What’s crucial for the success of any workplace? A well-stocked cookie table, obviously. But, also, effective collaboration and communication. Both of these things encourage teamwork, increase productivity and improve overall organizational performance.
When team members collaborate effectively, they can pool their skills, knowledge and expertise to achieve common goals and tackle complex challenges. Likewise, effective communication reduces misunderstandings, promotes a positive work environment and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
But achieving seamless collaboration and communication is easier said than done. It can be challenging, especially in today’s ever-changing, globally dispersed work settings. The rapid advancement of technology – not to mention the pandemic – has transformed the way we work, allowing teams to collaborate remotely and across different time zones*.
While this flexibility offers numerous advantages, it also presents obstacles.
One significant challenge when finding the right tools and technologies to enhance productivity and streamline teamwork is choice. The market is flooded with various tools, making it tricky for organizations to select the most suitable ones. Minefield, anyone?
Allow us to narrow it down for you, with our pick of the 10 best communication and collaboration tools for 2023.
*If you’re working remotely, you’ll obviously have to provide your own sweet snacks.🙁
What to Look for in Collaboration and Communication Tools
When selecting such tools, there are several key factors to consider:
User-friendliness and an intuitive interface
Look for tools that are easy to operate and have a user-friendly interface. Complex and confusing interfaces can hinder you and slow down productivity. The tool should have a clear layout that allows team members to quickly understand its features and navigate through different functions.
Essential features for seamless collaboration
Assess the features offered by the tool to determine if they align with your team's collaboration needs. Key features to consider include: real-time messaging, task management, file sharing and document collaboration, calendar integration and video conferencing. These features should enable smooth and efficient teamwork among colleagues, regardless of where they are physically located.
Integration capabilities with existing workflows and apps
It’s crucial to ensure that the tool integrates well with your existing workflows and applications. Seamless integration allows for the transfer of information and data across different tools and systems, reducing manual effort and enhancing productivity. Look for tools that integrate with commonly used platforms such as email clients, project management software, document storage services, and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
Top 10 Collaboration and Communication Tools
Airtable
Airtable is a versatile project management platform, which supports seamless data sharing and collaboration within organizations. It integrates with other apps for data synchronization, ensuring up-to-date information.
‘Low-code’ app building is possible, which enables users to build collaborative apps without the need for advanced programming skills. While a free plan is available, it has limitations on storage file sizes and collaborators, and the paid plans are relatively costly. Another drawback is the limited customer support.
Pricing
- Free: $0
- Plus: From $10/month
- Pro: From $20/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales team for a quote
Asana
Established in 2008, Asana is a veteran in the collaboration field, trusted by renowned companies like Intel, Uber, Pinterest, TED and Timely for its great team communication capabilities. Its main purpose is to provide businesses with a streamlined and efficient way to track projects, manage tasks and achieve optimal outcomes.
With Asana, you can easily create to-do lists for ongoing projects, set reminders for upcoming deadlines and send requests to colleagues. It also allows team members to leave comments on specific posts within the application. While it offers the flexibility to organize projects in a list, board, timeline, calendar and even workflow format, there are limited customization options and it’s rather a complex setup for larger projects. The search function for quickly finding previous work is very handy though.
Pricing
- Basic: £0
- Premium: From £9.49/month
- Business: From £20.99/month
Google Workspace
Formerly G Suite, Google Workspace provides a wide range of features. For starters, there’s Meet, a video-conferencing solution ideal for maintaining communication among colleagues, especially when working remotely. It also offers Google Chat for messaging, Google Drive for file sharing, Google Sheets for spreadsheets, and a shared calendar tool to keep track of schedules.
Google Docs is also an invaluable feature, allowing collaboration on document creation and editing, as well as real-time updates and options for comments and suggestions between colleagues. In fact, this blog was written and edited in Google Docs! And let’s not forget Gmail, the world’s largest email provider, with more than 1.5 billion active users. Despite its many advantages, there are a couple of limitations to Google Workspace, though, including its limited offline functionality and occasional compatibility issues with Microsoft Office formats. Pricing
Pricing
- Business Starter: From £5/month
- Business Standard: From £10/month
- Business Plus: From £15/month
Jira
Jira Software is a versatile tool best suited to software development teams. It offers a comprehensive range of features that enable users to plan, track and manage their projects efficiently. One of the key strengths of Jira Software lies in its flexibility, acknowledging that every team operates uniquely and allowing them to customize their workflows.
