It feels like just yesterday we were all in offices together, like it was normal, right? You could shake hands with people, throw paper airplane notes from one office to the next, and eat lunch with your co-workers. Can you believe it’s February 2021 and we’re still not able to get back into the office?
Well, maybe it feels like yesterday for you, but this author hasn’t worked in an office since late 2004. For that reason, it makes me uniquely suited to share with you the information in this blog post. I feel like I’ve read so many of these posts lately, many of them showcase the same apps, but it’s not because that app or service is necessarily “good” or “great”, even “exceptional”…. in some cases, the apps I’ve seen suggested for remote workers are exceptionally bad. It’s obvious that some of the authors of similar blog posts have been paid or otherwise incentivized to mention some of the services they do.
That said, I can affirm that we have not been paid (or otherwise incentivized) to mention any apps or services on this list. I can also affirm that I use or have used these apps and recommend them to my friends and professional colleagues just as I do in my writings. Practice what you preach, folks.
Let’s go!
Table of Contents
1Password
If you aren’t using a password manager in 2021, you’re really not doing yourself any favors when it comes to ensuring your login details are secure. The time to use a unique and complex password for each and every app, service, and the website you visit was several years ago…. get on the secure password train with 1Password!
Personally, I’ve been using a password manager since Keychain on Mac OS 9 and have been using 1Password for many years now. I can honestly say 1Password is the best password manager for a variety of reasons. 1Password is more than just a password manager. It’s also a secure digital vault for you to store things like software license codes and those annoying emergency 2-factor recovery codes, and it’s also a digital wallet that can save everything from your American Express Card to your Zappos Loyalty Membership Card.
You can also securely save notes, ID card numbers, even image scans (up to 1 GB in total file storage) of things like your driving license and passport for emergencies.
If you work on a team that has distributed resources, you know sharing passwords in Slack isn’t really secure, right? 1Password has a Business plan just for those cases. With the ability to choose from 13 vault permissions, you can give your team access to only the resources they need, quickly and securely.
With available advanced enterprise features, like Azure Active Directory, you can automate provisioning with tools you already have in place. And additional features, like 1Password’s Advanced Protection for Business, ensures access to your Password Vaults takes place only on the networks you specify, your company VPN for example, with enforced rules like a Master Password Policy and 2Factor Authentication, among other mobile features.
1Password Personal and Teams pricing is available with no hidden sign-ups required, as well. And, if you’re concerned about importing your logins from another app, don’t be. 1Password has a fantastic migration tool that’ll get you taken care of easy-peasy. But if you do run into any problems along the way, their fanatical support team is always there to help.
Adobe Creative Cloud
Adobe’s Creative Cloud has become the industry standard suite of applications for everyone from the average home user to full-on movie studios due to the inclusion of so many great and powerful applications. Looking back in time, what really made Adobe successful was the creation of the PDF file. Depending on your age, you may remember when sharing a simple file with lecture notes you made on your PowerBook with your classmate who had a Compaq wasn’t as easy as it is today.
Although Adobe’s Pagemaker and Photoshop tools were already immensely popular with its customers, they expanded their creative suite empire by acquiring Macromedia in 2005, which gave Adobe rights to Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks. Some years later, no doubt having taken notice of the success of the monthly subscription success seen from companies like Netflix, Adobe changed the way they license their software from one time purchases to a monthly subscription for some, or all of their applications, depending on the package. Born on this day was Adobe Creative Cloud.
Including applications like Adobe’s famed Acrobat, Illustrator, and Photoshop, but also advanced apps like After Effects and Premiere Pro, in the low monthly subscription free put these tools, which were often priced out of the reach of young creatives, in the hands of billions of people who have transformed the way we create art.
Adobe offers great discounts on its top Creative Cloud subscription tier for students and teachers as well, bringing the monthly price down from $52.99 for all apps, to a more palatable $19.99 (1st year, then $29.99 then onward).
Check out their plans page for the full scoop.
Affinity
It would be remiss of me to not mention Affinity’s collection of design apps, especially when in the same list I mention their main competitor – Adobe.
