With the WFH revolution now less of a revolution and more a way of life now, it’s no surprise remote work tools and softwares just keep getting better.
There’s a plethora of amazing software, extensions, plug-ins and apps to assist with day-to-day tasks. Whether you’re into automating, scaling, saving time, strengthening culture, or boosting productivity – there’ll be a handy tool to make your life so much easier. Better yet, it might just be free.
So if you’re looking to make remote work more efficient than ever, dive straight into our list of top picks for remote work software and tools.
The Best Remote Work Tools & Software in 2024
Focusmate
Are you a procrastinator or just easily distracted?
Sometimes it can be super hard to keep focused in this day and age. With notifications buzzing on your phone and emails pinging left, right, and center, we all just need a bit of peace, quiet, and focus sometimes.
And if focus is what you’re after, you don’t need to do it alone.
Focusmate is at its very essence a super simple concept. You buddy up with a stranger (or a favorite Focusmate buddy if you’ve done it before) and book for either a 25- minute, 50-minute ir 75-minutesession.
At the beginning of the session, you talk about what you want to achieve in that session and then just do it. The camera is on, the mic is on (although some may prefer to switch the mic off) and you get on with your work.
When the time runs out you get an alert, speak to each other and confirm whether you’ve succeeded or not in your task.
While you don’t speak the entire time, you equally don’t leave your desk or start mucking about on your phone.
It’s accountability in a simple but incredibly effective way.
And it’s levelled up even more with
Does it work? Well, this entire blog post was planned, written, and GIFed up during a number of Focusmate sessions. Even better it’s free! There is the opportunity to upgrade if you really love it as well
Slack
Slack has been around for years but is still going strong for 2024 as the communication tool for remote workers.
There have been many, many other options, and we can bet that many millennials yearn for MSN Messenger to make a comeback. However, Slack is definitely here to stay.
Whether it’s talking about upcoming reports or sharing a funny GIF from your lunch break, Slack keeps everyone connected in one place. With bots and integrations that can help you keep track of tasks, create polls, or even just have a bit of fun with your teammates; Slack is here to make sure that no matter how far away you are, you never feel disconnected from the office.
tl;dv
Your BFF in video conferencing, tl;dv is here to totally level up your online meetings.
As remote working becomes the norm for many businesses, being able to record, transcribe and revisit high-quality video calls is essential. tl;dv takes your remote working up a notch by allowing you to record all Zoom, Microsoft Teams and G Meet calls (for free) and turn the recording into super searchable, shareable, and actionable resources.
With tl;dv you can record meetings remotely to then to share with colleagues who weren’t available to join (making it ideal for async work cultures, and teams based across different timezones). The tool also lets you annotate and highlight insights throughout the call with a timestamping tool. Is a specific stakeholder’s input or awareness needed? Tag them directly in the call!
The free transcription makes it easy to create clips from the recording. Selecting text from the transcript automatically creates a snippet of the corresponding moment in the call, which you can then share as a short clip. Time-saver! No more sitting through 2-hour long recordings waiting for the 10-minute moment that’s relevant to you…
And speaking about relevance, the tool also sends out an AI-generated summary after the call for a quick refresher of what was discussed.
tl;dv is typically used be Sales teams who want to follow up more effectively on what was discussed with prospects and clients, or Product and User Research teams looking to bring the voice of their customer closer to the organisation with insightful clips from real user interviews.
That being said, tl;dv is also great as a digital interview tool because of how it helps recruiters hire the right people faster than ever. Key moments from candidate interviews can be shared more widely across an organisation, allowing multiple employees to weigh in on a candidate, and reducing unconscious bias as a result.
With an intuitive interface, smooth integration, fun onboarding experience and totally free version – you should not be planning a single Zoom, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet meetings in 2024 without inviting tl;dv along.
Maze
While product development is exciting, remote testing often presents unique challenges. Maze, now enhanced with AI-powered tools, addresses these challenges effectively, making remote product testing more insightful and efficient
Maze facilitates extensive user engagement for product testing. Its advanced tools enable quick design and distribution of tests to a broad network of beta testers, streamlining the process significantly. Creating custom tests, as simple or as complex as you need or require, means that you can get super granular with all your testing parameters.
The flexibility and insight from using a platform such as Maze mean that your products can be even more user-centric, in a fraction of the time. Other features include tree testing, card sorting, and prototype testing. It’s got a whole host of features that add so much value to any part of the product development process.
Maze is free to use for up to five seats with one study project with up to seven blocks. Going up to a paid-for level, you will be looking at a cost of $99 per month, billed annually. This does include plenty of scope for testing products and content, plus conditional logic and pro templates.
Butter.us
Despite its creamy name, Butter is actually here to help you make the most of collaboration. If you struggle to make the most of your time and maximize the useful output of your team, then you can use Butter to help.
