Best SaaS Tools Your Business Needs In 2021

“If someone asks me what cloud computing is, I try not to get bogged down with definitions. I tell them that, simply put, cloud computing is a better way to run your business.” – Marc Benioff, Founder, CEO and Chairman, Salesforce.

Businesses from small to enterprise level have been moving their core operational and functional departments like marketing, sales, development, and more into the cloud. The ever-evolving SaaS industry has been a catalyst to this cloud movement. They’ve made it a literal cakewalk for businesses to set up their operations without the need for extensive capital.

“With the cloud, individuals and small businesses can snap their fingers and instantly set up enterprise-class services.” – Roy Stephan, Founder and CEO, Pierce Matrix.

According to a recent report by Blissfully on SaaS trends, the overall spend on SaaS per company has seen a 50% surge in 2020 compared to 2018.

Additionally, SaaS has been the backbone of the recent work from home boom which was induced by the pandemic. If it weren’t for the CRMs, email marketing tools, and automation software, it would have been really rough for businesses to continue business as usual.

According to an article by the Tech Republic, more than 30% of the remote workforce is going to work from home permanently. This can only mean that the SaaS industry is going to grow bigger.

Investing in the right SaaS tools that remove any and every kind of friction from your workflow and user flow can easily give you a competitive edge. So, if you haven’t started creating your SaaS stack, then it’s time you build one to take your business to the next level.

In this article, we’ve listed the must-have SaaS tools in 2021. You can choose and build your SaaS stack based on your business model, target audience & their expectations, and your pain areas.

15+ Top SaaS Tools To Use In 2021

For Project Management

• Proofhub

A project management tool that brings all your teams under one roof. It helps in planning, collaborating, organizing, and delivering projects of all sizes on time. It’s equipped with all the right features including custom workflows & roles, one-on-one & group chat, project templates, project progress reports, timesheets, workload reports, and many more.

It seamlessly integrates with your current stack of tools including Dropbox, Google Drive, Fresh Books, Google Calendar, and One Drive.

Pricing: 14-day free trial and then $89/mo for unlimited projects, users, and 100GB storage.

• Asana

Asana is the perfect project management tool that keeps all your team projects and tasks in sync. Equipped with features like timeline, shared calendar, boards for tracking progress, dashboards to get real-time insights into all the projects at once, goals to set strategic goals, app integrations, automation, and more.

Asana is crafted to fit into any workflow and works for all kinds of teams, be it marketing, sales, product, and operations. You can manage workflows, teams, tasks, to-do lists, and more for your remote and agile teams.

Pricing: Comes with a free forever plan for individuals and small teams to get started with project management. Apart from that, they offer two plans: Premium ($13.49/per user/per mo) and Business ($30.49/per user/per mo). 

• Trello

A super simple project management tool that lets you create lists, cards, and boards to collaborate and organize your projects. It’s one of the best tools for collaborating on projects as it gives every stakeholder a quick glance at work in progress, completed tasks, and tasks to be worked on. It’s simple design, easy-to-use interface, and Kanban-style boards make it among the most efficient project management tools out there.

Pricing: A free forever plan for individuals and small businesses and Business Class for medium to enterprise-level customers ($12.50/per user/per mo).

For Collaboration

• Google Drive

Google Drive doesn’t need any introduction, it’s loved by almost everyone around the world. Cloud storage to easily and securely access all your content from a single place. It can be accessed on any device making it versatile and super-easy to use. Drive integrates with Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides to make collaborating in real-time easier for your team members. Most importantly, it has Google’s search capabilities and priority use AI algorithm that helps to find the right document at the right time.

Pricing: Google One – starts at $1.99 per month or $19.99 a year for 100GB. Or, for $2.99 a month or $19.99 a year, you get 200GB. For 2TB, you pay $9.99 per month or $99.99 annually, and 10TB costs $49.99 per month. For enterprises, you can contact their sales team from here.