This tool gives a clear overview of document versions and project progress at a glance. Its issue-tracking function allows users to see clearly what problems they need to tackle, facilitating re-prioritization as necessary. With its agile project management tool, teams can stay on top of their projects and get valuable insights through the reporting features. They can access real-time data on different metrics like efficiency, quality and overall performance. There is perhaps a fairly steep learning curve with Jira Software but once team members have got it nailed, they can expect collaboration to be that much easier.
Pricing
- Free: $0
- Standard: $7.75/month
- Premium: $15.25/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales team for a quote
Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams encompasses a comprehensive set of features, including video conferencing, phone calls, text chat and group messaging. During meetings, attendees can share their screens, enabling easier engagement and collaboration. Document collaboration is also possible; once a document has been uploaded and shared, it is accessible to every member of the team. Meetings can also be recorded, allowing absent participants to catch up on what they’ve missed.
With all of Microsoft Teams’ various features, there’s a lot for beginners to take on board. One thing that distinguishes Teams from its competitors is its integration within the broader Microsoft 365 suite of apps and services. For instance, Teams integrates with OneDrive and SharePoint, facilitating intuitive file sharing. However, users require a Microsoft 365 subscription for full functionality.
Pricing
- Free: £0
- Microsoft Teams Essentials: £3.30/month
- Microsoft 365 Business Basic: £4.90/month
- Microsoft 365 Business Standard: £10.30/month
Monday.com
Monday.com is a user-friendly platform designed for efficient project planning, tracking and collaboration. Its intuitive interface – which includes visual project boards – simplifies the management of projects and team collaboration. With its drag-and-drop functionality, Monday.com excels in project management and overall workflow organization and automation.
Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with popular tools like Slack, Trello, Google Drive and Dropbox, allowing teams to consolidate their work in a centralized hub. This wide range of integrations expands the capabilities of Monday.com beyond its standalone features, enabling teams to achieve broader and more diverse working objectives. Having said this, however, it does have limited reporting capabilities.
Pricing
- Free: £0
- Basic: £5/month
- Standard: £9/month
- Pro: £19/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales team for a quote
Notion
With features such as product roadmaps, document collaboration and meeting note-taking, Notion combines various everyday work tools into a unified platform. Its AI features are also very handy and help with brainstorming, text creation/embellishment, summarizing messy notes into something coherent, and automating tedious tasks.
Notion is specifically designed as a workspace for teams or entire companies, aiming to allow them to customize their tools according to specific needs and workflows. Notion allows database management, as well as the creation of wikis, documents and notes – offering versatile views like tables, lists, calendars, kanban boards, galleries and timelines to enhance the visualization of data/make things look pretty.
It may require a steep learning curve to get to grips with all that Notion offers but the various templates offered – plus the fact that the tool can be conveniently accessed via web, desktop and mobile apps – will help with this. Whilst lacking advanced project management features, Notion offers many user-friendly functions, including a drag-and-drop workflow builder that enables users to customize their workspace manually.
Pricing
- Free: $0
- Plus: From $8/month
- Business: From $15/month
- Enterprise: Contact sales team for a quote
Slack
Slack is accessible on both mobile and desktop devices. People can use its features to send direct messages (DMs) and share files with individuals or groups of employees. To streamline conversations, Slack organizes discussions into different channels, catering to specific projects, technical support and general chat. These channels provide structure and coherence to a team’s workflow.
The platform also supports video calling, allowing colleagues to discuss projects. Some larger teams may find this feature overwhelming (someone is always unwittingly on mute or has their camera accidentally switched off!) but can be a godsend for smaller teams. While Slack does not replace cloud storage services, it simplifies file sharing through a convenient drag-and-drop function. Additionally, although there is limited storage capacity, it integrates with services like Google Drive and Dropbox, allowing users to access and share files from various sources within Slack. At Timely, we almost exclusively use Slack instead of emails because it’s quicker, more organized and super easy for file sharing.
