10 best collaboration tools for teams
Working as part of a team can get a bit chaotic and the bigger the team, the more difficult it is to make sure everyone is on the same page. There’s keeping track of tasks, making sure content is being delivered on time, knowing who is managing your social media at any time and so much more, which makes it almost impossible to keep on top of everything without a few tools to help. In this blog post, I’m going to share the 10 best collaboration tools for teams.
What types of tools do you need?
- Something to help you keep track of all your tasks
- A tool to aid your team in managing your social media accounts
- A platform for managing your content
- Communication tools for connecting your entire team
- Collaboration tools
Here are some of the best tools available to help your teams’ work go as smoothly as possible:
Task managers
One of the first tools you’ll need when you work with a team is a task manager to help you track all of your existing tasks, as well as assign tasks and keep track of their progress.
1. dapulse
dapulse is a task manager for teams that aims to help you manage all of your tasks from one single dashboard.
Use it to:
- Add and assign tasks
- Check the status of all your different tasks and projects
- Leave notes and mention other team members to make sure they’re alerted
- Evaluate and comment on your team’s work
- See exactly who is busy and who isn’t
2. asana
asana is another very popular option when it comes to task managers; use it to:
- Create tasks and assign them to team members
- Organise tasks, customise them and prioritise them
- Customise the updates you get in your asana inbox, so you’re always in the know
- Check progress for any project at a glance
- Collaborate and communicate with other members of your team
3. Trello
Trello is a personal favourite of mine – you might know it too if you’ve read enough of my blog – because it has such an easy-to-use interface and so many different ways that you can use it:
- Create boards for all your projects
- Add individual tasks for each board
- Organise and customize your boards and to-do lists
- Assign tasks to team members
- Upload documents directly
- Create a board to manage your content marketing
4. Flow
Flow is a project management and task tracking tool designed specifically for teams. Among some of its best features:
- Manage projects from start to finish
- Visualize your tasks, projects and to-do’s in a calendar
- Check reports to track the exact progress of your projects
- Integrate with other tools, such as Dropbox and Google Drive, for easy collaboration
Social media management for teams
The busier your social media, the more people you need to help manage it. With these tools, you can make it easier for your team to manage all your different social accounts, but also easier for you to make sure things get done:
5. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a social media management tool – one I’ve talked about a few times in the past as well, as it’s a favourite of mine – but here, I want to focus on its features for teams:
- Flexible and real-time collaboration
- See who is reviewing/creating content
- Assign content to team members
- Create automations to quickly assign matching mentions/updates to team members
- Assign roles for your team
- Use the editorial calendar to plan, manage and approve social updates
- See exactly what each teammate has done
- Check analytics to see response rates and times for different members of your team
6. ContentCal
ContentCal is a social media marketing tool built for teams (business teams, marketing teams, and agencies alike). It’s all about facilitating the planning and management phases, especially when you work as part of a larger team:
- Assign specific roles to each team member so that everyone knows what they have to do (and not be allowed to do some tasks, like scheduling or publishing a post)
- Create a workflow so that every time you need to come up with a new campaign, the proposed updates go through all the right parties before they are officially approved
- Collaborate on update ideas using the Pinboard where your team can share their ideas, leave comments, and generally collaborate to turn any ideas into great updates
- Plan and organize your social media calendar with tags and colours and drag and drop ideas from your Pinboard directly in the calendar to be scheduled
Plus, you can also collaborate on managing your social media as a team (responding to comments and messages) and you have access to detailed analytics to help you improve your strategy.
The 10 best collaboration tools for teams: @contentcal_io via @lilachbullockClick To TweetCommunication tools
Another issue with teams is that they often need to be in constant conversation; whether it be by video, message or phone, one of the following tools can help you find a better, more efficient way of communicating with your team:
7. Slack
Slack aims to help you lead a less stressful life by “simplifying communication”; what this means is that with Slack you can form a better system for communicating with your team, and keeping all the conversations together, for easy access.
Your conversations and decisions are saved in the shared space so that you can search through them to find answers to your questions.
Another plus of using Slack is that it integrates with other productivity software (such as MailChimp, SalesForce and Skype).
The 10 best collaboration tools for teams: @slackhq via @lilachbullockClick To Tweet8. Skype for Business
Skype has introduced Skype for Business a few years ago, in an effort to provide businesses with a better tool for holding online meetings.
Skype for Business also integrates with Office products, so you can even start conversations on your Word app. With the more expensive plan, you get file storage and sharing as well.
Otherwise, use it to hold audio and video conferences (in HD) with up to 250 people, message your team, share your screen, schedule meetings in Outlook and more.
The 10 best collaboration tools for teams: @skypebusiness via @lilachbullockClick To TweetMarketing tools for teams
Planning, strategizing and managing marketing campaigns can be a pain – but, with the right tool, you can cut down on the planning and reporting and instead focus on your tasks and projects:
9. CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a marketing calendar that aims to help you organise all of your marketing efforts into one place.
