Running an SMB (small-to-medium-size business) is as challenging as it is rewarding, and one of the biggest challenges for smaller businesses is keeping an eye on how much it costs to run your SMB.
With subscription software especially, the expenses can add up quickly. A $10 or $20 monthly fee may not look like much, but once you add a few users and additional features, it can easily cost hundreds or thousands dollars a month.
The good news is that if you’re looking for affordable business solutions, you’ll find that there’s an increasing number of low-cost business software offerings appearing on the market.
And the best thing is that many of them are free. While there are definitely examples of free business software that are very limited, some free SMB software can help with anything from sales to marketing and even accounting, billing, and managing employee salaries.
In an ideal world, you’ll want to find free (or cost-effective) software for small businesses that can handle multiple aspects of your company’s processes. For instance, a lot of businesses have one app for video conferencing, another for team messaging, another for task management and so on.
As we’ll see later, there are some great free small business software solutions that’ll do all of these things!
So, how can you choose the best free software for a small business? Well, we’ve designed our guide specifically for small and medium-size businesses owners who are looking for the best free tools.
In our guide, we’re going to cover:
- What software tools do small businesses need?
- 4 free business software options for communication
- 4 free business software tools for sales
- 4 free business software alternatives for marketing
- 3 free business software choices for accounting/payroll
🔍 Are you thinking about purchasing a new communication tool and unsure how to get started? Here’s a checklist to help you pick the right one for your business.
What software do small businesses need?
No small business is the same. When it comes to deciding what software is best for your business, think about your organization’s unique pain points and requirements.
The features that your business needs will depend on the size of your company and the particular needs of the industry you operate within. Most small businesses require tools that can help handle these common processes:
- Operations management
- Accounting
- Marketing
- Productivity
- Collaboration
- Communication
If you’re in the process of sourcing new SMB software, prioritizing these features is a good place to start. Based on these operational needs, here are the most important types of software for small businesses:
- Communication software lets you share files, audio, text, and video communications. Software like RingCentral’s desktop and mobile apps gives you team messaging, video conferencing, and a phone service—all in one app.
- Customer relationship management software helps analyze customer data. CRM software manages interactions with past, current, and future clients. This allows companies to analyze and strategize their own interactions in a data-driven way.
A business hack: Find a CRM that integrates with your communication platform, and it’ll let you dial your prospects and customers right from your CRM dashboard on your computer—like this Salesforce integration with RingCentral:
- Payroll software helps process employee payrolls, salaries, and wages. These software applications automate employee payment and maintain payment records.
- Accounting software helps you manage the financials, track expenses, manage forecasts, and optimize workflows and operations for long-term profitability.
- Time-tracking software allows employees to accurately record time spent on projects. Time-tracking software is great for professionals who bill customers by the hour, as well as freelancers and workers paid by the hour.
- Project management software helps managers control their costs and meet deadlines. This type of software can help plan, organize, and manage resources and tools in order to develop accurate project goals and financial estimations.
Having a unified workspace is vital here, as Lake Expo found when implementing RingCentral’s solutions to manage the team’s workflow. - Website-building software helps SMBs create websites from scratch without coding. WordPress and Squarespace are some of the most common types of AI website-building software out there—or, your web-hosting company might have a website builder too.
- Payment transaction software helps process customer payments in person or online, and needs to handle most payment methods, including credit cards and PayPal. Think of Square or Stripe. This is usually a stand-alone application that records all the payments made by a customer and allows businesses to view payments alongside the customer’s details.
- Sales and marketing software lets businesses launch ad campaigns, send email newsletters, track customer journeys and sales funnels, and more. Depending on how much your SMB is investing in this area, you can easily have three to five (or more) tools, just for sales and marketing.Now that we’re familiar with the basics, let’s dive into some specialized software solutions—that won’t cost you a dime.
Now that we’re familiar with the basics, let’s dive into some specialized software solutions—that won’t cost you a dime.
Free business software: Communication
Free business tools that specialize in collaboration are designed to help team members communicate and collaborate with each other from different locations using channels like phone calls, video chats, and messaging.
Let’s take a look at some of the best collaboration software on the market today:
1. RingCentral Video Pro
Free integrated video conferencing and team messaging (and more) all in one app.
RingCentral is a leader in providing business and customer-service communications solutions for businesses of all sizes, and RingCentral Video Pro is designed to be an impressively holistic communications solution, available for free.
RingCentral Video Pro lets you and your team meet and communicate through team messaging, video conferencing, and more—all in the same app.
