Still looking for ways to supercharge your productivity?
Well, the easiest and the most effective way to boost productivity is to have the right set of productivity apps and tools in your arsenal.
But with literally thousands of options out there, making the right pick often seems like a next-to-impossible situation.
In this particular article, we’ll cover 11 of the best productivity apps that every freelancer, startup, small business, and enterprise should consider getting their hands on in the coming year.
Table of Contents
What is a productivity app?
A productivity app (also known as productivity software) is a type of software solution that allows individuals, teams, and organizations to perform their essential day-to-day operations faster, more efficiently. From note-taking, email management, calendaring, daily reminders, time tracking, think of any day-to-day task and there is an app for that.
In the past few years, this category of apps and tools have simplified the lives of many professionals across every industry. In fact, the sole aim of a productivity app is to optimize productivity and improve your surrounding work environment.
Planning to try out a productivity app? Start with the best one—Sign up for ProofHub!
What is the importance of productivity software?
An enterprise uses more than a dozen solutions and software programs on a daily basis, however, merely half of them are actually helping to increase overall productivity and improve everyday operations. The same happens in the case of productivity apps. There are so many choices available out there that individuals and organizations often fail to gauge how effective a productivity app will be before they actually using it.
Keeping that in mind, here are some of the key benefits that an “ideal” productivity app brings to the table for you, your team, your projects, and your business. If you succeed at finding software that offers a majority of these benefits, you’re making the right choice.
Now, having the right productivity app is important because it helps you in:
- Making everyday tasks more efficient
- Keeping collaboration fluid
- Knowing when you’re running late
- Making different schedules work
- Embracing diversity in the team
- Keeping everyone updated
- Tracking real-time progress
- Accessing cross-application integration
- Enjoying cross-platform compatibility
- Easing the process of reporting
- Streamlining invoicing
- Ensuring better customer experiences
What are the most commonly used types of productivity apps?
Below mentioned are some of the most common types of productivity tools that are being trusted by businesses and teams across every industry. For your convenience, we’ve also listed the best productivity software under each category.
11 Best Productivity Apps
Let’s get rolling…
- Project Management
The project management app is basically a combination of multiple tools within one suite. This kind of application can be used to manage people, manage tasks, schedule activities, share files, track time, and much more, all in one place.
Top Suggestion:
1. ProofHub
ProofHub is one platform for multiple purposes. It’s an all-in-one platform for freelancers, remote teams, small businesses, and enterprises to plan, collaborate, organize, track, proof, and deliver work smarter, faster, and more effectively. The key highlights of this platform, including Chat, Discussion, Gantt chart, Kanban board, Custom roles, Custom reports, Files, Notes, Timesheets, and much more.
Overview of ProofHub benefits
- It has all the features and tools a growing business or team needs
- It boasts quality outcome and brings down project delivery time
- It has little to no learning curve
- It offers a FREE trial with all basic and advanced features
- It has a simple pricing structure. No per-user fees
People often ask:
| What makes ProofHub the best project management software? ProofHub acts as a centralized place for all your projects, teams, and communications. It basically simplifies everyday processes such as creating plans, collaborating with people, keeping things organized, tracking time spent on activities, and delivering projects on time. |
ProofHub, one app that does it all. Sign up for a FREE trial today!
- Instant Messaging
Effective collaboration is important for every organization. Gladly, there are audio/video chat apps that make achieving effective collaboration a breeze. These are the kind of apps that make workplace conversations fun and eliminate any and every possibility of miscommunication or loss of information while working together on a common goal.
Top Suggestion:
2. Slack
Slack is a cloud-based team collaboration software. With Slack, information and people come together to yield effective outcomes. The key highlights of this popular platform are time messaging, file sharing and powerful search.
Overview of Slack benefits
- It brings all your team and project communication in one place
- It integrates with almost all apps you already use
- It keeps the project on time and within budget
People often ask:
| What are the best Slack alternatives? There are plenty of free and paid alternatives to Slack, including the best ones such as ProofHub, Microsoft Teams, Chanty, and Fleep. These are the alternatives that work similar to Slack, but more efficiently. |
Read more: 26 Best Slack Alternatives for Team Communication (You Cannot Live Without)
- Calendars/Schedulers
These are the kinds of apps that help to ease the scheduling and organizing aspect of project management. With such apps, you get a clear, central view of all your (and your team’s) important dates (tasks, events, milestones, etc) in one central place.
