15 Best Collaboration Tools To Keep Projects On Track

ProofHub
ProofHub Blog
Published in
9 min readApr 9, 2019

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Successful teams thrive on one thing — collaboration. It is the force that binds individuals together and gets things done. In fact, an increasing number of companies are focusing on team collaboration more than ever. Luckily, technology offers abundant options when it comes to team collaboration tools and online communication software. Although selecting the right one is often a herculean task.

“Want to collaborate faster with remote team members? Switch to ProofHub.”

How to choose a team collaboration software

A team collaboration software enables team members to better express themselves resulting in stronger team cohesion. Make sure to keep the following things in mind before you zero in a collaboration software for your team.

  • Versatility: The most effective collaboration helps you to take care of all aspects of a business. Make sure to select software that comes packed with advanced features which can be customized as per the needs of your business.
  • Ease of use: It is one of the most crucial factors that has to be taken into consideration. Go for a tool that does not need a learning curve and can be easily picked up by your team members.
  • Security and privacy: Data security should be your top priority. So, the collaboration tool should ensure high standards of data security and make sure you have protected communication.
  • Cloud-enabled: More and more organizations are storing their data in cloud-based management software, so should you!
  • Integrations and compatibility: You need a tool that brings your favorite apps together at a central place so that you can access them from within the tool.

15 Collaboration Tools For Productive Teams

  1. ProofHub

Collaboration plays an essential role when you are juggling various tasks and managing different projects. ProofHub is a well-known online collaboration tool and a basecamp competitor that allows you to connect with remote team members and discuss work.

Top features:

  • Create, assign, share tasks and subtasks
  • Share opinions, updates, announcements with online discussions
  • Chat for quick questions and conversations
  • Centralized file management to collaborate with remote teams and clients
  • Email-in feature allows you to discuss work even when you have access to it
  • Mark important topics and discussions as private
  • Visual timeline to monitor the project progress
  • Integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, Onedrive, Google Calendar and more

2. Huddle

Huddle makes document collaboration faster, seamless, and secure. It acts as a hub where teams and clients come together to share and discuss work. Whether it’s about working together on a task or collaborating with remote clients, you can customize it as per your needs.

Top features:

  • One place for tasks, approvals, and team communication
  • Set permissions and manage access rights within and outside an organization
  • Share files up to 10GB size from desktop and mobile securely
  • Integrates with SharePoint, Google Drive, Box, Dropbox
  • Get a real-time overview to see the ongoing progress

3. Celoxis

Celoxis is a top online collaboration tool helping teams to plan, track, and collaborate online with much ease. It is known as an all-rounder collaboration software that offers tons of features, interactive reports, and various customizations in an affordable way. With smooth collaboration, it also makes way for easier project management, risk management, custom workflows, and resource management for teams.

Top features:

  • Identify project requests to improve business value
  • Know skills, roles, and availability to allocate resources effectively
  • Track budget, costs, and profits in real-time
  • Share files, add comments and hold discussions to collaborate faster
  • Insightful and customizable reports to visualize data

4. Online Margin and Markup Calculator from Logaster

Free Logaster Profit Margin and Markup Calculator is a tool for calculating key metrics in your business.

This tool can calculate margin and markup. When you know the markup, you can predict the income in cash. When you know the margin, you can find out the ratio of the markup to the cost value, in percent. Forecast your profit in the long run, use this tool.

Top features:

  • Calculates indicators: Margin and markup.
  • Calculates indicators: Cost.
  • Calculates indicators: Selling price.
  • Free use

5. Brandfolder

Brandfolder is one of the top-rated digital asset management platforms for enterprise brands.

Over 5,000 companies, including Slack, Kroger, Sonos, and TripAdvisor use the platform to upload, store, organize, and share digital assets in multiple file formats.

Top features:

  • Use privacy controls, security and rights management
  • Organize files across collections, sections and labels
  • Perform in-document search, filtering and sorting
  • Leverage AI-powered auto tagging and image recognition
  • Access analytics to identify your highest-performing assets
  • Integrate with hundreds of third party tools you use every day
  • Centralize workflows with built-in creative tools
  • Stay on-brand with white labeled asset folders

6. Yammer

Yammer is a perfect tool to connect and engage with in-house and remote teams, clients, and stakeholders. It offers a platform where you can communicate openly across all departments, locations, and tools. It is helpful to build a culture of transparency helping project managers to keep team members informed and aligned.

Top features:

  • Groups and interactive workspaces
  • Open and dynamic communication to achieve better outcomes
  • Manage documents, create content, share notes
  • Quickly search for people, groups, and conversations
  • Advanced security that protects data and confidential information

7. Blink

Specifically created for companies with customer-facing workforces (think retail, travel, hospitality), Blink is the ideal tool that combines instant messaging with cloud storage and workflow automation features. Designed to digitize paper-based processes and reduce busywork for employees, one of Blink’s recent clients saw a 26% reduction in employee turnover after introducing the platform to their employees.

