11 Best Collaboration Software for Small Business 2023

Bottom line: Microsoft 365 is our top pick given its direct connection to the Microsoft software ecosystem and the title's sheer power. Slack is great for team messaging, while Webex is superb for videoconferencing. Easy Projects is ideal for project management, and Zoho Projects is perfect if you just need something low-cost and simple.

For most businesses, Microsoft 365 makes the best collaboration software.

That’s largely because Microsoft 365 is more a software package or suite, rather than one single tool. All Microsoft 365 Business plans include access to several popular Microsoft apps (Excel, PowerPoint, and Word at minimum) that can help your business create content, share ideas, and analyze data. 

And most plans (all except Apps) also come with business email, cloud storage (a whopping 1 TB), and Microsoft Teams. Teams is Microsoft’s business communication tool. It includes videoconferencing, audio calls, team messaging, and more. In other words, it has everything your team needs to stay in communication―whether your team is spread across a few desks or a few states.

Fortunately, Microsoft 365 comes with competitive pricing on its excellent team collaboration software. For only a few bucks a month, you can get email, Microsoft Teams, file sharing and essential apps. Higher-tier plans get you more apps (like Publisher) and cloud services, and they still have competitive per-user costs.

Oh, and if you’re not sure about Microsoft 365, you can test it out with the generous one-month free trial.

With affordably priced tools for every aspect of collaboration―including apps for communication, creation, and sharing―Microsoft takes the cake as our favorite collaboration software for most businesses. 

There’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Slack. That’s because it’s the best team messaging tool out there, making constant communication a breeze.

Slack uses an intuitive interface to make team communication simple. You can create channels (topical chat rooms for group conversations) or send private (and small-group) messages. That makes it easy to get messages to the right people―whether it’s the entire team, just one graphic designer, or your whole company. And Slack threads messages, so you don’t have to worry about conversations getting mixed up with one another.

Slack also offers basic videoconferencing and audio calling (for groups of up to 15), so you don’t have to rely just on the written word to communicate. Plus, Slack integrates with tons of other software―from productivity software to video conferencing software to social media―to help you move seamlessly between messaging and other kinds of collaboration.

Put simply, there’s a reason Slack is so popular with businesses of all sizes. For team communication (especially instant messaging), Slack offers the best software solution.

Sometimes messaging and email aren’t enough for effective collaboration―you need to see faces. In that case, we recommend Webex for all your virtual meeting needs. 

Webex offers a video conferencing platform. But there’s more to it than just a simple video tool. Webex includes plenty of features that make it a great collaboration solution. You get essential video conferencing features like screen sharing, chat, and polling. But Webex also gives you more advanced communication features, like virtual whiteboards and breakout meeting rooms, standard with all plans.

And speaking of plans, we should mention that Webex uses a per-host pricing model―not per-participant. That alone can save your business money on video conferencing costs. But Webex also has a very solid free plan (as we said, it includes even more advanced collaboration features) that will work well for many businesses.

Between affordable pricing and helpful virtual collaboration features, Webex’s video conferencing is an essential communication tool for business.

Need help collaborating on big projects? Then check out Easy Projects, an excellent project management software.

Easy Projects gives you pretty much every tool your team needs to successfully track and complete projects. It starts with a variety of project views (including a Kanan board, Gantt chart, due date calendar, and more). From there, you get useful features like time tracking and project cost management.

Throw in reporting, a time-off calendar, file sharing, and tons of integrations, and you’ve got the perfect software for helping your team communicate about what needs to be done, when it has to be done by, and who needs to do it. With higher-tier plans, you can even get billing and advanced analytics―not to mention larger amounts of file storage.

It all adds up to make Easy Projects an ideal collaborative tool for managing your business’s projects.

If you want to foster collaboration on a budget, then you need to see Zoho Projects―a highly affordable project management software.

Like Easy Projects, Zoho Projects has been designed as a project collaboration tool. Now, Zoho Projects isn’t nearly as feature-rich as Easy Projects is―but it’s way, way cheaper. Zoho Projects offers a free plan for small teams, and its paid plans all come in under $10 per user per month. That’s really, really affordable for project management software.

And Zoho Projects still gives you the most essential project and task management tools. You get some cloud storage for file sharing, tasks and subtasks for breaking down big projects, and even project templates to help you get started. More advanced plans also include features like time sheets, budgeting, and even free training to help you get the most out of Zoho Projects.

