15 min read

Undoubtedly, smartphones have made our everyday lives very easygoing. From communication to online car booking, the smart apps of your mobile are effectively managing your day-to-day activities. The use of mobile apps is not just limited to personal use but you can also use them to optimize your business operations. In this post, I am sharing with you 30 amazing small business apps that are mostly free and would help you to improve your business activities. You can use any business app from the list that you find suitable for your business. These apps are amazing and would bring more efficiency and productivity to your business.

Now, you don’t have to make expensive and complicated software to automate your business activities, rather you can install these apps that are affordable and easy to use.

Here is the list of the top 30 apps for this year for small businesses.

G Suite

G Suite is one of the top business applications that allows you to port files among tablets, smartphones, and PCs. The typical package comes with 30 GB of storage per user and you can also upgrade it based on your needs. And it lets you make spreadsheets, docs, drawings, presentations, and so on. It provides a popular set of smart business apps. It offers free and professional business email and you may not have any need to use different apps to perform basic functions of the business.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the useful apps for businesses that would allow you to generate surveys to evaluate user engagement and get feedback from the customer on your website, pricing, and products, and to understand the needs and demands of your target audience. You can build complex or simple surveys, and on the SurveyMonkey site, you can find tips on different question types and how to write them. The overall creation of the survey is collaborative, and reports and results can be seen by the team without sharing login information. You can create surveys from a brand and template with your business logos and colors. You can also review the results of the survey as you get them from the respondents. You can send a survey to the world using your emails, social accounts, or website.

Gusto

Gusto is a small business application that allows you to improve compliance, onboarding, and so on. It offers many effective HR Tools for your small business needs. It has made HR activities easier by altering pen and paper with online tools, forms to contract onboarding material, and many more. Using this app, you can send out surveys and act on the feedback got from respondents. This app is combined with payroll to save your time, remain compliant and employees are reserved in the loop.

Workday

Workday is one of the top mobile apps for business for finance and HR so you can make good selections through data and not assumptions. Using this app, you can easily involve your employees and it is also customizable. Through Workday (HCM), as a manager, you hold all the cards to effectively and efficiently plan, develop, and recruit talent in a click. This is a user-friendly, easy-to-use small business app to continuously manage employees from day one to the last day. You can also chat with a representative to get a price estimate.

Xero

Xero is an accounting app that offers a paid subscription service to help businesses to do everyday accounting procedures such as accounts receivable, purchase orders, accounts payable, and employee payrolls. Using this app, you can save data in the cloud and access it through mobiles such as iPad, iPhones, or laptops that means your data stays secure even if your device gets out of order to your loss the data in the device. If you have Xero on your mobile, it means you can manage the accounting transactions of business from any place and the real-time accounting lets you keep track of cash flow easily and quickly.

PayPal

PayPal is a payment business application that is used by millions of companies and people worldwide. It also offers a “Personal” plan that makes it easy to receive and send money to family and friends. Through its “Business” plan, you can get paid on the app or website directly and also by phone or email. Around 19 million businesses accept PayPal and you can also use it. With the business plan of PayPal, you can professionally get paid in-person or online, a customized checkout, get online invoicing or a card reader transaction. You can also handle your everyday business needs such as tracking payments.

QuickBooks

Quickbooks is the best bookkeeping app that makes it easy to fulfill business needs, no matter what is the size of the company. Easily analyses the expenses, make and sends forms (such as accounting reports, invoices, quotes, etc.), knows your cash flow– its dashboard is very user-friendly that is easy to use and tools are also very visible. Quickbooks link to your business bank account, Square, and PayPal and performs real-time data uploads to support you keep tabs on the financial well-being of the company. This app can also help you to monitor your expenses and upload receipts’ pictures from your phone a definite benefit in tax season.

RescueTime

 RescueTime runs on your desktop’s or mobile phone’s background, it monitors the time you spend on websites and applications so to can track your everyday activities, and a detailed report is generated and sent to you about your activities. RescueTime set alerts so you always be aware of your online activities, it also blocks distracting websites, at any time, especially on vacations you can pause RescueTime, and you will have a complete awareness of how much time you are spending scrolling social media, reading emails, etc. This app is very effective, it helps you to be more productive and stop wasting it on useless activity. Use this app, if you want to make your life more organized.