Key features:

  • A user-friendly mobile-first platform makes it ideal for deskless workforces as well as office-based colleagues
  • Instant messaging opens a door for two-way feedback, giving frontline employees a voice
  • Put all your daily procedures, rotas, and documents in the Hub for easy access
  • Use integrations such as SurveyMonkey to harness actionable employee feedback
  • Micro-apps and integrations such as Zapier help reduce friction and increase engagement

8. Slack

Slack has always been a front-runner online collaboration software that has grown strength to strength since its inception. Often touted as one of the best communication tools, Slack provides every essential feature a collaboration software should offer to its users such as instant messaging (IM), advanced search capabilities, and file transfer.

Top features:

  • Communicate through channels and organize them by department, topic, team
  • Find information whenever you need it with a quick search
  • SSO and 2FA security measures to ensure data safety
  • Can be personalized with the preference feature
  • Easily integrable with numerous third-party applications

Check out slack pricing and how to pay less.

9. Flowdock

Flowdock is a real-time chat software used by teams to prioritize work, organize stuff, and collaborate across different locations and timezones. At its core, Flowdock works with flows which are open spaces for teams to converse and discuss outcomes and progress. It also aggregates notifications from different social media channels and project management and customer support tools.

Top features:

  • Conversations are organized by threads
  • Color code conversations to mark and identify important conversations
  • Invite people to participate in discussions easily
  • Stay connected with its Android and iOS mobile apps

10. Filestage

Filestage is an easy video review software and document approval tool. You can review videos, designs, and documents with team members and stakeholders 10x faster. Filestage has made it very easy for people to get actionable and visual feedback and quick online reviews. It doesn’t require any registration for people to directly comment on your content.

Top features:

  • Share, review, and approve digital content
  • Manage file-approvals on a single platform
  • Time-saving approval workflow
  • Paste review links in tools like Slack, Trello, or Basecamp
  • Easy to use and intuitive

11. Week plan

Week Plan is not just another to-do app, it coaches you to improve your time management and teaches about the four key principles of priority planning. It helps you to focus on important tasks and block time for crucial things so you can treat your work accordingly. It has 420+ users including Massachusetts Institute of Technology, NASA, Franklin Covey among others.

Top features:

  • Create recurring tasks so they can repeat the way you want
  • Collaboration features include comments, notifications, and see what others are doing
  • Synchronizes with Google Calendar and Outlook
  • Available on desktop, smartphones, and tablets

12. Appear.in

Looking for easy video meetings for your business, Appear.in fits the bill perfectly. Start with creating a room link, it can be anything you would like it to be. Share the link by email, chat, or in Slack. Anyone can become a part of the conversation by just clicking on the click.

Top features:

  • No registration required
  • Group video conversations with multiple people
  • Screensharing features
  • Limit the number of users while video conferencing
  • Drag and drop to arrange videos, enlarge, go fullscreen

13. Jabber

Unlike other tools, Cisco Jabber unifies instant messaging, voice and video calls, screen sharing, web conferencing to enable teams to collaborate without any barriers. Interestingly, Jabber allows you to create bots that can send and receive messages and even launch chats and calls. Go where you need to go without any inhibitions because Jabber can help you collaborate anywhere, anytime.

Top features:

  • Business class voice and audio features including desktop sharing
  • Real-time information and instant messaging to reduce delays
  • Available on Android, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows
  • Syncs the Jabber app with a car display and allows users to safely respond to messages.

14. Troop Messenger

Troop Messenger is a complete team communication tool that includes chatting, audio/video calling, file sharing, video conferences, real-time position tracking, remote access, and screen sharing, among other features.

With its features, functions, and other attributes, Troop Messenger will easily take the top spot in any ranking. Troop Messenger provides all of the capabilities that a team needs in today's world, as well as some unique features that can be tailored to future needs. It assists the users to save time and money by not having to hunt for an alternative in the future.

Top features:

  • Integrated with Zapier
  • Defense validated tool
  • Follows world-class best security protocols.
  • Using the Jointly Code functionality, multiple programmers can work on a code via audio/video calls at the same time.
  • You can send a message to multiple users and groups at one go.
  • Live Location Tracking

15. Zenkit

Zenkit combines collaboration and project management effortlessly and acts as a perfect platform for businesses and teams to come together and create new ideas. Its biggest USP is that there’s a view for everything in Zenkit from scheduling meetings to tracking project progress, discussions to reports. The features of this collaboration solution span across all industries such as project management, CRM, support, recruitment and more.

Top features:

  • A single place to view all items assigned items
  • Track tasks and events across all collections
  • Invite colleagues, friends to collaborate on friends
  • Customize notifications to get the information you need

“Up your collaboration game with ProofHub. Try it now!”

Conclusion

Make sure to make the most of online collaboration tools to communicate effectively and keep things on track. The number of tools is infinite, be sure to know what you need before you choose a tool for your team. Remember that successful teams thrive on one thing — collaboration. Make sure you’re doing it right!

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Plan effectively, Collaborate seamlessly, Organize evenly and Deliver timely with ProofHub. Available at www.proofhub.com, App Store and Google Play Store.