Their apps, Photo, Designer, and Publisher, are fabulous (and far more affordable) alternatives to Adobe’s equivalents, Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, respectively.
If you could create your own photo editing software, it would work like Affinity Photo. Whether it’s quick corrections, delicate retouching, or immersing yourself in complex fine art with hundreds of layers, Affinity Photo has you covered. With live, real-time editing, even at 100+ Megapixels, you can pan and zoom at 60 FPS!
With Affinity Designer, switch between a full-featured vector and raster workspace in a single click. Have a complex illustration? Designer can handle it. The render engine is built to handle huge documents so you can be confident adding all of the tiny details won’t compromise the performance, Designer can work with thousands of objects with no perceivable lag.
And when you need to put your designs to print, Publisher has you covered. The app comes with essentials like master pages, facing page spreads, grids, tables, advanced typography, text flow, full professional print output, and other amazing features, Affinity Publisher has everything you need to create the perfect layout – whatever your project.
Worried about learning a new app? Affinity has you covered. Not only are their apps intended to be super easy to use, but Affinity even put together a great page on their site to Learn their apps, featuring Video Tutorials, and if you like – you can buy their Workbooks to learn the apps inside and out.
Currently, due to the COVID-19 Crisis affecting our World, Affinity is offering 90 day free trials on all of their apps AND they are on sale for 50% off. That means each app can be yours for the low, fantastical price of $24.99. Additionally, all of their apps are optimized for the new M1 Macs, giving you super high performance.
Airtable
One look at Airtable and you may think it’s just a spreadsheet oriented database tool. Sure, it looks like Smartsheet since it does blend database and spreadsheet elements together in a pretty sweet UI, but it’s more than that.
Airtable functions as a spreadsheet-database hybrid. Although other management apps are used mostly for task management, Airtable has a ton of flexibility built-in with its custom fields and blocks.
Its main view is a table, which you can link together to form a base and multiple bases can be organized into a workspace. Such compartmentalization in a project management app isn’t everyone’s forte, but if you like things to be just a certain way, Airtable may be the project management app for you!
Airtable has also designed great templates if you aren’t sure about how to get started. With use cases from content production, event planning, HR & Recruiting, even things dealing with everyday life, not to mention integrations galore, Airtable is an excellent choice if you prefer a different style of project management and relational databases.
Amazing Marvin
Amazing Marvin is simply the best productivity tool for individuals. I love it so much I bought a lifetime membership. Amazing Marvin is carefully designed using principles from behavioral psychology to help you reduce procrastination, feel less stressed, and increase your productivity. To quote their website, Amazing Marvin is a good fit for:
- Amazing Marvin is a great fit for anyone with lots of things to do and who works mostly from a computer (our mobile apps are not amazing yet).
- Amazing Marvin is also amazing for anyone struggling with executive dysfunction (e.g. ADHD, procrastinators).
- Many of our users are entrepreneurs, freelancers, students, writers, programmers, designers, marketers, event planners, teachers, knowledge workers among others.
Because different methods work for different people, Amazing Marvin equips you with just about any feature you would need, and ways to customize (nearly) every one of them so you can make an app that works for you. Because of its flexibility, Amazing Marvin can seem daunting, but it comes with thoughtful premade templates to get you started.
The core premise of Amazing Marvin is to work from a daily list of tasks that populate from a master list. How you organize this, is entirely up to you. Amazing Marvin is incredibly modular, and you can enable or disable its features anytime you want. You won’t have to reconfigure your workflow to do that either. Don’t want to use that Pomodoro timer this week? Turn it off. Not feeling inspired? Turn on suggested tasks or use the task jar to have it assign a random task.
Amazing Marvin is powerful, customizable, and he’s also a cute little brown square! Amazing Marvin is available on the web, as a desktop app, and for Android and iOS. Regrettably, at this time there are no team features, but, having used Amazing Marvin for almost 3 years now, I can say Christina and her team are working hard to add features all the time. There’s so much available in the app now than there was 2 or 3 years ago. There are few apps I can say I genuinely love using, and Amazing Marvin is one of them.
Also, if you’re using an existing app, you can import directly to Amazing Marvin with their quick and easy importer tool.