Top Suggestion:
3. Any.do
Any.do is an application used by professionals to stay organized and get more work done in less time. With Any.do, you can keep your tasks, lists, and reminders organized in one place and sync them seamlessly across all of your devices.
Overview of Any.do benefits
- It lets you organize and prioritize your tasks with colors
- It saves a lot of time and hassles
- It lets you customize themes and recurring tasks
People often ask:
| Does Any.do sync with Google Tasks? With the new Gmail integration, professionals can now easily turn email threads into actionable items that are automatically synced to Any.do’s cross-platform applications. |
- Note-Taking
From minutes of meeting to project details—there are always a few things that you have-to-have on your fingertips at all times. And that’s where the note-taking applications come into the picture. These are the kind of productivity apps that provide you a safe and easy-to-access place to save and share all your amazing ideas and business-critical credentials.
Top Suggestion:
4. Evernote
Evernote is one of the best apps designed for organizing, task management, and note-taking. With Evernote, you can easily capture and prioritize ideas, projects, minutes of the meeting, and to-do lists in one place so that nothing falls through the cracks.
Overview of Evernote benefits
- You can share notes and whole notebooks with coworkers
- You can take and attach pictures to notes right from within the app
- It syncs automatically between all devices
- It lets you scan text in a photo using Optical Character Recognition
People often ask:
| Which is better OneNote or Evernote? Evernote is slightly better than OneNote. It’s biggest plus point is custom tags. However, the two advantages that OneNote provides include unlimited notebooks and sub-sections within notebooks. |
Further Reading: Evernote Alternatives: 12 Note-Taking Apps You Should Be Using Today
- Time Tracking
A time tracking app is the kind of app that lets you keep a tab on every minute and hour you spend on a particular activity. Using this category of app guarantees you a more accurate insight into how your time is being invested at work, thereby giving you the opportunity to revise your time management strategy and become more productive.
Top Suggestion:
5. RescueTime
RescueTime is a fully automated time tracking software application designed to help people feel in control of how they spend their time across various tasks and activities.
Overview of RescueTime benefits
- It allows you to monitor computer activities (online and offline)
- It lets you monitor the time spent on distractions. Example: meetings and phone calls
- It allows you to compare productive versus unproductive days
- It allows you to maintain focus at work by blocking unauthorized, distracting websites
People often ask:
| Does RescueTime work on iPhone? Yes, RescueTime works for iOS as well as Screen Time that provides you with activity-specific durations for specific apps and websites. |
- File Storage/Sharing
File storage and sharing apps are the kinds of apps that allow you to keep all your files safe, secure and private. Moreover, the apps provide you easy access to your files from all devices.
Top Suggestion:
6. Google Drive
Google Drive, as most of us already know, is a file storage and synchronization system provided by Google. The idea of this platform is to simply ease the process of storing, editing, sharing, and collaborating on documents while working together on a common project or towards a common goal.
Overview of Google Drive benefits
- Google Drive is completely free to use
- It allows you to back up files securely
- It lets you store and share files directly to contacts and coworkers
- It lets you access and edit files on the go
People often ask:
| What is the difference between Google Docs and Google Drive? The key difference between the two platforms is that Google Docs is a web-based document management application with which you can create and edit word processing documents while Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service. |
- Reporting
Reporting app, as the name suggests, is an app that lets you create and share accurate reports faster and more effectively. With a reporting app, you can analyze instances, activities, individuals, tasks, processes, process progress, and more using graphical representation. Plus, there are reporting apps that let you create custom reports, and that’s a big advantage.
Top Suggestion:
7. OnePager Pro
OnePager Pro is a timeline and Gantt chart software. The software application is primarily designed to empower project managers and their teams to turn project files and spreadsheets into beautiful summary graphics in seconds.