So while Zoho Projects may not be the most powerful project collaboration app out there, its highly affordable platform is well worth considering.

Airtable is another project management software―one that works very well for content creation and document management, specifically.

Airtable offers file sharing, link sharing, due dates, and more―all project management essentials. But what makes Airtable truly great for document management is the revision history. You can see how a project stood weeks, months, or years ago (depending on your plan). So you can track changes in your content, see previous versions, and more. (We use Airtable here at Business.org.) 

You also get plenty of labelling and tagging features, personalized views for team members, and more. In other words, Airtable gives you all you need to manage documents with your entire team.

Another project management platform, Trello doesn’t have the most amazing features or lowest prices―but it’s ridiculously easy to use.

Trello mostly works as a drag-and-drop Kanban board. That means you create cards for projects, which then get displayed in columns by status and priority. The most important information is always front-and-center, and you can get more details by looking at individual cards. And if you need inspiration to get started, Trello offers loads (and loads!) of templates for all sorts of projects and uses.

Your team can get comfortable with the Trello platform in mere minutes―making it one of the most user-friendly collaborative tools out there.

Backlog’s collaboration software has been designed specifically as a project management tool for software development.

While Backlog gives you all the normal project management features (like file sharing, task management, and different project views), it also includes software-specific features too. It offers bug tracking tools, for example, that let your team find, prioritize, and fix software bugs. Backlog also includes version control tools, so you can keep your entire team on the same page, version-wise.

Businesses in other industries may not get as much value from Backlog. But for software developers, Backlog has what it takes to be your next team collaboration tool.

Reporting can give you an accurate look at your workflow and help improve team collaboration―and reporting is just what ProWorkflow excels at.

Sure, lots of collaboration software comes with some kind of basic reporting and analytics. But ProWorkflow’s project management software lets you make reports work for you. It includes both default and customizable reports, so you can see the data that you care about. You can look at data about projects, time management, finances, individual team members, and more. You can keep reports private or share them with the team.

In other words, ProWorkflow gives you the hard data you need to make decisions about how to adjust your workflow and collaborative efforts.

One hard part of online collaboration? Making sure people are doing what they’re supposed to. That’s where DeskTime comes in.

DeskTime offers time tracking for both projects and team members. So you can use it to verify that team members are spending time on the correct projects, staying productive, and getting tasks done. Some plans even let you use your time tracking data to create and send invoices to clients. 

But even if the data is just for your use, DeskTime’s time tracking platform offers a simple way to measure collaboration and productivity.

One hard part of online collaboration? Making sure people are doing what they’re supposed to. That’s where DeskTime comes in.

That’s because GoToMeeting offers larger meeting sizes for less money per organizer than Webex does. All meetings come with unlimited time (so you’ll never get booted) and as many big meetings as you want. And higher-tier plans get advanced collaborative tools, like drawing tools and mouse and keyboard sharing.

So while GoToMeeting doesn't include all the collaboration features Webex does by default, GoToMeeting offers a good alternative for when you want the entire team or company to get together.

With the right collaboration platform, you can help your business stay connected, creative, and productive. 

The best online collaboration tool for your team will depend on your business’s specific needs―whether you want to focus more on communication, project management, productivity, or all three―but our rankings above include great options for all sorts of businesses and needs.  

So whether you choose Microsoft 365 as an all-purpose collaboration solution or Backlog for an industry-specific tool, we hope you see improved collaboration in no time.

Now that you’ve got your workforce collaborating better, work on managing it better with the best employee management software.

Online workplace collaboration can take many forms. For example, you might collaborate in ways like these:

• Instant messaging questions about projects
• Video conferencing with a virtual whiteboard to brainstorm new ideas
• Sharing files via an online storage system
• Assigning and monitoring projects through project management software
• Tracking, revising, and merging different versions of software or documents 

And those are just a few ideas. There are many other ways to collaborate with your team online with the help of business collaboration software.

We carefully examined each brand's suitability for teams of various sizes, customer service quality, overall value for the money, supported meeting types (such as message-based versus videoconferencing), ease-of-use, and scalability for organizations of any size, among other factors.

Disclaimer

At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don't guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.