Pricing for Amazing Marvin is straightforward – $12 monthly, $96 yearly, or $300 for lifetime. You also have the option to get Educator and Student discounts. Additionally, Christina and her team provide personal and professional support. Amazing Marvin is available for 30 days FREE, no credit card required, as well. I really encourage everyone I talk to about productivity tools for individuals about Amazing Marvin but I also encourage them to read it’s Getting Started guides, because as I mentioned, it is very versatile and can seem overwhelming.
Asana
Asana is a great project management app for smaller teams who are looking to improve collaboration and accountability when working on distributed projects and tasks. When it comes to ease of use and the GUI, its interface and user experience, are almost unrivaled.
The service is great about making its users feel empowered, not just the project manager. There’s a great emphasis on tasks and management of things like a team or individual workloads to help prevent burn out. Additionally, the new Premium tier now includes some reporting and budgeting features, which were something it was very much lacking in.
With the usual sort of features, like task prioritization, shared team calendars, resource management & time tracking, and a host of easily creatable automation, users won’t be missing features. Asana also includes some really good templates that are predesigned for common use cases you can start using right after you sign up. The GUI is so good, it’s one of the few project managers you can pick up and run with without feeling as though you need to consult the Documentation every time you need to do something. It’s that easy!
Asana’s product really shines with their Premium tiers, which carry a monthly fee, but its free plan does allow for up to 15 team members.
Definitely keep Asana on your to-do list if you’re investigating project management tools this year!
Bitwarden
Bitwarden is a free, open-source alternative to 1Password. First and foremost, you should know they do the exact same thing at their core: store and autofill passwords, credit card data, identification information, and more. Is Bitwarden as pretty in appearance as 1Password? No. But free is good.
I should mention, Bitwarden is only free for individual use or sharing passwords with 2 people. If you need more than that, you’ll have to step up to their subscription plans. I know, everyone just relishes the idea of another subscription, but hear me out. Paying for Netflix every month isn’t the same thing as paying for an app that keeps your life secure (i.e., Bitwarden). Whether for personal, family, or teams use, Bitwarden’s pricing is one of it’s most attractive features.
With the free plan, you get unlimited vault items, you can use their apps to sync and auto-fill passwords across all of your devices, and a secure password generator. If you’re handy with servers, you can also spin up an instance of their password manager and not have to rely on their cloud tech, roll your own, and have even MORE privacy. If you want advanced features, like the ability to use 2FA codes, you’ll need to step up to Bitwarden Premium ($10 per year, for individuals)
Bitwarden also features a handy import/migration feature to get you set up fast, if you’re already using another password manager. Seriously, why aren’t you using Bitwarden already?
Bubbles
Bubbles – everyone knows and loves them. Our heads are almost immortalized in them when we chat with our colleagues and friends. Bubbles are sort of like taking a screenshot, but instead of drawing at whatever you want to share with your mates, you can record audio, comment in text, and more. Relatively new to the market, Bubbles is changing the way you share with your friends and co-workers.
Bubbles is more than a screen recorder. Being able to select anything on your screen, describe it, and share it instantly brings an entirely new meaning to screen captures. Use the app to give feedback, share inspirations and design examples, flag bugs, and more. Best of all, it’s free and has a great Chrome extension!
Canva
If you’re assembling a quick image for a party or a poster for your bake sale, look no further than Canva. Yes, Canva’s best templates are only available with a subscription, but there are thousands of design choices available with the free subscription.
Canva, if you aren’t familiar, is a very versatile graphic design tool that runs in your browser (or as an app on iOS and Android). You can use the app to create things like brochures, flyers, posters, social media graphics, invitations, calendars, videos, presentations, cards, logos, infographics, labels, resumes, menus, and more! If you prefer to start to blank and add assets as you go, you can do that too.
Canva is like Photoshop, but easier to use, works in your browser, and is FREE! Their web app includes an impressively complex set of editing and layout tools as well, covering everything from blur, background removal, and image cropping. With layering support, you can arrange assets in your project just as you would in apps like Photoshop or Illustrator, and easy to use extras like adding text captions and stickers are present to keep designing your own art fun, as it should be!