Overview of OnePager Pro benefits
- OnePager Pro standardize project presentations
- It helps to improve accuracy in project reporting
- It helps to ensure consistent, informative project reports
- It helps to save considerable time when building project presentations
People often ask:
| Why should I use OnePager Pro? A project manager or a team should consider using OnePager Pro because it conveniently offers a dynamic, data-driven look at projects, thereby simplifying and speeding up the project management process. |
- Digital Marketing
Developing, implementing and managing marketing campaigns—that’s what a digital marketing app or software is designed for. These are the kind of solutions you use to get the word out in the digital space about your product, services, and business.
Top Suggestion:
8. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is the most powerful social media management platform. It lets you manage multiple networks and profiles in one central place. Using Hootsuite, marketers and marketing teams can manage their social media activity across all platforms and track overall engagement with just a few clicks.
Overview of Hootsuite benefits
- It makes finding, scheduling, managing, and reporting on social media content easier
- It lets you automatically schedule posts across multiple social accounts at the same time
- It makes curating social content a breeze
- It lets you track and share meaningful insights about customers and campaign via reports
People often ask:
| Is Hootsuite easy to use? Hootsuite is one of the many tools referred to as the “Easiest Social Media Management System” and it is certainly doing a great job helping teams keep track and manage their many social network channels with ease. |
- Finance/Accounting
Most of us are familiar with the pain of spending too much of our time managing the finances. Now, an accounting app is designed to automate everyday accounting and save us tons of time. With accounting software, it’s much easier and faster to track the money you receive, owe and are owed.
Top Suggestion:
9. QuickBooks
QuickBooks is an accounting solution that caters specifically to accountants and small businesses. The application is designed to simplify processes like bank reconciliation, tracking expenses, drafting invoices and monitoring financial reports, among others.
Overview of QuickBooks benefits
- Makes managing sales and income easier
- Helps to keep track of bills and expenses
- Offers key reporting insights to your business
- Simplifies taxes
People often ask:
| What is better than QuickBooks? QuickBooks is an amazing accounting solution in terms of ease of use and inexpensiveness. However, there are better alternatives in terms of diversity in functionality—Sage, Xero, FreshBooks, etc. |
Say goodbye to all your invoicing and billing hassles. Try ProofHub!
- CRM
A CRM application is designed to help you and your business gain insights into the behavior of your customers and use those insights to alter your business operations and ensure that your customers are always served with the best possible solution.
Top Suggestion:
10. Zoho CRM
Zoho online CRM software is an on-demand, SaaS-based customer relationship management solution designed to help teams (particularly sales) to attract, retain, and delight more customers.
Overview of Zoho CRM Benefits
- Automates daily sales tasks
- Converts web visitors into hot leads
- Tracks customer experience in the sales cycle
- Lets you identify and target inactive leads
- Integrated with Google Apps and Zoho suite
People often ask:
| Is Zoho CRM really free? Zoho CRM indeed offers a free forever plan, but it works best for entrepreneurs and is only available for up to 3 users. Apart from that, there are other subscription plans that are available at a starting price of $12/user/month (billed annually). |
Further Reading: Zoho Alternatives – 13 Tools Your Team Will Love
- Data Protection
Data protection solutions allow you to back up your data and quickly recover files whenever you need to. By storing backup copies offsite or in the cloud, you eliminate a single point of failure and significantly reduce the risk of data loss in case of a natural disaster or cyber breach.
Top Suggestion:
11. NAKIVO
NAKIVO Backup & Replication is an affordable, top-rated, and fast solution that provides comprehensive data protection for virtual, physical, SaaS, and cloud environments. You can ensure the safety of your data by easily creating backups that you can store onsite, offsite, in the cloud, or offline. With NAKIVO Backup for VMware, you can instantly restore entire machines or individual files to quickly resume your business operations following a disruption or a disaster.
Overview of NAKIVO benefits
- Support for all modern IT infrastructures from one pane of glass
- Fast and flexible recoveries of workloads and application objects
- Step-by-step wizards and user-friendly interface
- Simple administration with advanced automation and scheduling features
- Built-in anti-ransomware features to protect against encryption/corruption
People often ask:
| Can you use NAKIVO Backup & Replication for free? While NAKIVO offers cost-effective perpetual and subscription licenses, you can get your hands on the solution without paying a single penny. Download the free trial to get the full-featured version of the product for 15 days. You can also download the free edition to protect a limited number of workloads for a full year. |
So, what are you waiting for? Go ahead! Make your pick and get super productive.