• Monday

With Monday.com, you can manage everything; from projects, marketing, sales, to designs, software, operations, and HR. With over 200+ workflows, you easily plan, organize, distribute, and track everyone’s work in one place. Their design is quite visual and easy to use, even for new team members. They also offer 8 different data visualizations including kanban, timeline, Gantt to keep everything on track and everyone updated in a quick glance.

Pricing:

• Bit.ai

With Bit.ai, you can create dynamic notes, knowledge bases, documents, projects, training guides, technical documents, and more. It comes with all the right features including template gallery, smart editor, 100+ rich integrations, smart widgets, document tracking, team notes, content management to keep your work organized and everyone on the same page. It’s a perfect end-to-end document collaboration solution for companies of every size.

For Customer Management

• • Zoho

Equipped with powerful features like lead management, contact management, workflow automation, approval process, Omni channel customer management, performance management, predictive sales, and more, Zoho is one of the most loved customer relationship management tools around the world. You can convert leads, engage with your customers, and grow your business with this robust CRM.

• Salesforce

Salesforce is also one of the most sought-after CRM tools. It comes with features like contact management, email integration, sales forecasting, workflows and approvals, opportunity management, data management, and more. It’s carefully created to make the lives of sales professionals, marketing leaders, and IT teams easier and their work more effective. Using Salesforce, you can easily scale your processes, skill your people, and increase your business’ bottom line.

Pricing:

For Customer Support

• • • Freshworks

A customer and employee engagement software suite that’s intuitive and easy-to-use helps in keeping your employees happy and customers satisfied. Freshworks offers three robust and intuitive customer service software Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller that can help you take your customer service and support to the next level.

Freshdesk: A perfect solution equipped with omnichannel, self-service, and bots to delight your customers. It also comes with reporting and analysis to help you reduce your customer response time.

Freshchat: Deliver seamless, personalized customer support with the help of chatbots and human assistance across various channels.

Freshcaller: A modern plug-n-play PBX system that doesn’t need any downloads, maintenance, or hardware.

• Zendesk

Zendesk enables its customers to create seamless and unforgettable experiences for their end-users. It offers end-to-end customer service solutions that are easy to use and scale for businesses like yours. It’s equipped with features like unified agent workspace, 1000+ pre-built integrations, collaboration tools, routing and intelligence, knowledge management, omnichannel messaging, AI-powered bots, and reporting and analytics.

Pricing:

For Marketing Automation

• Hubspot

Hubspot’s Marketing Software is well-known among the marketing community for its end-to-end marketing solutions. It’s equipped with features like blog publishing, ad tracking & management, SEO, live chat, social media management, marketing automation, account-based marketing, lead tracking & management, marketing analytics, and Salesforce integration. Hubspot helps you build a seamless robust funnel to attract, convert, track, and retain your leads and customers.

Other readers find this useful: An Ultimate Guide to Squarespace SEO for 2021 with Checklist

Pricing:

• • • • Evernote
      • Evernote
      • Evernote
      • Marketo

A part of the Adobe Experience Cloud, Marketo Engage is an end-to-end engagement solution for modern demand marketing. With Marketo, you can attract and convert leads, build long-term relationships, scale up your marketing, and master account-based marketing. It comes equipped with powerful features like AI-powered segmentation, content personalization to create 1:1 experiences, cross-channel engagement, experience automation to nurture customers, and marketing impact analysis.

Pricing:

A few other powerful SaaS marketing tools:

• Drift – For conversational marketing, demand generation, AI chatbots, real-time personalization, and more.
• Outreach.io – An integrated sales engagement platform equipped with conversational intelligence, buyer segment, analysis, team performance reporting, and more.

For Productivity

TomatoTimer – A custom Pomodoro timer that lets you add your to-do list, track your progress along with animated tomatoes to boost your productivity. It’s a free online tool.