Canva premium only opens the door to even more templates with better, more complex, or niche-specific designs, and even more stock art features to make your project truly one of a kind.
Confluence
Remember Intranets from the 90s, maybe even later? That internal website your IT team managed and eventually gave tools for your department heads to create pages of policies that always felt clunky? Well, enter the future that is Confluence.
Confluence is an open and shared workspace that connects your team to ideas and information that is critical to your business. You can use Confluence to describe processes, store meeting notes, onboard your staff, and much, much more. Publishing content in Confluence is incredibly easy, as its editor is very similar to WordPress meets Microsoft Word. . Of course, Confluence comes with the usual integrations to other Atlassian products, like Trello and Jira, plus a host of integrations in the marketplace.
Confluence is free, like most Atlassian products, with some limitations on the number of users in your team and cloud storage. But don’t think Confluence is strictly for work. You can use it to document any number of things, plan out your budget, a major purchase, use it as a journal, a life diary, planner, and more.
A full list of features and templates are available here.
Figma
Figma is one of those tools that takes a little getting accustomed to unless you’re a designer. While I am not a designer, I can say the app is incredibly useful when you’re planning out design changes for your own website, working on prototype ideas for graphics for things like social media and marketing campaigns, and more. As a design tool, it’s very similar to Sketch, but there’s a huge difference – Figma’s collaboration features are just out of this world.
Figma works on any platform since it runs in the browser and just as you would comment and collaborate in a Google Doc, you can do the same with Figma. Each person has their own cursor, so it’s easy to see who’s doing what, but with a creative team working on a single set of images or wireframes, you can put together a prototype for a client really quickly and without a lot of the hassle that was back and forth iterations before.
Figma is also heavily reliant on Slack, so if your team is already using that, Figma will be a drop in-app for you. Additionally, sharing files and projects in Figma is super easy, uncomplicated, and very flexible. Pricing for Figma varies depending on your needs. For 2 editors, it’s free with up to 3 projects and a 30-day version history. Paid plans start at $12 per editor per month and include unlimited projects and version history.
Figma is also celebrating 5 years of Figma, be sure to check out the reflections from their Co-Founder and CEO Dylan Field.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace, formerly known as G Suite, and before that Google Apps For Your Domain, has become almost the “go-to” business email solution. With the addition of Google Docs, Google Drive, and Google Voice, all in one convenient service, it makes sense. Google Workspace is a great service that scales easily with the size of your business and user base.
Each app is seamlessly integrated into the other apps, making communication with your team, collaborating on deliverables, managing calendar, and having chats that turn to video calls all from one app, is pretty cool. Google’s new Chat feature is giving Slack a run for it’s money and many new integrations are appearing for the service every day.
And since it’s Google, Search is built into all of their products making it easy to find things and surface actual results faster than having to dig through things. Also, with Google Workspace, you get support from Google, which means you can talk to a human for questions about anything to do with your Google Workspace products. Need to setup a filter in your Gmail but don’t know how, call up Google!
Pricing for Google Workspace varies depending on the number of seats you need. However, every plan includes Gmail, Drive, Meet, Calendar, Chat, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Keep, Sites, Forms, and Currents.
HoneyBook
HoneyBook is everything your business needs to get stuff done. This fabulous and thoughtfully designed project manager is perfect for anyone selling a service, such as designers, event planners, DJs, Photographers, Business and Life Coaches, Catering, Copywriters, Florists, Travel Professionals, Personal Concierges, and anyone in between. Their application is perfectly suited for people who provide custom-tailored services that are unique to each client.
My favorite feature about HoneyBook is it’s an all-in-one application. If you’re a designer, for example, you know how hard it can be keeping track of every iteration of a client’s project, all the notes, the various changes in contract, as well as the client communication that takes place. HoneyBook keeps all of this in one place. The app is your Homebase for essentials so you can keep everything organized for your client. With context aware conversations, you can drill down and see who said what and when regarding which thing, eliminating confusion. And when you’re ready to deliver, take sign contacts and take payments in the same system.
