Managing small- to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) is no small feat. Working with a lean team means you work with limited human resources.
Thankfully, there’s a way to streamline your processes and improve your team’s productivity with the help of software for SMBs. In this article, we’ve listed the best small business software options and sorted them according to these categories:
Is your small business making a profit? Tracking your cash flow and financial performance is essential because doing so helps you make critical, informed decisions.
The table below summarizes the best accounting and bookkeeping software that small businesses can use:
Starts at $19 per month (30-day free trial available)
4.5 out of 5 stars
1. QuickBooks Online
Pricing: Starts at $15 per month (30-day free trial available)
G2 rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Best for: Best overall
QuickBooks Online is an accounting and bookkeeping software that small businesses can use to:
Track income and expenses
Manage cash flow
Track miles
Manage projects
Calculate tax deductions
It’s a feature-packed and user-friendly accounting tool that can scale. You can also create and send personalized invoices with your brand colors and logo.
QuickBooks Online complies with accounting standards. Every plan comes with a free one-time setup with an onboarding expert. This accounting software tool for SMBs has a support hub for video tutorials and articles.
2. Xero
Pricing: $15 per month (30-day free trial available)
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Best for: Best for analytics
Xero is another well-known accounting software for SMBs. It lets you easily view all your invoices, contacts, balances, and other financial information.
It features a customizable dashboard to track daily cash flow, including bank balances, invoices, and bills. You can also integrate Xero with other apps to streamline and combine data to get a bigger picture of your business’s status and performance.
Xero’s analytics feature lets you track your short-term cash flow and check your financial health.
3. FreshBooks
Pricing: Starts at $19 per month (30-day free trial available)
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5
Best for: Freelancers
FreshBooks is another intuitive accounting and bookkeeping software for small businesses.
You can create and send invoices using this software, making it an ideal software for freelancers. You can even automate payment reminders for your clients.
In addition, FreshBooks lets you:
Track your expenses
Scan receipts to log and categorize expenses
Accept payment through credit card
Manage your clients and projects
You can also track loans and assets. The reporting feature makes planning your future activities to grow your business easy.
Best CRM software for SMBs
Small businesses can benefit from using customer relationship management (CRM) software. It can help nurture prospects, increase sales, and improve customer experience.
This table summarizes the best CRM software for small businesses:
$14.90 per user per month (14-day free trial available)
AI features
4.2 out of 5 stars
4. Nutshell
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month (14-day free trial available)
Best for: Best overall
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
First on our list is our own CRM here at Nutshell! Nutshell is a user-friendly CRM software for SMBs that provides numerous features to help you nurture and convert prospects:
Sales automation: Nutshell can help you optimize your sales process by auto-assigning leads to your reps, providing them with reminders at each stage, and automating repetitive tasks.
Reporting and analytics: Nutshell helps you forecast your sales and track your leads, sales, team performance, and more. You can easily analyze how leads move through your sales funnel and download presentation-ready charts.
Contact management: Users can import their customer data to Nutshell, reducing manual data entry and potential errors. With all of your contact data in one place, your whole team then has access to accurate, up-to-date information.
Pipeline management: This feature lets you monitor the health of your pipeline and manage leads within it. Nutshell offers multiple pipeline views, so you can manage your leads however works best for you.
Start a free trial of Nutshell today to see for yourself what it can do for your SMB. We’re confident you’ll love what you see!
See Nutshell in action
Give our powerful, easy-to-use CRM a try for free for 14 days! Or join a live demo to see Nutshell at work!
Pricing: Starts at $12 per seat per month (14-day free trial available)
Best for: Flexibility and customization
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5
Monday.com sales CRM is an artificial intelligence-powered (AI-powered) software that can automate tasks and summarize sales meeting notes or call transcripts.
You can also tailor your CRM to your sales process. You can edit your deal stages and add columns, enabling you to manage different pipelines simultaneously.
Integrating your email into Monday.com Sales CRM lets you track your customer interactions. This ensures that no small details slip through the cracks, and it also makes personalizing your emails easier!
6. Pipedrive
Pricing: $14.90 per user per month (14-day free trial available)
Best for: AI features
G2 rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
Pipedrive is a CRM software for SMBs that provides a clean interface with all the necessary features.