Use their drag and drop calendar to create workflows for each of your projects and then manage them: assign tasks, collaborate with other teammates, add notes and comments and keep track of all your work deadlines.
A huge plus of using CoSchedule is that you can also schedule your social media updates through your calendar and even your content.
Additionally, you’ll have access to performance analytics, so you can examine your teams’ performance and efficiency.
The 10 best collaboration tools for teams: @coschedule via @lilachbullockClick To Tweet10. Wrike for Marketing
Wrike has quite a few different solutions for teams of all sorts (creatives, project management teams, and so on), including for marketing teams.
You can use it to create your project workflows, set tasks for others in your team (and send notifications for when they need to start a task), share documents, communicate with your team, approve content and basically, anything you need to make sure you’re on top of everything.
The 10 best collaboration tools for teams: @wrike via @lilachbullockClick To TweetConclusion
If you’re looking for ways to improve your team’s efficiency and productivity, look no further; a good tool can make a huge difference to your whole team and make everyone’s lives so much easier. Use tools to manage all of your projects, create detailed workflows, assign tasks and keep track of all your teammates and more; the more you can centralise your communications and work, the easier it will be for everyone involved to manage their workload.
What tools are you using for easy collaboration? Leave your comments below and please share if you found the post useful 🙂
Highly regarded on the world speaker circuit, Lilach has graced Forbes and Number 10 Downing Street. She’s a hugely connected and highly influential entrepreneur. Listed in Forbes as one of the top 20 women social media power influencers and was crowned the Social Influencer of Europe by Oracle. She is listed as the number one Influencer in the UK by Career Experts and is a recipient for a Global Women Champions Award for her outstanding contribution and leadership in business.
Great list, these products are quite well-known on the market. Here in my team, we’re using Slack + Futuramo apps. Slack for fast exchange of comments and information, Futuramo for time tracking, issue reporting and planning. This combination works well for us.
Hi Magda, many thanks for your comment, pleased you liked the list 🙂 Good to know what everyone else is using – I’ll have to check the Futuramo apps!
I’m glad I’ve found this article. So much to learn and try. For collaboration we use Google Suite for document sharing, Slack for team communication, Hitask for project and task management.
Thank you very much Lilach. Have a great day.
Thanks Alexa 🙂 I’m not that familiar with Hitask, will have to check it out 🙂
Where’s Bitrix24? Absolutely the most powerful free team collaboration and project management option right now.
Not familiar with them Lena
+1 for Bitrix24. One of the best free team collaboration tools IMHO. I like them a lot more than Slack or Asana.
Thanks Marsha. I’ve not used them before. I love Slack 🙂
Great list! We currently use Dapulse & Sprout Social. Have looked at Slack a few times but can’t seem to move past Whatsapp for client communication. We also use Podio / Zapier / Process St – all great for automation within teams.
Thanks Stacey 🙂 I love Slack for teams. It’s funny, I don’t think I’d like Whatsapp for client communication but if it works for you guys then keep doing it 🙂
Great List, But Surprised Proofhub is not there I Really Pleased with proofhub.
Thanks, not familiar with them.
Hey, Lilach Thanks for sharing the great stuff. You should be added 365appz modern digital workplace. This is very effective workplace tool for collaboration. We are using this tool at work.
Thanks for recommending your own tool Ami!
My team used to work with Trello but we weren’t satisfied with it. I know it’s probably the most popular collaboration tool but quite honestly, the amount of notifications makes using it very confusing. A couple of months ago we switched to Kanban Tool and that was exactly what we needed. Have you heard of the software?. It’s very easy to use and I find it extremely effective. I’m glad about the change, best decision in the last couple of months.
Thanks Sally. I’m surprised to hear that. I find Trello so simple and easy to use. I’m a huge fan of them and use them with my team too. Not familiar with Kanban
Great List of tools. I would like to mention one more tool. ProofHub. Have you tried? It comes with so may amazing features. It s work management system brings teams, clients and management under one roof. Must Try!
Thanks Ashpreet, not familiar with them
One more to the list is R-HUB TurboMeeting for secure real time collaboration which runs on-premise.
Thanks Jeff, not familiar with them
Great Article..!!! My team has been using Rainbow, a free business messaging app. It’s an open cloud based platform which provides more than 150 APIs that allows developers to integrate its features into your existing core business applications and process.
Thanks. Good to see that you use your own tool! 😀
Hi Lilach – great list. I am an organization geek, so I love seeing what other people use and love. I have created a new editorial calendar / marketing calendar tool called PlanITPDQ – I would be delighted if you would check it out and give me any feedback! It’s designed for small teams and entrepreneurs, so it’s a lot easier to use than some of the tools on your list. And once we launch commercially next year, it will be a LOT less expensive, too!
Thanks Alison. Congrats on your new tool 🙂
Good job! I Have known few of these tools, Here I would like to help you guys with another tool which you can check it out here: https://fleep.io
Amazing list but missing some useful tools like Basecamp and Slack. These tools are very handy in collaboration.
Thanks 🙂 Yes Basecamp and Slack are awesome too 🙂