Outsourcing and working with remote teams enable companies to save on real estate costs and hire in-demand specialists from all over the globe. It also gives employees flexibility and freedom to work wherever they feel comfortable.
One burden that still hard to overcome for many companies is communication. Technology made it easier to be on the same page with your remote team and effectively manage their work. The right set of tools for collaboration enables productive workflow and information exchange.
That’s why we’ve compiled a list of tools for collaboration with remote teams and outsource partners. You can pick some popular options to monitor the project’s progress, track the tasks and communicate.
Tools for Online Communication
1. Slack
Pricing: free plan with usage limitations. Standard plan starts with $6.67 per active user per month
Slack is a great tool for team chatting that helps you keep secure and transparent communication. It enables you to create and manage different channels where you can gather the necessary coworkers to discuss your work. It’s a quite popular solution for texting as it offers the possibility to set up open or private channels, invite users to them, and share various files’ types in an appropriate format. Besides, you can make calls and share your screen while talking. As a result, Slack can become a convenient workspace for your remote team.
The tool may have all the necessary features for written communication on a free plan but group calls are available only for members on a paid plan. Also, there are 5GB file storage limit and a possibility to view only the most recent 10k messages on a free plan.
2. Google Hangouts
Pricing: free
Google Hangouts is a free platform that allows making phone calls, video conferencing and messaging. It’s a convenient solution for those who already use Gmail or G Suit package because it’s integrated with Google Apps system. You can read messages and chat even when you’re checking your Gmail inbox.
It provides such necessary features for remote teams as group video conferencing and chatting, but if you need more complicated options for internal business communication (integrations with other apps or smoother sharing of information) consider tools like Slack or Microsoft Teams.
3. Microsoft Teams
Pricing: free plan with usage limitations. Standard plan starts with $5 per active user per month
Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform for creating channels or chats, sharing and storing files, voice or video communication and screen sharing.
It is integrated with Microsoft’s online office suite Office 365. So you can work in connection with such Microsoft services as Word and Excel, or SharePoint. Also, if you create and share documents within a Team, they’ll be synced with a copy kept in Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage and a local SharePoint environment. It enables every team member to access the latest version or even start the collaborative editing of the doc.
Besides, you can use integrations with apps and services like PowerPoint, OneNote, Planner, Power BI, GitHub, Evernote, Zendesk, MailChimp, and many others. API frameworks allow you to integrate with services and apps you need and create a powerful hub for team collaboration.
4. Zoom
Pricing: free plan with 40 mins limit on group meetings. Pro plan starts with $14.99 per month
Zoom is a remote conference tool. Its main features include high-quality video and audio, screen sharing, meetings recording and team chatting. You can sync Zoom with your calendar system and use it for video conferencing from desktop or mobile.
All of these features make online meetings, demos or webinars easy and enhance collaboration of the remote teams.
5. Cisco Webex
Pricing: free plan with 40 mins limit on group meetings and 1 GB of cloud storage. Starter plan costs 12,85€ per month per host
Cisco Webex is a multifunctional tool tailored for real-time collaboration with your team. You can use it as a conferencing solution with all relevant features like screen sharing, meeting scheduling, recording and more. Besides, it provides cloud calling that enables you to make and receive calls from a range of Cisco IP Phones from any office location.
You can easily communicate with your remote team using the app or even integrate it with other third-party applications. Webex Teams allows connecting your teamwork with such tools as Trello, Asana, Salesforce, and Jira.
6. Uber Conference
Pricing: free plan with up to 10 Participants. Business plan starts with $15 per month per user
Uber Conference has all in-demand features for conference calling including group calls, screen sharing and meeting schedule. You can use it as international IP telephony and implement it as a business phone system in your company.
Among other perks there are convenient applications for iOS and Android, integrations with Slack, G Suit, HubSpot, Hipchat, Salesforce and Office 365.
7. Skype
Pricing: free. Paid rates for calling the phones or sending SMS
Last but not least is Skype. You can use it on any device for chatting and sharing files with your team members, creating channels and groups, make group calling and video conferences, or even make phone calls.
