57 Best Collaboration Software in 2021

What are Collaboration Tools?

As more and more companies decide to opt for remote working, online collaborative tools are now a necessity. Moreover, in modern workplace scenarios where different members of a team are in varied locations, collaboration software is necessary for managing projects and streamlining communication.

Team collaboration is important to ensure enhanced employee productivity, organized project workflows, information sharing, and task updates. Business collaboration software's task management capabilities help manage task deadlines, track the process, upload files and set project milestones with ease.

Project collaboration software is a prerequisite for efficient task collaboration strategies. Aside from strengthening team relationships, the platform also plays a key role in helping a company achieve its business goals and profitability margins with the remote workforce.

What are the Benefits of Online Collaboration Tools?

Collaborating closely with team members or managing different projects, all this is easy with paid and free collaboration tools. Such tools help maintain accountability across the entire team aside from organized file management. Some such other benefits of team collaboration software are:

• Improved communication

Team chat software solutions make it easy to communicate with different team members from even remote locations. Whether your employees are traveling or working from home, project collaboration tools are best for sharing the content of all types such as videos, messages and documents.

• Streamlined workflows

Collaboration software helps organizations with smooth daily operations even when their team members work from remote locations. Assigning tasks is easy and so is updating every one of the recent task deadlines. The best collaboration tools can also be used for planning sprints, sharing current tasks and sending instant feedback.

• Improved employee engagement

Paid and free collaboration tools ensure that your remote employees receive continuous updates from their team leads. Companies also use these applications for resolving immediate queries and providing feedback. With so many interactive mechanisms in place, employee productivity is bound to improve.

• Sharing updates for better accountability

Collaboration software helps make employees more accountable towards their work. The best office chat solutions facilitate regular interaction through update sharing options. Online collaborative tools are a good way of ensuring increased employees' responsibility towards their work.

• Better project management

Collaboration software helps manage task allocation and progress tracking for better outcomes. Employers share regular updates and feedbacks whereas employees share tasks with project collaboration tools. The best collaboration tools help with project management, helping companies save both time and resources. After all, better coordination means better task management.

• Comments & assignee for transferring work

Collaboration tools let end users assign separate task cards to individual team members so that they are in the loop every time a new task is assigned to them. Such cards are also utilized for identifying potential issues, attaching important files and communicating further about task transfers.

• Enhanced workflow management

Team collaboration tools send automated reminders to those working on a project about the progress of their tasks and approaching deadlines. This feature is important for keeping every member on the same page regarding their contribution to a project.

Must-Have Features of Online Collaborative Tools

Centralized systems that keep your files, documents, videos and data at one secured place help with the better exchange of knowledge as well as information. You can rely on collaboration software for managing tasks, scheduling deadlines and sharing feedback.

• Cross functional collaboration

Use team collaboration software for streamlining cross-departmental collaboration within an organization. All the files shared through collaboration tools can be worked upon by multiple users. The documents shared can be further customized for the restricted, viewing, editing and sharing options. The cross-functional collaboration feature helps receive real-time work updates.

• Project workflow cycles

Paid and free collaboration tools through built-in communication mechanisms help team members track all conversations around a specific project. Teams thus don't have to go through the hassle of cross-checking emails and trail mails for collecting information. Feedbacks, comments and updates get saved along with every individual document. The project workflow cycle is always maintained, and files can be sent easily for further revisions or approvals.

• Notifications & updates

Checking inbox for the latest updates can be tedious at times but with the help of the notification feature of team chat software solutions, team leaders and project managers can stay abreast of important updates. All information regarding pending tasks, modifications done on a file, request for approval and status changes can be viewed through an external notification option.

• Calendar views

Best collaboration tools offer the calendar view for all scheduled tasks. With most of these collaborative tools, you would also find an option for selecting a calendar format of your choice. As soon as you opt for the calendar view, be ready to start viewing tasks in chronological order - date wise, weekly or daily.

• Online Gantt charts

Online Gantt charts help with interlinking of dependent tasks and visually depicting all scheduled tasks for a given period. Further, the feature can be used for making changes in a schedule just by dragging the beginning and ending date of a project.

• Synchronous and asynchronous collaboration

In case you and your team is interacting in real-time, you can use team collaboration software for synchronous collaboration. For task sharing and regular updates when a team or its member may not be available online, then you can rely on the collaboration platform's asynchronous collaboration capabilities. In both types of collaboration, the best paid and free collaboration software support file sharing, uploading, editing and publishing.

• Internal chats

Communication is well-coordinated with online collaborative tools. The best part about team collaboration software is you can even use it to integrate with other communication software that your company may be using. All alerts, notifications and updates get sent directly to this integrated messaging solution.

• Document management & file sharing

Each collaborative process would go incomplete if timely access to documents is unavailable. With the best collaboration software solutions, you would find not just document repositories but also robust file sharing tools. Attached further are deep reviewing functions for collecting feedback and comments. You can customize these as per your company's administrative restrictions as well as access rights.

• Video conferencing

Videos being a popular mode of communication these days. Online collaborative tools play a major role in bringing into your virtual meetings all nuances of real-life discussions. To further support these video conferences are the screen sharing and whiteboarding tools. Aside from virtual meets, you can also use this option for hosting live webinars and do some live streaming.

• Instant messaging

Project collaboration software solutions are used by companies big and small for linking together teams with their co-workers, heads of the departments and other managerial staff. All these instant messaging processes are highly secured. Teams often use the instant messaging feature for instant chats and such collaborative meets.

Things to Consider for the Best Team Collaboration Tools

Get immediate notifications for rescheduled tasks and all finished deadlines with support from the best team collaboration tools. Annotations, pinned feedbacks and approvals are other functionalities of project collaboration tools. You have to take the following factors into consideration before opting for the best team chat software.

• Assess your business needs

Project collaboration tools need to be selected based on your business needs and requirements. Look for the collaboration software that would help address existing collaboration issues within your system. Check how secured is your data on the software and whether it supports on-premise or cloud deployment.

• Must-have & advanced features

Collaboration amongst employees needs to be organized with such productivity tools that aid in file sharing, document management, audio and video conferencing, project management, task management, and more.

• Consider your budget

The best collaboration tools that fit in your budget should be considered. You need to calculate maintenance costs, update costs and hidden charges associated with any collaboration software so that it doesn’t prove to be a costly affair in the long run.

• Technical support

Regular improvements and updates within collaboration tools are important. So are the available resources such as training materials, knowledge centers and tutorials. Therefore, before you select a team chat software, check if reliable technical support is provided by the vendor.