Best Small Business Mobile Apps & Productivity Software

Shopping for software to help support your small business can be daunting. A quick google search brings up hundreds of options and it’s hard to know which features you really need. So we decided to comb through and test out the vast productivity app landscape to find the most helpful tools – that are affordable and easy to use – for small business owners. Our number one criteria? Apps that do everything you need on your mobile phone.

Our top picks will help you save time and money by automating everything from payroll to email marketing. Instead of pouring over spreadsheets for hours each week, you can focus on doing what you love, providing excellent products and services to your customers.

Freshbooks is super popular with their customers– and we can see why. This app is a great fit for small businesses, freelancers and solopreneurs. Users especially love how it can be customized to their brand, giving their business the professionalism of a larger enterprise so they can win bigger projects or orders.

Freshbooks doesn’t have a free tier like some of our other top picks but it is fairly affordable. Paid versions range from $15/month to $50/month depending on what features you need. Freshbooks offers discounts if you are willing to pay annually upfront.

Stax (formerly known as Fattmerchant) has a very unique pricing model for payments by offering subscription plans with a flat rate. Customers only pay interchange fees along with the plan’s monthly rate. Since most other providers have complicated pricing structures, this app makes budgeting a lot easier.

Prices start at $99/month on a subscription plan.

Inventory Management has always been bulky, expensive and not very mobile. Business owners often chose to save money by manually tracking their stock. Luckily, the market has matured and there are now dozens of affordable and straightforward options. Sortly is our top pick for a mobile friendly inventory management and asset tracking app.

We love that Sortly offers a free tier that works well for individuals and businesses that are just starting out. The first paid tier is priced around $50/month with a discount if you pay annually upfront.

Jibble is a well liked and affordable time tracking app. Most importantly, your employees can log their hours directly from their mobile phones. We love that they have a free plan with unlimited users, which is very helpful for businesses on tight budgets.

Aside from the free plan, monthly billing plans start from $2/user/month. The best part is that only active users are counted in the monthly billing cycle which is helpful for seasonal work. If you have 50 employees but only 25 log their hours during the last month, you are only charged for those 25 users.

Slack is very popular, easy to use and offers lots of features to collaborate with your employees. The most popular feature is channels. Channels can be private, only open to specific departments or projects, or public, someone looking for the latest contract document can pop into the finance channel to ask for help or search for files.

Slack has a free version that works great for very small teams. This app has monthly or annual paid plans starting as low as $8/user/month.

CRM apps are important repositories of all your customer data. Keeping contact information, contracts and proposals, sales opportunities, etc. in one place helps small businesses provide better customer service and increase sales. Pipedrive gives you a streamlined view of your sales process and is purposefully designed for smaller companies.

This app does not have a free version. Their paid versions can be billed monthly or annual upfront with pricing ranging from $18/user/month to $100/user/month.

Cloud storage for documents is a lifesaver for business owners that need to access contracts, proposals,and designs from their phone or tablet. Dropbox was one of the very first cloud based document management companies on the market so while this app is not the most feature rich option, be assured that what they do, they do very well.

Dropbox Business has a free version to store up to 2GB of data. Their paid versions range between $15/month (5TB of data) to $25/month (unlimited data storage). This app offers discounts with an annual upfront commitment.

Marketing is a crucial but difficult requirement for businesses of all sizes. If you don’t have a dedicated marketing team or you’re a sole proprietor, MailChimp is a super helpful and popular tool. It’s easy to use and has a free forever option. MailChimp also has a reputation for quality customer service.

MailChimp has a free forever version for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 email sends per month. Their paid versions offer monthly pricing ranging from $20/month to $35/month.

LinkedIn is a social media platform specifically for businesses and professional networking. If you don’t have a LinkedIn profile, we recommend that you set one up. It’s free for a general user but also has paid options for recruiting or sales prospecting. Users can follow their colleagues, industry and thought leaders, and clients to be alerted about upcoming conferences, company announcements, thoughtful discussions, and more.

The majority of LinkedIn users are on the free plan which offers all the benefits of networking. You can also purchase premium plans for sales prospecting and recruiting that range in cost from $80/month to $120/month.

We included apps in this list that are stand-alone, meaning you don’t have to buy into a package with features you don’t need (or a package lacking the features you do need). That being said, Zoho Suite gets an honorable mention as a small business platform with mobile apps for CRM, email marketing, invoicing, internal communication, document management and more. If you would rather have one central tool for all of your business needs, this is a great choice. Their pricing is very affordable ranging from $4/user/month to $7/user/month with discounts for annual upfront commitments.

These apps offer the flexibility and pricing that small businesses need to grow and thrive. If you have a small business, freelance or have a side hustle, you can benefit from streamlining all your manual tasks. Do you have favorite mobile apps that we didn’t include in this list? Let us know!