14 Communication and Collaboration Platforms for Your Startups

With the rise of e-commerce today, it's a lot easier for investors to build their own startups. There are various industries that you can explore and try investing in. Once you've decided to have your own startup, you'll be working with various teams that would work together to make your business succeed.

This is why communication is essential for your business. Some communicate tools would allow you to communicate and collaborate with teams and even your business partners effectively.

1. Wrike

Wrike is a project management tool for small business that can make your projects move faster. This tool gives you a safe space for users to collaborate. It can be used for scheduling, monitoring, and for discussing the projects at hand. It's an organized way of working on a project with various people. While you can communicate through social media platforms and schedule using calendars, it would be a lot easier to keep track of everything when you can do all of these tasks using one tool.

Additionally, Wrike is a simple tool, and it's very easy to use. You won't have to provide months of training to your employees for them to learn and master the interface of this tool. They also offer a free version if you are interested in trying this platform for your business.

2. Weje

Most of the tools are stuffed with a selection of features that are taking your time and in the end, you don't need them. Weje is one of the simplest workspaces on the market that has only the necessary features. You can organize different diagrams like a Flowchart or methodologies as a Kanban. Here you can easily share your ideas and workflows with your team.

Weje can be everything for you, a project management tool, a planner, or a solution for presentations and reporting. As a use case, you can create neat boards and present them to your investors.

3. BlueJeans

Talking to a business partner especially to manufacturers can be a bit overwhelming. We can give you a few tips in doing so, here. Aside from the pressure of finding the right one, you often have to set up a meeting where you will be able to discuss all of your questions, and maybe arrive at a deal that would benefit both parties. Luckily, today’s technology allows us to have conference meetings with people from around the world without physically meeting each other.

BlueJeans is an example of a platform that businesses can use if they need to have video meetings with anyone. This software allows the users to attend the meeting through a mobile phone, a web browser, or even a desktop app. Aside from this, it’s packed with collaboration tools that business owners would love.

4. Cisco WebEx

Aside from communicating with your business partners and employees, you also sometimes have to provide training sessions for your staff. Doing this would allow you to ensure that their skills are improving. There would also be times that you would have to conduct sales demos.

Cisco WebEx allows you to do this and a lot more. It enables you to make presentations, HD video conferences, and even file sharing just like Wetransfer. Doing so makes the meeting and working together more convenient for you and your team.

5. MirrorFly

MirrorFly Chat API is one of the best real-time communication and collaboration platforms. While the other platforms offer specific startup tools to improve internal communication, MirrorFly provides a whole new level of chat experience.

From chat to voice calls and 1:1 video calls to conferencing, the easy integration of API allows complete customization and ownership. With this communication platform, users can integrate and build custom in-app chats that align with brand value.

Choosing the best platform will be great; however, building your own app will provide flexibility and a reduction in cost and time.

6. Google Hangouts Meet

Google Hangouts Meet is one of the most popular tools that startups use today for their collaborations. It’s easy to operate plus, people with Android smartphones can access it without any hassle. You can make voice and video calls, send chat messages, create group chats, and send multimedia messages using this platform.

You can also use this for your meetings and events. The regular version is free, but if you’re planning to get the business edition that allows you to connect with up to 25 participants all out once, you’d have to pay for it. Another great thing about this platform is that you’d be able to have a record of your old conversations.

7. Office 365

If you have an Office 365 package, you'll have access to Skype and Yammer. Skype is one of the easiest video calling platforms that anyone can get tonight. It also has a business version that offers more features. It allows you to have a group meeting with up to 250 people all at the same time. The old version of Skype might not be the best option, but the latest version has a lot of new features that would allow you to communicate better with your team members.

On the other hand, Yammer is created for businesses that need to share important and internal files. It's also fun to use this platform because it looks a lot like Facebook. You'd be able to promote unity in your organization using this kind of platform.

8. TeamViewer 13

TeamViewer 13 is one of the best tools to have when you're building a startups. This software is especially useful when you have several team members who are working remotely at home. This tool has a conference feature that allows you to hold meetings and a screen sharing feature that you can use for when you need to show people how to do something.

