By David Nield and Brian Turner, the best office software suite is still offered by Microsoft with its Microsoft 365 platform. It is familiar to those who have used Microsoft Office before, and easy to learn for those who haven't. The cloud version of Microsoft 365 allows you to use it while traveling with your smartphone or tablet, and all your documents are saved online in the cloud with OneDrive. This means that you don't have to worry about losing important files due to a hard drive failure, and also that you can switch between devices without losing your work.
The price may seem a little more expensive than before when you buy a separate license for Microsoft 365 Personal, but there's also Microsoft 365 Home, which offers up to six licenses, which could be ideal and cost-effective to distribute to employees if you have five or fewer. Microsoft 365 Business Premium is aimed at larger companies and includes Sharepoint, Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Teams. Taken together, Microsoft 365 offers what you need in terms of office software and management platform, and remains superior in terms of functionality to those of its rivals. In addition, expect to find many vendors and contractors who also use it, making it easy to share, exchange, or send files between the two of you without any problems.
Sage Accounting makes a good first impression with clear pricing and no tricks. The best Sage Accounting plan offers a decent price, and there's also a 30-day free trial. If you have a team and several projects to manage, Asana can help you determine who should do what at any given time, maximizing the chances of everything working within the deadline. Asana has an accessible interface that's easy to navigate and works across all mobile apps and the web without missing a beat.
It also integrates very well with more than a hundred other products and services. Slack may not be done with email yet and it can become a waste of time if you're not disciplined in the way it's implemented, but it's also fair to say that this communications platform has helped transform the way many teams of small businesses keep in touch. What Slack does well is to bring that simple idea to life in a very intuitive way, with an elegant and responsive interface, and a lot of integrations, add-ons and shortcuts to keep the conversation flowing.The free version of Avast has long been considered one of the best for home users, but if value for money and simplicity are key factors, Avast Business could be a wise choice.Bitrix24's unusually generous free account supports 12 users and includes 5 GB of storage, but if you need more, there are additional paid accounts that offer more and for more users. Overall, Bitrix24 offers a powerful set of tools that will be especially useful for small businesses and start-ups to help them develop and grow through better productivity.Zapier is the best process automation software for busy teams.
Connect more than 1500 of your favorite business applications and tools so you can focus on your most important work. Zapier automatically moves the necessary information between applications with a central command.Google Workspace is collaboration software that helps small and large businesses create and record meetings, personalize business email, and share files. Hubspot's CRM software brings together marketing, sales and customer service tools under one roof with popular features such as lead generation, analysis and automation.We've barely touched the surface of all the different software options a small business would want to consider, especially since there are multiple areas of interest and a wide variety of competitors who want to offer the best product for you.