You can start by creating the stages of your sales funnel or using a template. Then, you can import your deals from a spreadsheet.
Set up alerts and reminders to track your progress. You can even get sales forecast updates every time a prospect moves further down your funnel.
Pipedrive also has built-in analytics and reporting features. With its dashboard, small businesses can spot patterns that lead to sales, helping them streamline their workflow and campaigns.
Best small business software for website building
When you’re looking for a product or service, do you search online to find more information or to find a deal? If you do, you’re not alone—80% of consumers start their product research online.
Having an online presence through their own website is important for SMBs to attract prospects. Small businesses can use any of the following website builders, which don’t require coding skills:
Starts at $16 per month (Free limited version and free trial available)
– Built-in templates- Drag-and-drop editor
4.2 out of 5 stars
7. WordPress
Pricing: Starts at $4 per month (Free limited version available)
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
WordPress is an easy-to-use website builder that SMBs, freelancers, and solopreneurs can use.
You can start by choosing from customizable website design templates. The user-friendly drag-and-drop editor lets you customize your page layouts.
Do you want to add more functionalities and features to your website? You can integrate plugins. WordPress has over 50,000 of them—from analytics and scheduling tools to ecommerce and search engine optimization (SEO).
8. Shopify
Pricing: Starts at $29 per month (Free trial available)
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Shopify is an excellent website builder for SMBs planning to sell products online. It allows you to create full-featured websites with ecommerce capabilities.
This website builder has various sales channels and point of sale (POS) systems to make selling easy for businesses.
Shopify also has free tools like a logo maker and a domain name generator to help you start selling online.
9. Wix
Pricing: Starts at $16 per month (Free limited version and free trial available)
G2 rating: 4.2 out of 5 stars
Wix is an easy-to-use website builder for SMBs. To get started, you can choose among the templates sorted according to categories.
Then, you can use the drag-and-drop editor to add or edit elements on your site. Change the colors, buttons, and other functionalities without writing code.
Best small business software for payment processing
Streamline your payment collection and processing with helpful software. The tools below provide your customers with a safe way to pay.
Pricing: 2.9% + $0.30 per successful charge for domestic cards
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Stripe is a payment software solution for SMBs. With Stripe, you can accept payments online, in person, or anywhere in the world.
This payment processing software helps you increase conversion with its built-in optimizations. You can also customize your checkout page.
11. PayPal
Pricing: 2.29% to 3.49% + fixed fee
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
PayPal is another payment processing software that SMBs and freelancers can use. It enables you to accept payments online or in-store.
You can integrate PayPal into your ecommerce website and receive credit or debit card payments.
Don’t have a website or a brick-and-mortar store? You can still accept payments remotely. You can send an invoice or share a payment link.
12. Square Payments
Pricing: Starts at $0 per month + processing fees
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
SMBs can make processing payments easy with software like Square Payments. Simply set up an account and get a virtual terminal or card reader.
With Square, you have several payment options. You can take contactless payments with your smartphone and accept payments remotely. Customers can also pay via credit card over the phone through Square Dashboard, which acts as a virtual POS terminal.
Best software for marketing and email automation
Marketing and email automation software can help SMBs streamline their processes. If you’re looking for free software for small businesses (or freemium ones) that can help you automate email send-outs and other marketing efforts, check out our list below:
Starts at $6 per month for one social channel (Free limited version available)
Social media content scheduling
4.3 out of 5 stars
13. Canva
Pricing: Starts at $119.99 per year (Free limited version available)
Best for: Graphic design
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars
Whether you need a visually appealing deck for a client pitch or fresh graphics for a social media post, Canva is your weapon for slaying that presentation or engaging your audience.
Canva has over 250,000 free templates for various graphic needs. Its drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to customize the templates for your small business.
Do you need your other team members to review your deck or image? You can share your Canva design with a colleague by giving them a link.
14. Google Analytics
Pricing: Free
Best for: Website traffic insights and analysis
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
What are your sources of website traffic? Which pages get the most number of visits?
Google Analytics can answer these questions and more. It provides you with data about your website traffic.