What it does is provide a platform for remote design sprints. So you can plan, collaborate on, and implement tasks with your team in a way that is more structured than ever before. And it does this all in a way that is super easy to use, and also happens to be visually pleasing.
Session recaps now have the options of AI-generated summaries, offering a quick and insightful overview of meetings. Furthermore, Butter now supports session transcription in 25 languages, expanding its accessibility and usability for diverse teams.
Moreover, the AI-powered agenda planner in Butter streamlines meeting organization, allowing you to structure your agendas in much less time. Mobile updates have been implemented for better functionality, and a new sidebar design enhances the overall user experience. These updates, coupled with Butter’s ability to easily capture participant feedback, ensure that every aspect of remote collaboration is covered effectively.
As well as the great interface, there’s also the fact that you have a dedicated team to help you get set up, so there are no worries about getting stuck or left behind.
Butter offers a free tier as well as a per-user licensing plan. The Business Plan is $25 per month/per user, and allows unlimited rooms, no time limits, templates, plus premium support.
Donut
Donut is a tool that helps bring people together… literally.
It does this by offering a way for teams to schedule virtual coffee chats with each other via Slack.
With Donut, you can completely customize your coffee chat experience to suit the needs of your team. By allowing you to set when conversations will happen, how often they will happen, who should be talking to who, and so much more.
It’s like having a digital barista on hand constantly to brew up the perfect coffee chat for your team. AND, it’s also like your office Karen, you know the one who remembers ALL the birthdays?
Donut is great for celebrating remotely as well, giving teams the chance to recognize each other’s successes and milestones.
Plus it’s completely free, though there is a paid version with up to 24 people able to connect. You can easily scale with Standard priced at $49 per month/per user (billed annually), and Premium priced at $99 per month/per user (billed annually).
Kona
Working remotely it can be easy to miss some of the signs of stress and burn out.
Originally designed as an add-on to Slack for monitoring employee well-being, Kona has transitioned from this into an AI-powered leadership coach for remote managers.
This shift focuses on providing real-time, expert-level coaching and support within Slack, helping managers navigate the complexities of remote team leadership.
It now offers a range of interactive features such as:
AI-Powered Leadership Coaching: Kona now provides 24/7 access to executive coach-like support directly within Slack. This feature acts as a sounding board for managers to talk through leadership challenges and problems, offering expert-based, confidential advice tailored to specific situations.
Customization and Documentation Integration: Kona allows the addition of company documentation on values, DE&I, performance review processes, and more. This enables the AI coach to offer advice that aligns with specific organizational needs and cultures.
Support for a Variety of Management Challenges: Kona is equipped to assist with performance management, difficult conversations, meeting preparation, team disengagement, change management, and coworker conflicts. This makes it versatile for addressing a wide range of leadership situations.
Integration with Existing Tools: Besides Slack, Kona integrates with tools like Google Calendar and various HRIS systems, ensuring seamless workflow integration.
Data Privacy and Security: As an AI tool, Kona ensures confidentiality in coaching conversations. The conversations are private and secure, encouraging open and honest discussions without fear of privacy breaches.
Kona offers its AI Leadership Coach service at $49 per user per month. This pricing provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional executive coaching methods, making leadership support more accessible.
The shift in Kona’s focus and capabilities underscores the growing need for specialized tools that assist remote managers in navigating the unique challenges of remote work environments. By offering real-time coaching and support within familiar platforms like Slack, Kona aims to improve managerial effectiveness, enhance team engagement, and ultimately contribute to healthier, more productive remote work cultures.
Basecamp
When you climb a mountain, you don’t do it all in one go. You prep, plan, and tackle it bit by bit. The same can be said with a big work project. To facilitate that, Basecamp could be an absolute lifesaver for your team’s projects.
Basecamp is a project management tool that offers a, simplified, customizable home screen to enhance efficiency. Its ‘Card Table’ tool provides a unique take on Kanban, and ‘The Lineup’ offers a bird’s eye view of projects in play, from start to end date, perfect for planning. The platform allows you to specify who’s actively working on the project and who’s just following along, managing notifications and involvement seamlessly.
Additionally, ‘Doors’ feature lets you link up other services you use right alongside Basecamp’s built-in tools.
Basecamp also includes features like ‘Don’t Forget’ for reminders, repeating to-dos, and multiple instances of any Basecamp tool (chat, messages, docs, etc.) to any project, adding more versatility to your project management toolkit
Basecamp is a project management tool designed to provide teams with the ability to plan, communicate, and complete tasks more efficiently. It offers features like task management, file sharing, scheduling and calendars, messaging tools, and more.
You can also extend Basecamp beyond just your team by allowing your clients, partners, or other stakeholders to have access. This allows you to keep everyone on the same page while also providing them with a way to see the progress of their project in real-time. Plus, with the automatic check-ins feature, you can easily keep track of who’s on task and who’s falling behind.