HoneyBook also handles Invoices, Proposals, Scheduling, Contracts, and Automation, making it truly all-in-one. Everything you send from your HoneyBook is totally customized to your brand and you can manage everything from the web or your phone, with their convenient app. If you need help, their support team is always around to help you out!
Additionally, HoneyBook integrates with your favorite apps, Zoom, QuickBooks, Zapier, Gmail, Google Calendar, and more!
Pricing for HoneyBook is simple and affordable. They often run sales too, so be on the lookout!
Jira
Jira is project management redefined. Truly designed for agile software teams so they can plan and ship software on track and on time, it’s Jira’s versatility that lands it on this list. Sure, you can use Jira for its intended purpose, but you can also adapt any and every aspect of it to work with a lot of things. For example, at ChemiCloud we use Jira to track projects like server upgrades and bug fixes, as well as planned product launches and enhancements and content planning for our Knowledge Base and Blog.
Jira also has advanced features, like Road-mapping so you can complete projects faster by building out smarter plans for how you want things done, as well as automation to trigger events, making once tedious tasks a breeze. You can customize the workflow of any Jira project so that it suits the need of your team. That’s what makes it so powerful. Plus, since it’s from Atlassian, it integrates seamlessly with Confluence so you can integrate the status of projects and tasks into Confluence documents for your Leadership and Management teams to review at any time without having to consistently update intranet pages on the backend.
Pricing for Jira depends on the number of seats you need, but like Confluence, it’s always free for up to 10 users.
Krisp
Whether you’re working from your favorite coffee shop or from home, you know the pain of being in a meeting and the second you unmute your microphone the espresso grinder goes off, or your kids start shouting their favorite new curse word. Krisp takes care of that. Using AI and Machine Learning, the app will remove the noise from your background and make it sound like you’re in your own private office.
Making it even easier, Krisp works on any PC or Mac with any microphone, headset, and speaker. Simply install the app and set your primary recording device to Krisp in your System Preferences and Krisp takes care of the rest. You can finally enjoy noise-free productive remote classes with your students or have noise-free meetings with your team.
Krisp is available for free, with 120 minutes of noise cancellation via each method per week, or you can pay $5 per month (billed yearly) for unlimited use. I’ve personally used the app and can tell you it’s phenomenal and works as advertised. As far as I’m concerned, they’re using dark magic to make it happen.
Also, if you’re a business, you can impart Krisp as a perk to your team with Krisp’s super convenient Business and Enterprise plans.
Monday
If you asked me today what the best visually-oriented project management tool was, my first choice would be Monday. Everything on Monday starts with a board, a visual super-powered spreadsheet. Visually intuitive, you won’t need any training to jump in and use this app to power everything in your organization from ho-hum project management, HR and Recruiting, Creative and Design plans, Software Development, even Construction.
Monday is an operating system for the way you work.
Set it up in minutes with the pre-built templates that you can totally customize to any workflow you need. Need a new entry to appear in the sales pipeline when an email comes into a certain Gmail address? Use integration and automate the process.
Manage everything from one workspace. And visualize everyone’s work with Views that are automatically created, no finicking with complicated chart formulas in a spreadsheet.
Pricing for Monday varies like most software, on the number of seats you need. Having worked with their team before however, reach out and get custom pricing for what you want. Don’t just sign up for a plan on the site. You’ll get an account rep and you can customize a lot of things like automation and integration actions.
Notion
Notion is a personal productivity powerhouse of an application that is now FREE for personal use. Similar to Confluence, but more visually appealing, Notion can be used to organize everything in your life from appointments, budgeting, goals, recipes, shopping, and more.
With a WYSIWYG editor that is similar to a website builder on steroids, you can create pages for everything in your personal life. Notion also includes a large selection of templates that you can customize to your taste and need. A spacious canvas for forward-thinking, Notion is great for note-taking, journaling, and writing.
For teams, Notion becomes a fully-fledged Project Manager and Team Workspace with powerful real-time collaboration features, wikis, docs, version history, and more.
Pricing for Notion is free for Personal use, with a Personal Pro plan that gives you even more features. Teams pricing is reasonable as well and starts at $8 per member per month.