Not only does this free business software help teams stay in sync with each other and clients, no matter where in the world they are, but it also comes with other useful features like:
- HD video
- File sharing and collaboration
- Screen sharing in online meetings
- 50-minute meeting durations
- And more…
2. Slack
Slack is a popular B2B messaging application. Its interface is similar to other messaging applications (WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, for example), but it offers business-friendly features to streamline virtual team meetings. These include:
- Threaded messages
- File transfers and screen share
- Audio and video call
- Shared channels
- Instant and asynchronous messaging
- Integrations
Fun fact: RingCentral has partnered with Slack to bring RingCentral phone and video solutions into the Slack environment and help enable seamless remote working.
3. Zoom
Zoom is a software for businesses that enables video conferencing. It became a household name in 2020, and it’s known for making communication via video conferencing quick and easy. Other features include:
- Zoom Phone
- In-line translation and transcription
- Conference and waiting rooms
- Hand-raising features
- Question and answer features
4. Cisco Webex
Cisco offers a business collaboration software that combines messaging, file sharing, and voice calling.
Cisco comes with features such as:
- Secure end-to-end encryption
- Integration with Cisco equipment
- Video and audio conferencing
- Screen and file sharing
- Integrations with third-party apps
Free business software: Sales
Sales software helps businesses optimize their sales lifecycles, from prospecting to demos to closing and beyond. Good sales software should speed up the selling process and give sales representatives the tools they need to hit their number, every month.Let’s take a look at some of the best free business software for sales on the market today:
1. Spotler CRM
Spotler CRM is an entry-level customer relationship management system (CRM) with prospect-tracking features that help sales reps generate more sales by making sales pipelines more visible.
The software is completely free for up to two users. It boasts instant invoicing and quotes from its opportunities dashboard, as well as:
- Conversion estimations
- Opportunity histories
- Opportunity lines
- Powerful report writing
- Weighted value forecasts
2. Freshsales by Freshworks
This CRM software from Freshworks lets managers see where their employees are interacting with customers. It’s designed to help you track your pipeline status, and has a handy automated data entry feature. Even better, the Freshworks CRM software has an integrated phone and email sync. Other features include:
- Workflow automation
- Lead-scoring
- Reporting
- Event-tracking
- Intelligent insights
- Customer touchpoint tracking
- Mobile application
3. Streak
Streak is sales software that’s built right into Gmail and helps companies achieve efficient pipelines on autopilot. Users add data to the app’s spreadsheet tool and can filter through customer information and create any necessary notifications.
This drives sales by allowing sales reps to capture customer data from emails and contact lists. Other features include full integration with other Google apps and view tracking, which allows users to see if their emails have been opened and send follow-ups accordingly.
Streak is rapidly growing in popularity, and in its standard form, it’s a completely free business software option that you can get as an add-on for Microsoft Edge.1 Some of Streak’s other great features include:
- Automated data collection
- Send-later scheduling
- Email snippet templates
- Mail merging
4. Agile CRM
Agile CRM is a full-service CRM software solution, boasting features such as custom appointment calendars, drag-and-drop automation, email reports, widgets, and plugins.
The free plan and software option is wide ranging, offering email-campaign tools, web-engagement analytics, email tracking, milestone alerts, and unlimited documents, deals, and tasks.
5. Printify
Printify is a free print-on-demand platform that lets anyone anywhere start their eCommerce business with ease. Customize over 900 high-quality products with your designs and sell them on any of the world’s leading selling platforms.
Why choose Printify?
- No upfront costs
- Beginner-friendly
- No inventory
- Sell worldwide
Free business software: Marketing
Marketing software helps businesses run successful marketing campaigns by tapping into their target markets to convert leads in sales, and is a staple tool for any business.
There are many different types of marketing software, from website and SEO management to advertising and email campaign management. Let’s take a look at some of the best free marketing-software on the market today
1. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Screaming Frog specializes in free tools for small businesses. Their SEO software will audit your business website and offer insights to help you create and optimize your SEO strategy. The free version lets you audit up to 500 URLs. Other features include:
- Troubleshooting links and servers
- Website redirects
- SEO auditing across page titles and metadata
- Duplicate content removal
- Data extraction for reports
- XML sitemaps
2. Canva
Canva is a great option if you need to do digital and email marketing. The tool is a simple editing and graphic design solution offering templates for social media posts and websites.
This helps SMBs customize their assets and content with up-to-date graphic design elements. Canva offers an easy-to-use drag-and-drop interface and an extensive library of graphics.