Evernote

Evernote is a corporate app to keep your notes organized. It allows you to store share and store your business and personal to-do lists, notes, and reminders across desktop and mobile devices. Evernote is available on Mac, Windows, Android, and iOS devices. It is a cloud-based notebook that allows you to organize your ideas, notes, memos, to-do lists, bills, invoices, and receipts, digitally across your devices. For small businesses, it is a useful tool for sharing and organizing personal plans and brainstorming ideas with your team.

Basecamp

Basecamp combines all the tools required by the teams to complete the work in a streamlined, single package. This app allows you to keep things organized by keeping everything in one place, your team will know where things stand, what to do, and where to search for things required. It helps you to create, assign tasks, and set deadlines with tasks, display projects clearly, develop a message board on a single topic, chat in real-time, all documents and files are suitably located in one place, “check-in questions” lets you ask questions, monthly, weekly or daily, charts show project status, share access with clients, forward emails, Pings are messaging option and a lot more options.

Dropbox

Dropbox Business is a cloud-based app that lets you sync folders and files across different platforms. Using this app, you will have access to your different files on the go and you can get plans for small businesses also. With around 200,000 businesses and 500 million users, Dropbox is one of the best apps for startups to share and store files through the cloud. Businesses that are searching for a consistent way to share data with teleworkers can use this app. 

Inigo

With this business card app, you don’t have to carry business card stacks with you. Inigo is a networking app that lets you make and share business cards virtually, just by tapping your smartphone with another person. It is the best app that offers you easy business card sharing, no more business card loss, and provides a real-time solution through networking.

Vivial

Vivial is one of the best mobile apps for business marketing. It would allow you to build online branding via websites, social media, email newsletters, and local directories. The service updates the Google Places listings automatically for brick-and-mortar business users. This app allows you to do easy website optimization and also offers local search optimization.

Asana

When it comes to a project management app, Asana is quite different. Well, it acquired some of the supreme programs, such as Basecamp and Trello, and joint their features into one package. Basically, Asana combines all the objectives established with a deadline timetable permitting you to develop projects, set objectives and keep on track to finish each step. You can create numerous boards to divide each task by project or department and you can use the team calendar or project timeline to imagine progress. Using this app, you can manage all the crucial goals and tasks from one place and you can integrate Asana with Microsoft Teams, Slack, Gmail, and Google Drive. 

MailChimp

If you want to send your newsletters directly to customers’ email, signup forms, make landing pages, and Facebook ads, Mailchimp is the best solution. Its interface is very easy to navigate, the exclusive templates are designed professionally, and you can also start for free. It helps you to easily reach your customers and make a new one as you raise your marketing efforts suddenly. As your audience increases, Mailchimp also grows. It is a small business app with a lot of features that help you to automate marketing goals and it is not very hard to understand. 

Hootsuite

It is one of the popular business apps for social media management. Hootsuite allows you to manage and track all of your social networks. It allows you to analyze the views of people about your products and helps you to respond to them instantly. You can view streams from numerous networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ and directly post a reply or update. The best thing about Hootsuite is that it allows you to monitor manifold streams from one place and it also supports Facebook, Twitter, Google+ Pages, LinkedIn, Instagram, Foursquare, Vimeo, WordPress blogs, Evernote, Tumblr, Mailchimp, Flickr, Storify, Slideshare, etc.

Skype

Skype is a reliable app for improving team communication. It lets you chat with your team members from remote places. It is one of the most popular business apps, you can assure that your clients and team members know how to use it. Some competitors have tried to knock off Skype’s videoconferencing throne, but the app is still very popular and effective, with 10 million-plus Google Play reviews.

Skype can be used to voice or video call around the globe; on this app, up to 25 people can call; transmit video, files, and photos of different sizes; share computer screens, and send voice or text messages. You can also use Skype on Amazon Alexa devices.