In terms of pricing, Basecamp now offers two simple plans, each with a 30-day free trial. ‘Basecamp Per User’ is ideal for freelancers, startups, or smaller teams, priced at $15/user per month, including 500 GB of storage.
‘Basecamp Pro Unlimited’ is perfect for larger groups and growing businesses, offering 5 TB of storage and first-in-line 24/7/365 priority support at $299/month billed annually for unlimited users. This plan also includes an option for month-to-month payment at $349/month
Trello
If Basecamp isn’t your jam, and you like to keep things simple, visual, and oh… yes SIMPLE (yes, we’ve said it twice because it’s important), then Trello could be the answer to all your wishes.
Trello is an online tool for managing tasks and projects in a visual, user-friendly way.
Instead of having to scroll through a massive amount of emails and documents, you can easily keep track of everything on a single platform.
Trello can be used for both personal tasks as well as team projects. It makes it so easy to organize tasks into “cards” that can be moved and organized into different categories, making sure everyone knows where they are in the project at all times. It also integrates with other popular tools like Slack, Google Drive, and Dropbox, making it easier to share files and communicate with other people.
If you work in marketing or any kind of content-driven or task-driven environment, then you’ll appreciate the simple nature of Trello. It’s easy to set up as well, taking it from idea to execution in a very short amount of time if needed.
Trello is free, but offer some paid options as well:
- Standard Plan: Priced at $5 per user/month (billed annually), this plan suits small teams needing more work management capabilities and collaboration scaling. It includes unlimited boards, advanced checklists, custom fields, and larger file attachments (up to 250MB).
- Premium Plan: At $10 per user/month (billed annually), this plan is designed for teams requiring multi-project tracking and various visualization methods, including boards, timelines, and calendars. It offers extensive views and advanced features for comprehensive project management.
- Enterprise Plan: For larger organizations, this plan provides advanced admin controls, security features, and extensive collaboration options at $17.50 per user/month (billed annually).
G Suite by Google
If you’re looking for the ultimate suite of tools, then G Suite has it all.
From Gmail to Calendar to Docs and beyond, you can use these tools to collaborate on documents or keep track of project deadlines in real time with your colleagues – no matter where they are in the world.
It also has great accessibility features like text-to-speech and screen readers so that everyone can access your work regardless of sight or hearing impairments. G Suite is also home to Google Meet which is one of the most user-friendly video conferencing platforms going and also works beautifully with the tl;dv plug-in.
G Suite has both free and paid plans, with the latter offering powerful storage and collaboration tools. Pricing starts from $6 per user/per month, and with the backing of the Google machine behind it, security is strong, and you have that household brand name for reassurance of that its futureproof.
Timely
Let’s face it, time tracking can be a pain – especially if you need to take breaks! However, Timely offers an intuitive, accurate and automated way of tracking time that takes the hassle out of manually logging every minute.
Timely is designed for individuals, as well as teams. It can be used to track time spent on tasks, projects, and activities across multiple people at the same time. It’s easy to set-up and simple to use, so you won’t have any difficulty getting it going.
Pricing-wise it starts with an $9 per user/per month tier (billed annually), Premium is $16 per user/per month, going up to Unlimited at $22 per user/per month.
Marinara: Pomodoro Assistant
If you get fidgety easily and struggle with keeping focus, then the Pomodoro Method may become your new best working friend.
The concept is simple, you focus for 25 minutes before breaking for 5. You can do whatever you want in that 5 minutes, scroll on your phone, make a cup of coffee, just don’t get distracted by emails or messages from colleagues.
Marinara: Pomodoro Assistant is a great way to incorporate this method into your workflow. It’s a simple Chrome extension that will track the 25-minute intervals and remind you when it’s time to take a break. Very simple and effective!
The app is free, and can be implemented directly into your browser, ensuring that you can switch from focus to break easily and quickly without too much downtime. It’s also fully customizable, allowing you to chop and change your work/break times to what suits you best.
BitWarden
WHY ARE THERE ARE SO MANY PASSWORDS?
And also, how many times have you wanted to scream into a pillow trying to remember all of them?
With BitWarden, you can securely store and manage all of your passwords in a single place. You can easily generate secure passwords, and sync them across all of your devices for easy access.
What is even better is that you can create shared team access for passwords. So if you all collectively use a social media account, for example, you can store the passwords safely in one place, and everyone with access can get in to use it.
BitWarden is free for personal accounts, but they do offer Business pricing that is $20 per month for ten users, going up to $6 per month/per user for Enterprise. A small cost but one that offers peace of mind for security, and for your own memory!
Thank Goodness For Tools!
Tools really are here to make our lives that much easier, and whether it’s to help with productivity, automate a boring task, or keep you connected, there are plenty to choose from nowadays.
Let us know any others that you cannot live without!