Polly
What was the last survey you sent your team? Was it picking out lunch? Where to go on the next team retreat? Or was it a simple happiness survey? Whatever it was, you probably didn’t use Polly, but instead used a simple Slack Survey or a Google Form. BORING!
Polly is here to save you from that by making giving feedback fun again. Polly integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams (Sorry Google Chat users) and makes it easy to get instant feedback using an app your team is already relying on every day. Instead of yet another login and “oh boy, another survey” (said no one ever), send a Polly through Slack and get responses where work is actually happening.
My other favorite feature about Polly? No more pivot tables, no more vlookups! Polly captures this data instantly and makes automatic visuals for you in beautiful and easy to use dashboards. Of course, if you are a die-hard spreadsheet user (#respect), you can download CSVs and import them into any visualization tool of your choosing.
Polly has a library of templates covering everything from HR needs, like Benefits Feedback and Employee NPS, to Management Feedback Tools, and Support Ticket Feedback tools for your IT Department Metrics, making it easy to put together automated workflows that take place in your team’s chat environment.
Pricing for Polly varies on your needs and platform, Slack or Teams. Polly also has a free plan for both Slack and Teams platforms with a fixed number of responses per sender, per month, as well.
Raindrop.io
They say the first step to fixing a problem is admitting you have one…. well, I have a problem with bookmarks and “fun sites I find that may be useful one day”….. as a result, I’ve amassed an encyclopedia’s worth of bookmarks and they’re totally unorganized. I also like to clip things as I browse the internet, like fun patterns, or quotes I find useful, and GIFs, lots and lots of GIFs. Until recently, I was using about 3 apps to keep track of this – Chrome Bookmarks, Evernote, and Gmail where I would mail these sites to myself with clever subject lines I think I would remember, but really I won’t.
Organizing my Chrome bookmarks was something I tasked myself with one weekend. Huge mistake. It was like trying to achieve world peace. I searched and searched for a bookmark manager that also let me clip things and save them to a notebook. In came Raindrop.io. Designed for creatives and built for coders, or people who are like me and have to label everything with every conceivable label that could surface in a search if we were to look for that information 3 months or even 5 years later. Raindrop felt literally heaven-sent.
Raindrop integrates with your browser with an extension and features an import tool to bring in your bookmarks. From there, you use the extension and context menu tools to save bookmarks and clip information and save it for use later. Just open up Raindrop to organize and personalize. With ease, you can group related bookmarks within the same context and the app comes with thousands of icons you can use to make things look beautiful!
Raindrop is free and honestly, most users will be fine with the free plan. The Pro plan unlocks some cool features and one of my favorites – permanent library. This means if you save a page, even if the page is taken down, you’ll be able to get back to that information because it was saved in Raindrop. You also get a number of other cool features and you’re be supporting an awesome dev team.
Slack
Remember what it was like to communicate with a remote team? In the very first remote job I had, we used Skype to communicate and had group chats. It was a mess of hot garbage, to tell you the truth. Skype wasn’t designed to work with large teams scattered around in different places. There weren’t any integrations that made it easy, file share limitations, plus weird call and video quality quirks always made things inconvenient.
And then Slack appeared. A single app with channels for each department or group in your organization, threaded replies to keep chats clean and have context. And images and videos shared were able to be viewed in the same app. Slack revolutionized team communication for remote and in-house teams as we know it.
But Slack isn’t just perfect for work. Because Slack is FREE, you can create a Slack account for anything you can imagine. Babysitting club? Create a Slack for it! History club? See you in Slack! Homeowners association! Why not make a Slack for it, create channels for yard sales, HOA violations, lost pets, emergency channels, and more! Share and chat with your neighbors in ways never thought possible and coordinate neighborhood events in seconds, instead of having to use text message.
A key feature in Slack is the number of integration features in the software. With thousands of integrations, you can engage with your team (or friends and neighbors, if you prefer) and interact with them using apps that work within Slack. They won’t have to sign up for another service or even leave the Slack app to use the app or be notified. It’s simply, amazing.