Podium

Podium is a marketing app that allows you to gather online testimonials and reviews via text messaging. Nevertheless, more people talking well about your business will attract more customers to your brand. This app makes it extremely easy to directly interact with your prospective or existing customers through text, so you can professionally respond to comments, questions, and reviews.

the Podium app also allows users to respond to incoming messages from Google, Podium’s Webchat, Facebook, and text at a time. You can invite clients for business review via text and collect the contact information of the visitors. Using this app, you can assign messages to employees and easily analyze the reviews.

Expensify

With the Expensify app, you can easily keep track of your business trip expenses. It is a small business expense management app that allows you to connect your debit or credit card to your Expensify account so the app can directly place charges on an expense statement. If you want, you can also take your receipts pictures with your mobile, and the Expensify app will extract the relevant data automatically. Through this app, you can make an expense report in a few minutes.

Slack

Slack is an instant messaging app that you can use to organize conversations with your team into separate public or private channels or send a message directly. The app makes it easy to drag, drop and share PDFs, images, and other documents in the chat. It archives and indexes any message automatically, file, or notification, and there is no limit to for your business to add more users.

Trello

Trello is a project management app that is very easy to use and tracks the workflow of your team. Every card you made using the Trello board signifies a task or assignment. Using this app, you can add comments, members, checklists, attachments, due dates, stickers, and labels to make your cards more descriptive. When you change a card, Trello notifies every member through email and mobile.

Nimble

Nimble is a CRM and lead-generation tool that lets you grow your business faster. It is a marketing CRM app that allows you to turn your communities into potential clients. It offers smart results, smart insights, and smart contacts no matter where you work. Leveraging a CRM for marketing purposes is really significant to increase your sales, and win more customers that are loyal to your brand. Nimble is a social media tool and an automation app that lets your business keep a complete record of customer’s profiles, and email conversations and coordinates social listening across social platforms.

Salesforce 

Salesforce is a popular CRM software that stores your customers’ data on a single database. Through the Salesforce app on mobile, you can track and develop marketing and sales lead and also manage, log, and examine your customer data. Salesforce offers a lot of services specific to the industry including service, packages for sales, commerce, marketing, healthcare, and financial services, at variable price points based on your sign-up package.

Freshdesk

There are many customer-support tools that you can use for your business, but Freshdesk and its associated app get the highest reviews from the user. This app offers a variety of dedicated software, including call centers, customer messaging, products for sales, and so on.

With the core customer support app of Freshdesk, you can categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets. Users can use collaboration features such as chatting within a ticket, adding notes to tickets, or proficiently responding to your customers. it also helps you to convert incoming emails to tickets and save replies for common tickets and send out prerecorded replies. You can get the Freshdesk app free with a Freshdesk account. 

Zenefits

With Zenefits app and software you can manage hiring, employee records, and onboarding. It allows you to integrate with several apps such as Google Drive and Asana.

Adjust payroll as per employees’ vacations, hours, and benefits. It helps small business owners to navigate small business compliance and ACA. With the Zenefits app, employees can clock in and out, view insurance plans, review taxes, schedule time off, and track flex benefit plans.

Monday 

Monday is a project management app, which helps you to improve team communication and organizes all tasks. You just have to create a project, including all tasks to the project, and lastly, add steps to every task. As employees finish a task or task’s steps, the status is automatically updated and everyone can see the current status of the project. Furthermore, you can make knowledge bases to store files and everything related to the project.

 Monday is available on both mobile and desktop and you can obtain real-time notifications so you never miss anything.

ZoomShift

ZoomShift offers you everything you required for job scheduling, such as time offs, shift swaps, and availability. You can use existing templates to generate a schedule, on the calendar, you can drag and drop shifts. Share the schedule through message, push, or email notification. All members of your team can set their availability, request time off, and preferences, view their schedules, and pick up open shifts. To substitute for Excel, you can also sign up for a free plan. 

Buffer

Manage and schedule your social media posts from a single place. This app helps you to easily send a message to social media platforms, without any disturbance. Make posts, examine the data, and involve your followers with Buffer app. You can add up to 25 users to your Buffer account, and you can select who needs permissions or full posting access. 

