Collaboration tools for remote teams have almost completely changed the workplace scenario over the last couple of years. Sure, they were around before that, but the Covid pandemic brought them to the foreground.
There are many number of collaboration tools for remote teams to pick from. What becomes important is to keep focus on the features that your team needs in a tool, and then to find one that offers these features. These tools make it possible for teams to work from ?️ anywhere at any ⏲️ time, and support offline work / asynchronous work.
Best collaboration tools for remote teams in 2022
Lets look up some tools that you can put on your shortlist:
1. Slack
If you get the feel that your team communication is all over the place, try out Slack! Primarily, it’s an instant messaging app. It can help to streamline your work and to keep things all together. That way, you can easily find your contacts, communication and to-do tasks in one place. Status updates and notification preferences let you know who’s available and who’s not.
With Slack, you can also post quick requests or chat one-on-one or publicly in groups. It’s also great for making team announcements, posting updates, and sharing thoughts or ideas. Or, if you wish, run polls or set up specific channels for any project.
? Price: Slack has a basic forever Free plan that allows voice and video calls. Paid plans include Pro (increasing from $8.75/user/month) and Business ($15/user/month), besides a quote based Enterprise Plan.
Trello, with its emphasis on project management, is one of the best collaboration tools for remote teams. At a glance, it provides an overview of all the projects in Kanban view. Opening a card will display the progress of each project. Simply create a board for each project and stay organized like never before.
Easy-to-use templates and automation of tasks and workflows with Butler automation help you get started. Integrations and Power-ups give an extra boost to productivity. Depending on your plan, you’ll be able to open any number of boards and view them in Table, Dashboard, Timeline, Maps and Calendar formats. With unlimited Workspaces, attached permissions and multi-board guests, there’s a lot you can get done sitting in any corner of the globe.
? Price: The Free plan works just fine for teams looking to organize any project. To scale collaboration and more, check out the Standard plan ($6/user/month) and Premium plan ($12.50/user/month). The Enterprise plan will cost about $17.50/user/month.
Chances are you’d know about “zooming,” even if you’re not a tech-savvy person. The word took on a whole new meaning during the Covid pandemic. It moved out of the photographers’ dictionary and into the video conferencing dictionary. Zoom is great for holding virtual meetings and spur-of-the-moment hangouts. The gallery view puts everyone on the chat in one screen to help you feel connected. What’s more, it’s great for one-on-one chats too.
The messaging feature includes chats and channels for communication as well as file sharing. Editable Whiteboards with cloud storage are available. The Free version allows 100 participants at a meeting and adds automated captions. Meetings can last up to 40 minutes, and even more under different plan packages. Zoom offers an all-in-one solution, Zoom One (including a free version) that bundles chat, meetings, channels, phone and whiteboard together.
? Read this to find out how Zoom compares against Microsoft Teams and Google Meet.
? Price: Beyond the Free plan, the Pro costs $149/user/year, and Business costs $199/user/year. Zoom also offers other products like Zoom Phone, Zoom Rooms, Zoom Events & Webinars, Zoom Contact Center, besides optional add-ons.
Basecamp is suitable for project management for remote teams. It breaks up work into different projects. You can create any number of them, each with unlimited users. Projects are self contained, including within it every detail related to that project. You’ll be able to see team members who are working on it, the files that they’ve uploaded, chat history, deadlines as well as the project’s progress. Team members can communicate using Messages and Realtime Chat.
Ample storage of 500GB helps you centralize file storage, and link documents to projects. To-do lists and schedules help to streamline work. Automatic reminders serve to keep deadlines in plain view.
? Price: Free trial for 30 days is available. Basecamp Personal is free too, and is suitable for personal projects. Basecamp Business is comprehensive and includes all features at a flat rate of $99/month.
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5. nTask
nTask is yet another project management tool that works well for individuals and small business teams. It maximizes efficiency by setting up multiple teams, all with their own Workspaces. Each Workspace can contain several projects, tasks and to-do lists. You’ll be able to assign tasks to members and set up custom filters to sort task by resources, dates or time. Further, you can set budgets and costs for each project or task.
Team members can organize and collaborate with Kanban boards, share documents, add comments and schedule meetings. Online interactive Gantt charts help to visualize progress and highlight critical tasks. It’s also possible to keep tab on time invested on a task and view / track issues impacting progress of each task.
? Price: Free trial for seven days. Thereafter, switch to Premium at $4/user/month or Business $12/user/month.
Monday.com has 200+ industry-specific readily available templates that you can use to organize all your tasks and processes related to a project. That’s not all. Dashboards offer real time insights to simplify decision making. Kanban boards help to prioritize tasks and balance demands according to capacity, and Gnatt charts visualize project milestones and dependencies.
You can upload any type of files, and automate repetitive tasks. Inventory tracking monitors stock at every point. All-in-all, Monday.com is one of the best collaboration tools for remote teams to stay productive.
? Price: Beyond a Free forever plan (up to five seats), there are Basic ($10/user/month), Standard ($12/user/month) and Pro ($20/user/month) options.
Dropbox is mainly a tool for storing information in the cloud. But its widespread usage and “anytime-anywhere” access makes it one of the best collaboration tools for remote teams. Team members can upload files to Dropbox and share them with other members, including external guests.