You can employ Skype as a regular phone. It provides a local telephone number in more than 20 countries, and calls to this number will go straight to your Skype account. So you can easily reach your team members or customers from any location.
Tools for Project Management
1. JIRA
Pricing: $10 per month for up to 10 users and $ 7 per user per month for 11-100 users
Jira is a popular tool for progress planning and software development tracking. It’s widely used by developers, project managers and SCRUM masters for project and task management. Jira enables you to set up, assign and prioritize tasks, organize them into backlogs and track their progress.
Integration with other tools like Confluence, Bitbucket, Slack, and GitHub allows you to update task information directly from these solutions and consolidate your work within one environment. Another useful feature is task estimation. Your team members can indicate how much time is required to complete a task and record the spent hours.
2. Confluence
Pricing: $10 per month for small teams (up to 10 users) and $5 per user per month for 11-100 users
Confluence helps organize and manage teamwork. The main feature that distinguishes it from other tools is a user-friendly environment for keeping project documentation, knowledge bases, roadmaps or any notes in one place. It provides different access levels to manage who can edit, comment or read documents. Also, you can use various templates, formatting and integrations to make your workflow efficient.
3. Trello
Pricing: free. Business Class plan starts with $9,99 per user per month
Trello is also a tool for managing work progress that clearly shows the task status and accountable team members. You can organize your processes using Trello boarding cards and move them when the task status is changed. Use a free plan if you have a small team or a paid version that allows different integrations with instruments like Jira or Slack.
4. Epicflow
Pricing: On request
Epicflow helps to see project’s progress and offers a broad perspective of your work. You can use it for resource allocation, tracking past, current and future workload, and analyzing risks and bottlenecks in the project. It enables you to share milestones between your projects, make fast changes in Quick Edit Mode, administer risks using time or capacity buffers, make comments, analyze the previous output, improve things in the future using Timesheet, and foresee the impact of your actions in the future using ‘What-if Simulation’.
It can be integrated with any tool on request, or you can use the current possibility to integrate with Jira, MS Excel, MS Project, and Primavera.
5. Asana
Pricing: Free Basic plan with limits. Premium plan starts from $10.99 per user per month
With Asana, you can track the workload of your team, assign and visualize tasks using boards, and plan your work with a timeline. These features allow you to keep abreast of the work process and stay in sync with your teammates. Using Calendar and Kanban boards, you can easily plan sprints and track all activities.
You can integrate it with the services you already use like Slack, Dropbox, Zapier, or Office 365.
Tools for Workflow Automation
1. Zapier
Pricing: free plan with limits. Starter plan costs $19.99 per month, billed annually or $24.99 month-to-month
Zapier connects apps and services you use in one place and helps you automate your tasks. It offers integrations for more than 1,500 apps like Slack, GitHub, Google Drive, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Trello, Asana, or Salesforce.
You can create zaps that allow moving data between services you use and automate repetitive tasks. The best part is your opportunity to link internal processes, share and push data between tools you apply without any code or special technical skills.
2. Google Team Drive
Pricing: Basic plan starts with $6 per user a month with 30GB cloud storage
All-in-one suite from Google that includes Gmail, Docs, Drive, and Calendar has become a real must-have for any business. G-suite provides cloud storage for your team, where you can keep all your documentation.
Documents can be shared between team members. They also have a different kind of access level – for editing, viewing, or commenting. You can edit one document simultaneously with other team members and see any changes online or even check the version history. All docs, spreadsheets or presentations are stored in your Drive which can be shared with your remote team.
3. Monday
Pricing: Basic plan for two users starts from $17 per month
Monday allows customizing a workflow, creating dashboards and tracking progress. You can be up-to-date with the work of your remote team using charts, files, timeline, calendar and even Kanban views.
You can choose ready-to-use templates and customize them for your needs. Like most of the previous tools, it supports integrations with Slack, Jira, Trello, Asana, and many others.
You have a wide range of different instruments to make your work with a remote team productive and automate the processes. Consider your needs and try various solutions that can do the legwork, luckily most of them have free plans or trials. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to drop a line to our specialists. We’ll be glad to help you and answer any questions.