Slack is Free, as mentioned, but also has a few paid subscription tiers depending on your needs.
VoIP.MS
A lot of companies put a lot of thought into what they need from a VoIP phone system, sometimes too much, and as a result, they end up with companies who provide great service at first, but quality declines in the months after sign up, usually right around the time the promo pricing ends and you’re tied up in a contract with a company who provides near rubbish service that costs too much to get rid of. Sound familiar?
I’m not disparaging any VoIP providers out there, but the major players are so expensive for what you get. VoIP.MS on the other hand is affordable, customizable, and the most feature-rich provider out there. Bring your own phone? Have at it. As long as it supports SIP, you’re good. Need MMS and SMS as well? VoIP.ms has it. Encrypted calls? Shhhh, mum’s the word but your calls can be encrypted if you so choose. Support is provided via live chat and ticket during extensive business hours, but having used these guys myself for over a decade, I can say there have been few problems and I’ve only needed support a handful of times.
VoIP.MS is also notable, at least, in my book because they have a virtual fax service that actually works. I truly love their extensions feature, which is just as it sounds. I can have an IP phone in my Kitchen at Extension 101 and my bedroom at 102, and call them just as I would any other regular telephone, except it doesn’t cost anything because it’s an intra-network call.
Speaking of cost, USA outgoing rates to USA proper start at 0.01 a minute and if you need Unlimited Plans, you can get them. VoIP.MS features an easy-to-use control panel that lets you customize the permission of every extension (or sub-account, as they call them) on your plan ensuring no surprise international phone call bills. Also, VoIP.MS features a number of server locations (18 to be specific), so if you have a global team, you can certainly set them up on servers closer to their location for better latency.
VoIP.ms supports my 2 favorite softphone apps, Bria and MicroSIP, and almost any SIP phone you can throw at the service. Additionally, VoIP.MS provides SIP trunks so you can set up their services with your favorite FreePBX or Asterisk server, for example.
If you are looking for top quality VoIP services where you can customize every feature, have enhanced US/Canada 911, keep your current numbers, and NO CONTRACTS with pay as you go billing, you’ll want to take a close look at VoIP.MS.
World Time Buddy
If you’ve ever worked with a team that is scattered across the globe, you know how difficult it can be at times determining what time it is where are. Especially when you have this great idea and you want to run it by your creative team, but can’t remember what time it is where they are. What to do?
Check out the time on World Time Buddy! As the name implies, the site is fast and easy to use the app to load up various cities around the world and it will tell you the current time in those locations, as well as a time overlay showing you what time it is there when it’s 3 pm (for example) where you are. Super handy if you need to find a time that works for the both of you for meetings!
Check out World Time Buddy the next time you can’t figure out what time it is “over there”.
Zapier
Zapier is one of those tools that has really gained popularity in the last couple of years, which I’m so happy to hear. Before that, it was kinda a secret, which was fun, but now they have really blossomed into this fully-fledged automation solution. What is Zapier you ask? Well, it’s automation for the masses. Zapier allows you to take those tasks you do over and over and over and automates them for you, saving you time!
Say you are on a sales team and get leads/inquiries to your [email protected] email address. You can use Zapier to monitor that inbox, and when it receives an email, take the name, email address, subject, and body of the message put into a spreadsheet for record-keeping purposes, then notify a random sales agent in your team app, like Slack for example, that they have a new lead assigned to them. Amazing right?
One of my favorite uses of Zapier is having photos I take uploaded to Google Photos, then copied to another Google Account I use for backup purposes. I also use it to save attachments I am sent in my Gmail to my Drive automatically and a lot of other things. Zapier integrates with hundreds of apps and has actions that are just beyond imagination at this point.
While Zapier is free for 100 tasks per month, if you’re like me, you will quickly exhaust that and have to step up to their Starter or Professional Plan, both of which are reasonably priced considering the amount of time they save.
If you’re looking for an easy way to automate the exchange of information between 2 or more apps that don’t already natively integrate with each other or need a more creative way to manipulate the information, you need Zapier in your life.
Wrapping up
Now it’s your turn: which apps do you think are must-have? Let us know in the comments!