With Dropbox, you can work efficiently with teammates and clients. You’ll be able to keep tabs on projects and keep all your data safe. Admins can create authoritative groups and enable multi-team login. It integrates easily with other collaboration tools for teams like Slack, Zoom and Google Workspace. It also offers a feature to securely sign important documents, without leaving Dropbox.
? Price: Personal Plans include Plus ($11.99) and Family ($19.99). Business Plans include Professional ($19.99), Standard ($18/user/month) and Advanced ($30/user/month). The business plans also offer free trials.
If you’re a team of designers working from different locations, you can rely on Figma to get you all onto the same page. It’s easy for everyone to use, since it’s not platform specific, and can work across browsers.
Team members can all access, edit and collaborate on any project at the same time. Unlimited viewers and version history, shareable links, on canvas commenting, sharing permissions and audio conversations, all aid in collaboration. Advanced drawing tools, auto layout, Figma editor, overlays, transitions and animations help with design and prototyping. In addition, there are design systems and developer features that the team can use.
? Price: Besides a Free starter plan, there’s the Figma Professional plan at $15/editor/month and the Figma Organization at $45/editor/year. For advanced security, flexible controls and company-wide design processes, choose Figma Enterprise at $75/editor/month. A separate plan, Figjam is available for whiteboarding.
This one is quite unusual as it markets itself as an ideal app for programming in pairs. You can pair up with a single click, and then both of you will have mouse and keyboard control at the same time. Thereafter, the tool remains discreetly in the background allowing the users to interact using high-fidelity remote control.
Efficient CPU usage, a 5K-quality video stream and low-latency crisp audio, makes it easy for remote collaboration in pairs. You can pair with an external collaborator using the “Add friend” feature. Tuple converts the whole screen to a whiteboard, and is always visible in your menu bar.
? Price: Engineering teams pay $35/user/month for unlimited pairing sessions and single sign-on. A free trial for 14 days is available. For Enterprises, the rate starts at $25,000/year.
InVision’s Freehand is a real-time workspace for design collaboration. Remote teams can centralize the workflow and stay in sync throughout the design process. 100+ powerful templates, rapid prototyping, asynchronous discussions using comments, collecting votes with emoji reactions and feedback tracking help members stay aligned.
Users can create unlimited public and private spaces, and download Freehand as a .png file. There’s the version history to view and revert to automatically stored versions, and guest permissions for clients and contractors. Moreover, it integrates with Zoom and Microsoft Teams to turn meetings into working sessions. Other useful integrations include Vimeo, Spotify, Webex, SketchFab, Photoshop and more.
? Price: Freehand has a Free forever plan, Pro for cross collaborative teams ($4.95/user/month), and Enterprise with customized pricing.
Automation is vital for teams that work remotely. That’s why Zapier is one of the best collaboration tools for remote teams. What it does is to connect all your apps together and move data between them automatically. It works with 5000+ apps and offers a user friendly interface to work from.
Zapier works by creating “Zaps” that can execute 100+ actions automatically. You can create different actions by using if/then logic rules, and add filters for execution only if conditions are met or as per schedule. To view the data in the way you want, simply add a formatting step.
? Price: The Free plan is good for up to 100 tasks/mo. The premium plans charge on the basis of the tasks per month. These are the Starter ($29.99/month), Professional ($73.50/month), Team ($448.50/month) and Company ($898.50/month) plans. All plans offer a free trial.
Whereby is a fine tool for quick video calling, anywhere or anytime. All you’ve got to do is start a conversation and then share the link with a team member. No need to download apps, or add extensions to your browser. The embed feature allows you to integrate real-time video to your product, app or website.
If you wish, you can customize your Whereby room with customs names, URLs and branding. Virtual whiteboards help with brainstorming and Breakout Groups help with events and workshops.
? Price: Start for free for one room that can host up to 100 participants. Upgrade to Professional at $6.99/month (one host and three rooms) or Business at $9.99/host/month (starting at three hosts and up to 200 participants).
Mio connects different messaging platforms into one central communication hub. You can connect Webex, Zoom, Slack and Microsoft Teams and share messages and make calls across these apps. This can really simplify things if you’re using multiple communication channels, which is generally the case if you’re on a remote team.
Mio enables you to chat with external business contacts without managing multiple accounts. It enables cross team collaboration between different team members who use different chat apps. It also integrates with your messaging platforms and does not store messages or files.
? Price: Different plans are available – Flex at $5/user/month, Pro at $1000/month, as well as an Enterprise plan. A free trial is available for the Flex and Pro plans.
Notion is a tool that helps you centralize information and access it easily. Think of it as a more effective and feature-rich Google Sheets. It offers thousands of community made templates and integrations to design documents, take meeting notes, publish websites and more. The collaborative workspace allows you to connect your teams, projects and docs, share links and upload files.
You can view the database in many ways suited to your workflow – table, list, timeline, Kanban, gallery or calendar views. Notion supports advanced permissions and bulk PDF exports. There is the version history, so you can view and restore any past versions.
? Price: Four plans are available – Personal (free for individuals), Personal Pro ($5/month), Team ($10/user/month) and Enterprise (quote based).
Any collaboration tools for remote teams that we missed?
That’s it for our list; but maybe there’s some noteworthy tool ? that we’ve missed? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
? Also, if you’re looking for a remote job, these remote job boards can help you.
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