This software works like magic and can even surprise you with its advanced features. You can even operate another person's computer screen using this software. TeamViewer is a nifty tool that you can use for collaborations and even for when you need to troubleshoot a problem of another team member.

9. Asana

Keeping track of your projects is important so that you won't end up forgetting them. When you have a lot of team members, and there are a lot of pending projects, it's easy to overlook some of them. Asana will help you prevent problems because it has a design that streamlines the workflow in your business. Aside from this, it can speed up your work.

Asana makes sure that you are always on time and that your employees would be reminded of their deadlines. This platform also has a smartphone app that your staff can install so that they can have access to your working space, anytime and anywhere.

10. ProofHub

ProofHub intends to solve a problem that many organizations -- established or startups -- may have to face. It replaces the multiple tools that teams may otherwise have to invest time and money on, to manage work and communicate, with just one.

From team chatting, proofing files and designs, time tracking, task management, note-taking, etc. -- ProofHub helps throughout every phase of work. It also has multiple task views -- list view, board view, calendar view, Gantt chart view (timeline view), so you can manage work using the one that suits your needs the best.

11. Slack

Last but not the least is Slack. Slack is an excellent tool for communicating with your team. You can divide your chat groups and prevent other people from seeing the conversations in other team chatrooms in your organization. You can send files through this platform and even integrate it with other tools like MailChimp, Google Drive, and Zendesk.

It’s also a very versatile tool since you can access through your smartphone as well, whether you’re an Android or an iPhone user.

12. Instagantt

Instagantt is probably one of the most useful tools you could think of when starting a startup because it tackles the two main fronts of building something new with multiple people involved: organization and communication.

Whether you are a seasoned project manager or you simply like to keep your tasks and personal projects organized, Instagantt relies on its efficiency to schedule, organize, and provide accurate visualization of your plans, making it easy to always stay on track.

The software is very intuitive and easy to use, this means your team won’t be needing virtually any training at all and they will be inclined to start logging in their tasks right away.

Instagantt allows the users to schedule tasks, assign responsible members for each task, create dependencies and critical path for especially complex scenarios, manage workload, hours and costs for different project members, and keep an eye on the overall budget and progress of a project.

This tool is especially useful when you need to have different people working on a project at once because they can communicate by commenting on tasks, assigning comments, and attaching relevant information, keeping everyone on the loop at all times thanks to its integrated inbox and notification center.

Also, what’s best is that Instagantt makes it really easy to share progress. Building a startup usually involves sharing plan projects and being able to make progress visual to shareholders or business partners, and this software allows you to create public snapshots, which are basically read-only, up-to-date links to your project that you can share with anyone, as many times as you need to.

13. Troop Messenger

Troop Messenger is one of the few tools that has quickly risen to the top of the list of greatest collaboration platforms since its public introduction. It has a plethora of features that meet the needs of small to large businesses, which you won't find in most of its contemporaries or popular tools today. Many startups have benefited from this budget-friendly office chat app, which has helped them organize internal communication.

Troop Messenger is available in a variety of delivery models, including SaaS, on-premise, Chat APIs & SDKs, and more. It also invites clients to share their perspectives to customize it to their individual needs, which is why this tool can be used in any domain.

14. Scribe

For a startup, you’re constantly testing and experimenting new ideas. But once you’ve figured out best practices for something new, transferring that knowledge to a junior employee or contractor is essential, but it’s also time-consuming. Traditionally this required running a meeting, sitting side-by-side at a desk, creating a video guide, or manually writing an SOP.

Scribe cuts this time down dramatically while empowering your hybrid workforce. It’s a how-to guide automation tool, taking the clicks and keystrokes you make while performing a process and turning them into a guide with steps and screenshots. These guides can be edited or modified, then shared with a link or embedded in a knowledge base. It will dramatically save your time when onboarding employees or helping answer customer questions. Finally, all guides can be edited if a workflow changes, automatically reflecting those changes wherever those guides are housed.

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