This free software for small businesses and enterprises provides you with valuable insights about your audience and site visitors, too, as it tells you:
The geolocation of your traffic sources
The devices your site visitors used
The digital marketing channels they came from
All these can inform your SMB’s marketing strategies.
15. MailChimp
Pricing: Starts at $13 per month (Free limited version available)
Best for: Email automation
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Another excellent marketing software for SMBs is MailChimp. It lets you create automated email campaigns to nurture your relationship with your subscribers or inform them of the latest offers they might be interested in.
You can also create email templates for different customer segments and send emails to different audiences based on their behavior.
16. Nutshell Campaigns
Pricing: Starts at $5 for 100 contacts with a Nutshell subscription (Nutshell customers get 150 free emails per month)
Best for: Email automation
G2 rating: 4.3 out of 5 stars
Here at Nutshell, we also offer a world-class email marketing platform. Nutshell Campaigns is built right into the Nutshell CRM, so you can easily add your CRM contacts to custom marketing audiences and keep your data up to date across sales and marketing.
In addition to seamless integration with your CRM, you get a drag-and-drop email builder, email templates, email automation, reporting, and AI email writing tools. You can send broadcasts, newsletters, and drip sequences.
ONE TEAM. ONE TOOL.
Powerful email marketing, minus the headaches
Nutshell Campaigns plugs directly into your CRM data, so you can create highly targeted audience segments, track the impact of your emails in real-time, and manage all your communications out of a single tool. Get started for free!
Consider Gusto if you’re looking for payroll and human resources software for SMBs. This platform allows you to manage your team, their payroll, and benefits.
It has automated tools that automatically calculate your team’s hours, holidays, and PTOs. Your team’s PTO requests and approvals are centralized in Gusto.
This software for small businesses can also help you hire and onboard team members. Post your job openings on LinkedIn and Indeed, and then track your applicants through the software, too.
19. Slack
Pricing: Starts at $7.25 per person per month
Best for: Team communication and collaboration
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Slack is primarily a team communication software with additional handy features for SMBs.
It enables seamless collaboration through a feature called channels. You can create different channels within your organization, one for each team or project you’re working on.
By having organized channels, your team can collaborate more effectively and have relevant conversations in one place.
You can integrate Slack with other apps. Automating tasks and message send-outs is also possible within Slack, thus improving your team’s productivity.
20. Google Workspace
Pricing: Starts at $6 per user per month (Free limited version available)
Best for: Team collaboration and document management
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars
Google Workspace is a comprehensive suite of tools for SMBs that enables team members to communicate, collaborate, and share files. Its tools are even powered by Gemini AI. Here are some of the software tools included:
Gmail: A business email platform
Calendar: An online calendar that lets team members schedule meetings, block their times, and share their schedule
Meet: A voice and video conferencing tool
Drive: Cloud storage that lets team members access and share files on desktop or mobile
Sheets: An online spreadsheet app that enables team members to create and share files
Docs: A word processing tool that lets team members create, edit, and share their files
Slides: An app for creating and sharing presentations from a browser or through a mobile app
21. Trello
Pricing: Starts at $5 per user per month (Free limited version available)
Best for: Project management
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
With Trello, a web-based project management tool, SMBs can stay on top of all their projects and to-do lists. Using boards, lists, and cards, Trello gives team members a bird’s eye view of what has been completed and tasks that still need to be done.
Create a card for each task and assign it to the team members involved. You can set deadlines, attach files, and add comments to each card so that all relevant notes and documents about the task are in one place.
22. Udemy
Pricing: Starts at $20 per month
Best for: Online learning and skill development
G2 rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Udemy is an online learning website with over 200,000 courses across many topics. SMBs can choose from several available plans to give their team members access so they can learn new skills.
This online skill development website offers a wide variety of courses—from hard skills in business and marketing to soft skills like mindfulness and emotional intelligence.
Add Nutshell to your tech stack
Ready to enhance your tech stack to improve your processes? Consider adding Nutshell to take your marketing and sales processes to the next level.
With Nutshell, you get a user-friendly CRM with powerful contact management, sales automation, and team collaboration features. Plus, you get fast, friendly customer support and access to add-ons such as a built-in email marketing platform, landing page builder, and scheduling tool.