Other features include:
- Infographic designs
- Templates for charts and case studies
- A library of more than one million images
- One Page Website Builder
- Online Drawing Tool
3. Hotjar
If you have a website, a tool like Hotjar is extremely useful because it lets you analyze your customer behavior and see where they click and which pages they interact with the most. This helps SMBs make strategic decisions when developing their content. The software includes:
- Heatmaps to track where customers are spending most time on your site
- Conversion funnels to show you the steps users take before purchasing
- Surveys and polls to generate even more qualitative data
- Recordings to use in training
4. Optimizely
Optimizely is another free business tool that helps boost marketing ROI by helping SMBs get the most out of their marketing campaigns. Optimizely lets you run A/B and multivariate tests so you can see how one type of messaging or graphic performs against another. Features include:
- Marketing experiments
- Activity tracking
- A/B testing
- Visual editing
- Workflow experimentation
Free business software: Accounting
Accounting software helps your Finance team manage your accounts payable and receivable, expenses, transactions, and more. This saves an inordinate amount of time and energy that used to be spent on manually updating and creating spreadsheets and other repetitive tasks.
Let’s take a look at some of the best free accounting software on the market today:
1. ZipBooks
ZipBooks is a free business software option with invoicing, accounting, and business intelligence features. The free Starter plan lets businesses send unlimited invoices and manage an equally uncapped number of vendors and customers.
Starter plan users can also accept digital payments from Square or PayPal, connect one bank account, and access basic reports.
Other features at the free tier include:
- Sending custom quotes and estimates
- Adding taxes and discounts
- Invoicing in multiple currencies.
2. ProfitBooks
ProfitBooks sells itself as free software you can use to stay on top of business finances with no accounting knowledge. You can also use the toll for no outlay, if you choose the Startup plan.
With that free plan, you get one user and can create professional invoices in a range of currencies. You can also:
- Track receivables
- Manage business expenses
- Get tax reports
As well as being limited to one user, you can also only create 25 invoices per month, manage up to 100 customers, and track up to 25 products or services.
3. Wave
Wave is free business software that is extremely small-business-friendly. Users can sign up with Google or create a new account to access free reports and expense tracking. It’s a great option for creating professional invoices, recurring billing, and automated payments.
Other features include:
- Checkout and payment management
- Business health reports
- Annual and monthly comparisons
- Encryption
- Shopify tracking
- Various payment options
The benefits of business software
Good software is a must-have for small businesses as they start scaling their operations, and finding the right software—that has a free plan—is no easy task.
But if you’re able to source these free or low-cost software solutions that have the features that your business needs, the pay-off—streamlined workflows, more time saved, and reduced costs—is worth it.
Here are some benefits of the right software that can help grow your SMB:
- Simplifies tasks: The right tools can streamline your workflows and make day-to-day tasks quicker and easier. Time-tracking software is one example. It helps employees complete timesheets and helps businesses track them. Managers and supervisors can then stay on top of their employees’ progress, and small businesses can integrate appropriate software to help improve workflows accordingly.
- Helps with capturing and following up with sales leads: Software can make it easier for sales reps to find, log, and track sales prospects.
- Improves customer relations: Customer relationship management (CRM) software helps both sales and support teams. Sales teams use CRMs like Salesforce to keep track of prospects and sales cycles, while support teams can use contact center software to take calls and messages from customers and troubleshoot problems.
- Makes your business more competitive: Small business software that can help your SMB improve service quality and efficiency will make your business more competitive and stand out from the crowd. Why write out paper invoices when you can use software that automatically fills out all the details and customer information for you?
Implementing the right software can also help your business scale, as Chais Mayer of 24 Hour Tees found after migrating to RingCentral.
“I’d estimate this automation with the RingCentral API has saved us the need to hire about four additional full-time employees.”
Chais co-founded 24 Hour Tees. As we can see from the name, the company creates custom T-shirts within a day, so any automation is greatly beneficial.
Start using free business software today
If you own a small-to-medium sized business that’s in need of some extra resources to streamline your workflows, you’ve come to the right place.
Think about your organizational pain points, and pick some free business software that you’d like to try out. Even free trials of paid plans are a good option to try things out and see which tools are a good match for your business and which aren’t worth investing in.
Once you know which ones you like best, it’s worth looking at their pricing plans and add-ons. Often, you’ll (understandably) find that the paid plans have much more functionality that will help your business in the long run.
Reach out to RingCentral today to find out more about our offerings or to sign up to RingCentral Video Pro for free.
1https://www.streak.com/pricing
Originally published Jun 16, 2024, updated Jul 16, 2024