• Evernote

“You have to make your own condensed notes. You learn from MAKING them. A lot of thinking goes into deciding what to include and exclude. You develop your own system of abbreviations and memory methods for the information.” ― Peter Rogers, Author of Straight A at Stanford and on to Harvard.

Evernote is considered to be one of the best note-taking apps. It comes with powerful features like spaces, templates, web clipper, document scanning, rich notes, app integrations, PDF & doc search, and more. It lets you create the notes the way you want.

Pricing:

For Social Media Management

• Hootsuite

With Hootsuite, you can manage all your social media accounts from one place. It lets you schedule posts in advance which saves quite a lot of time. It also comes with an in-built asset library that lets you access image assets directly from the dashboard and also lets you keep a close eye on the latest social conversations, trends, and brand mentions.

Pricing:

• Mind the Graph – a free infographic makerSocial media is all about visuals and what better form of visual content than an infographic. With mind the graph, you can create beautiful and informative infographics with no effort. It comes equipped with features like drag & drop, pre-made resources, on-demand illustrations, multiple sizing options, slide presentations, and more.

Pricing:

A few other worth-having SaaS social media management tools:

• Buffer – An engagement tool that lets you help build authentic and long-term relationships with your audience on social media platforms. With buffer, you can publish your content, analyze your engagement, and measure campaign performance easily.
• Canva – A graphic designing platform for individuals and small businesses to create visual content for anything and everything. It has features like photo straightener, photo effects, speech bubble, image cropper, icons, frames, grids, textures, and more.
• Coschedule – Coschedule is a combination of powerful agile marketing tools like marketing calendar, headline studio, asset organizer, content organizer, and more.

For Email Marketing

• Active Campaign

Active Campaign is a powerful mix of email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools that enables you to create amazing customer experiences. With Active Campaign, you can segment, personalize, and automate customer communication to reach, engage, nurture, educate, convert, and support your customers. It comes equipped with features like email marketing & segmentation, automation map & goals, event tracking, pipelines, predictive content, web personalization, and a lot more.

•  Pricing:

For Content Marketing

• Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is known for its content insights that help organizations create well-performing and engaging content. It lets you conduct extensive content research, find the right influencers for impactful collaboration, and monitor what’s happening in your industry.

Pricing:

A few more powerful SaaS content marketing tools to help you create high-performing content:

• Coschedule’s Headline Analyzer – This is a free headline analyzer that helps you create headlines that can drive more traffic, shares and search results. 
• SEO Plugin by Yoast – Create SEO-friendly content by using Yoast SEO plugin that comes with features like estimated reading time, robots meta tags, breadcrumbs, SEO analysis, Google previews, meta descriptions & tag variables, schema controls, keyword data via SEMRush, and more.
• Positionly [now Unamo] – An inbound marketing tool that lets you keep track of daily keyword ranking, local SEO performance, competitors tracking, keywords group, keywords mapping efforts, and more.

For Payroll

• Gusto

Equipped with features like automatic deductions and fillings, direct deposits, offer letters, checklists, software setup, time tools, employee benefits, access to certified HR professionals, and other resources, Gusto makes it easy for all businesses to onboard, pay, insure, and support their teams.

Pricing:

• BambooHR – An all-in-one HR software that comes equipped with features like employee records, workflows and approvals, reporting and analytics, applicant tracking system, onboarding, e-signatures, and more.

Other Must-Have SaaS Tools 

For Accounting & Payments

• Stripe – An online payment processing software for all kinds of internet businesses.
• Xero – An online accounting software that lets you pay bills, claim expenses, accept payments, track projects, capture data, and more.

For Video Conferencing & Webinars

• Zoom – For enterprise-level video communication
• GoToWebinar – A leading webinar platform equipped with features like event management, scheduling, webinar templates, and more.
• Demio – Another great webinar software that lets you create a no-download and hassle-free experience for your attendees.

For Software Development

• Jira – A powerful work management tool for all kinds of workflows, use cases, test case management, agile development, and more.