compared to previous years.
These figures highlighted the high potential of social media for your business growth. But you need specialized apps to stay competitive in this game. These tools can oversee, publish, and keep track of social media activities. Therefore, they can assist in managing various tasks from customer support to generating leads.
This comprehensive platform offers a range of features to help you manage your social media presence effectively. It boasts a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process of integrating team members, handling client approvals, and planning posts without any inconvenience.
SocialPilot supports multi-network scheduling. Accordingly, you can easily schedule and publish posts on all major social media platforms.
Besides, SocialPilot provides comprehensive reporting tools, simplifying the process for your team and clients to obtain full-scale analytics for various social media accounts whenever required. Further, it provides an AI assistant to generate creative, unique, captivating captions and hashtags for different platforms.
SocialPilot is a worth considering app for small businesses because it offers the following benefits:
Consider these tools if you’re looking for alternatives to SocialPilot:
These small business applications can easily help your business manage and track financial transactions, income, and expenses. These apps can automate time-consuming tasks, streamline workflows, and provide a more complete view of a business’s financial health. For small businesses, these apps offer a more affordable alternative to hiring an accountant or a large firm to manage their accounting, tax prep, and payroll.
Xero is an online accounting platform developed to simplify financial management for businesses of all sizes. Thanks to its cloud, you can do routine tasks and view financials remotely at any time.
Xero goes beyond basic bookkeeping. It offers features like online invoicing, inventory management (for some plans), bank reconciliation, expense tracking, and payroll processing (in some regions).
Besides, Xero allows you to connect to over 21K financial institutions globally for bank data, and accept online payments by credit card, debit card, or direct debit straight from your Xero invoice. It also supports project tracking, GST returns, and contact management. Noticeably, Xero’s data capture feature allows you to automate the process of inputting data into the system.
Like other small business applications, Xero is well-suited for small businesses for several reasons:
Apart from Xero, you can consider other best alternatives for accounting and finance as follows:
These small business applications can facilitate and streamline the financial transactions of your business by automating the transaction process, tracking important sales data, and managing everything from customer service to inventory. They offer small businesses a more affordable alternative to traditional cash registers and manual billing systems.
PayPal is a leading online payment platform that allows you to send and receive money securely and conveniently. It acts as a digital intermediary, eliminating the need to exchange cash or personal banking information directly between parties.
PayPal features a personalized dashboard of a customer’s PayPal account, a wallet tab to manage payment instruments, and a payments hub that includes send and receive money features, international remittances, and non-profit giving.
Besides, PayPal offers built-in invoicing tools. You can create and send professional invoices to clients, allowing them to pay directly through PayPal. This streamlines your billing process and helps ensure faster payments.
In 2021, PayPal launched a new bidirectional messaging feature that allows two users to communicate after a peer-to-peer financial transaction. This functionality improves the peer-to-peer money transfer feature in the PayPal app, introducing a novel method for two PayPal users to interact when transacting money for Goods & Services.
PayPal is considered a great tool for small businesses because of these remarkable benefits:
Below are several decent alternatives to PayPal:
These digital platforms allow you to store, synchronize, and share data across multiple devices. They’re incredibly beneficial for small businesses. In particular, these apps provide a centralized location for data that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, and from any device with an internet connection. This helps your team members update the latest data instantly, thereby improving collaboration, increasing productivity, and reducing costs arising from physical storage infrastructure.
Dropbox builds upon the core functionality of Dropbox, offering secure file storage, sharing, and collaboration features tailored for teams.
It’s integrated with various small business applications you already use (like Slack, Microsoft Office 365, or Google Workspace) to streamline workflows and keep your files instantly synchronized across all devices.
Besides, the tool provides Dropbox Dash and Dropbox AI that work hand-in-hand to enhance your productivity. Dropbox Dash lets you search content stored in various tools (e.g., Asana or Salesforce) from a single, central location. Meanwhile, Dropbox AI helps you analyze and understand the content within your Dropbox files or summarize long documents.
Dropbox simplifies file sharing and collaboration to foster better teamwork and streamline workflows. This is especially useful for geographically dispersed teams. It’s also a key reason why many small businesses choose it for data storage.
But this tool also has other immense benefits:
Dropbox is a great option. But you might consider other apps as follows:
These tools help your business track and manage inventory levels, orders, sales, and deliveries. They can provide real-time inventory updates, automate the ordering process, and even predict future demand trends. With these apps, you may prevent product shortages and overstock, improve efficiency, and ultimately save time and money.
Zoho Inventory is a cloud-based inventory management software solution designed to help you streamline your inventory operations. It offers a comprehensive suite of features, including inventory control, multi-channel selling, warehouse management, and more. These functionalities help you manage stock levels, track sales and purchases, and manage customer or vendor relationships.
With Zoho Inventory, your business can automate your workflows, keep track of every unit with batch and serial number tracking, and even gain valuable insights into your inventory performance with powerful reporting tools.
Zoho Inventory goes beyond basic stock management by offering several smart features. These capabilities leverage AI and automation to predict future demand for your product, automate purchase orders when inventory falls below a certain threshold, and more. This helps you optimize stock levels and avoid overstocking or stockouts.
Zoho Inventory is worth your consideration because it offers some standout benefits for your small business:
While Zoho Inventory is a robust solution, there are several other inventory management applications that small businesses might consider:
The top 10 small business applications on this list offer a great starting point for you to explore the most suitable software solutions to manage your business effectively. But remember, every business is unique. So, consider your specific needs to choose the right apps.
And if you need a hand in building tailored applications, DSV is here to help. Reach out to us and let’s work together to make your business more efficient and successful.
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