Pricing
- Free: £0
- Pro: From £5.75/month
- Business+: From £9.75/month
- Enterprise Grid: Contact sales team for a quote
Timely
Timely prioritizes user-friendliness and offers various features for automatic time tracking, task management and progress tracking. Its goal is to simplify time management processes to enhance productivity. While Timely uses AI technology to ensure accurate time tracking, it could perhaps do with an upgrade. More mobile app features wouldn’t go amiss, either. However, it has efficient reporting capabilities, giving users insights for decision making and analysis.
The tool boasts a simple and intuitive interface, making it easy for users to navigate and understand. The Timeline function gives an at-a-glance view of tasks, deadlines, logged time and availability of your colleagues. And the Memory feature captures everything you do on your computer in the day, so you don’t need to remember what you’ve worked on. Plus it’ll capture every billable hour. Timely also integrates with many commonly used software applications, such as Zoom, Gmail, Google Calendar and Photoshop. It may benefit from a phone-call tracking feature and an invoicing option but, despite these limitations, Timely remains a valuable, productivity-boosting tool.
Pricing
- Starter: From $9/month
- Premium: From $16/month
- Unlimited: From $22/month
- Unlimited +: Contact sales team for a quote
Trello
Trello offers both web and mobile app versions for convenient project organization, task management and collaboration with colleagues. It allows you to effectively manage tasks and assignments using kanban boards or lists, meaning a well-organized workflow within your team. You can create to-do lists and easily delegate them to team members. Furthermore, Trello provides the option to assign comments to specific cards, facilitating a quick and efficient feedback exchange among team members.
Although Trello lacks advanced project management features and has limited reporting capabilities, one of its notable strengths is its integrations with various apps such as Evernote, Google Drive and Slack. These integrations enable seamless connectivity and enhanced productivity by bringing together different tools and platforms.
Pricing
- Free: $0
- Standard: From $5/month
- Premium: From $10/month
- Enterprise: From $17.50/month
Conclusion
As this blog has demonstrated, there are many communication and collaboration tools out there to choose from. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all the options, but simply think about which features and functions would be most beneficial to you, your team and your organization as a whole in order to find the best fit. Then try one on for size. If it’s not working for you, try another. Then another. Until you settle on one that inspires high-fives all round.
Here’s a quick recap of each tool we’ve outlined:
Airtable
- Features: Extensive online collaboration, project management, low-code app building.
- Limitations: Relatively costly, limited customer support, restrictive storage options.
Asana
- Features: Task management, project tracking, team communication.
- Limitations: Complex setup for larger projects, limited customization options.
Google Workspace
- Features: Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, real-time collaboration.
- Limitations: Limited offline functionality, occasional compatibility issues with Microsoft Office formats.
Jira Software
- Features: Issue tracking, agile project management, team collaboration.
- Limitations: Steeper learning curve, more suitable for software development teams.
Microsoft Teams
- Features: Chat, video conferencing, document collaboration, integration with Microsoft 365.
- Limitations: Steep learning curve for beginners, requires Microsoft 365 subscription for full functionality.
Monday.com
- Features: Visual project boards, team collaboration, workflow automation.
- Limitations: Higher price point, limited reporting capabilities.
Notion
- Features: Note-taking, document collaboration, database management.
- Limitations: Steeper learning curve, lacks advanced project management features.
Slack
- Features: Channels, direct messaging, file sharing, integration with other tools.
- Limitations: Can be overwhelming for larger teams, limited storage capacity.
Timely
- Features: Automatic time tracking, task management, progress tracking, Memory feature, efficient reporting, simple user interface, Timeline view.
- Limitations: Limited mobile app features, no free version, no phone call tracking, no invoicing option.
Trello
- Features: Kanban boards, task management, team collaboration.
- Limitations: Lacks advanced project management features, limited reporting capabilities.