Polaris Office

Polaris Office is an effective mobile substitute for Apple’s iWork suite or Microsoft’s Office Suite for docs and spreadsheets. It lets you edit and read docs through the app. It offers excellent compatibility to edit and view all documents and you will get desktop and mobile access. This app will also eliminate the costs of buying an office suite.

Abukai Expense

Abukai Expenses is a small business expense tracking app that allows you to snap an image of your receipts with a mobile, and the information gets entered into the interface of the tracking app. You can take a photo of an itinerary or map to compute and mileage of the report. This app offers easy receipt record-keeping and stops tracking messy receipts. It also provides numerous expense tracking all at once.

TripIt

TripIt is a smart app that lets travelers keep business trip measures, schedules, and data at one location, with flights and meeting times details. It holds maps, weather forecasts, and guidelines. This app is the best travel guide that offers a master itinerary for your trips. It offers access plans on any device and avoids travel setbacks.

DocuSign

DocuSign app lets you easily gather signatures online or through a mobile device. This is an ideal tool for gathering required data from remote employees and clients. This app offers quick app development and stops the difficulty of collecting in-person signatures. DocuSign also provides influential integrations with Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, etc.

Time Doctor

This is a time-tracking app that keeps track of billable hours, and the time of workers on projects and on the clock. The app estimations that it can raise your productivity in the workplace by 22%. This app offers screenshot monitoring, and powerful reporting tools, and stops payroll misperceptions.

Todoist

Todoist, the name says it all, this is a task management app that helps you to complete your tasks and meet deadlines. It works very much similar to your everyday to-do lists. Sounds simple, but its intuitive and clean interface makes your tasks’ tracking more pleasing than checking piles of notebook paper. It is an amazing business app that you can use to manage your business tasks or you can also use it to manage your personal life.

Using this app, you can add recurring or one-time deadlines. This app allows you to measure productivity trends, easily organize and add tasks, assign tasks and plan projects, share files and comment on files.

Bear

Bear is a flexible, streamlined way to write down whatever you want from fully-fledged essays to half-formed sentences on iOS devices. This app is not specifically made for businesses, but you can also use it to organize and jot down your personal ideas, thoughts, dreams, recipes, to-dos, to-reads, to-buys, and anything else cluttering up your mind so you can be highly functional when you are in office.

Some major features of the Bear app include editing and markup tools, typography and theme choices, and multiple conversion options such as Word docs and PDFs. This app also Syncs with the cloud.

Addappt

Addappt app makes it easier for you to manage your contacts. When business contacts, family, and friends update contact data, the changes are automatically made to your phone. Using this app, you can also organize your contacts into different groups and send messages to them through the app.

Upward

Being a small business owner, you have to deal with a long to-do list and Upward is a hiring tool that will make your job hiring tasks easy. Whether your hiring requirements are sporadic or constant, this app makes it easy and quick to post job listings, select applicants, and search and save resumes. Using this app, you can post your listings on more than 100 platforms for the job with a single click. Through this app, you can directly communicate with applicants using the messaging platform Upward. This app will also help you to rate and manage candidates all in one place.

LogMeIn

As a business owner, you may always want to be at two places at once and one of these places is probably the office. Fortunately, there is an app that would allow you to have remote access to your work computers (PC and Mac) and home when they are on the go, from their tablets or phones. With this app, you can also access desktop competence on your tablet or phone, such as printing and editing files.

Mention

Mention is an effective app to monitor your brand in real-time. Using this app, you can easily give live brand updates from all around social media and the web. With Boolean alerts, you can thoroughly screen your competitors, brand, and clients. This app lets you attract more customers, improve your business’s reputation and build brand awareness.

Hubspot 

Hubspot offers a range of tools for social media advertising, sales and marketing, and content management. This business app goes beyond setting up a website and content editing, as much as carrying a widespread toolkit to increase conversions, and it is also one of the best content marketing tools to manage your website. It provides many options for content hosting, split testing, sales team, and customer communications, along with targets and goals that can be chased through Hubspot’s analytics software.