Top 7 SaaS Tools for Small Businesses in 2024

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Software-as-a-Service is doing exceedingly well today. Recent statistics show that businesses with less than 50 workers use about 16 SaaS tools, and those with 50–99 employees have, on average, 24 SaaS apps at their disposal. Being easily accessible online, these products are best for startups and small businesses looking to drive their productivity and growth while saving costs on expensive IT infrastructure. Keep reading to learn about the top SaaS tools designed to boost the efficiency of your business and supercharge its everyday operations.

Sales/CRM: HubSpot

HubSpot is so far one of the top SaaS tools for CRM (customer relationship management). It helps businesses create deep connections with their consumers through a rich selection of marketing, sales, content management, and customer service solutions. The platform provides significant benefits to enhance the growth and profit of small businesses. It allows entrepreneurs to:

• Measure conversion rates, audience engagement, and content performance.
• Harness the power of AI to produce more leads.
• Automate repetitive everyday tasks.
• Assess the performance of marketing strategies using reports, dashboards, and analytics.
• Increase search traffic with SEO software.
• Track, store, and manage business tasks.
• Create and distribute content across different platforms.

Social Media Marketing: Hootsuite

Hootsuite has long been a handy SaaS for small businesses and startups. The platform offers efficient ways to enhance social media presence and get more followers on various networks, including YouTube, Facebook, X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Hootsuite’s numerous content creation and management features empower business owners to engage with their audience continuously. Meanwhile, ample analytical and reporting capabilities help improve social media productivity. This is what you can do using it:

• Create, schedule, and post content on all social channels from one place
• Track the engagement rate by network, post, and account
• Keep public comments and private messages on one dashboard
• Use a generative AI chatbot and auto-response feature
• Search for brand mentions across 150 million websites
• Boost customer satisfaction by learning their preferences
• Figure out the best times to post on different social media channels

Document Management: PDF Guru

Whenever you need to create a professional-looking PDF for contracts, confidentiality agreements, budget reports, purchase orders, or business plans, PDFGuru.com comes in. Its rich combination of conversion, editing, and security features helps companies manage their files most conveniently and effectively. As one of the best SaaS tools for startups and small businesses, PDF Guru seamlessly integrates into any document workflow. It allows entrepreneurs to:

• Create PDFs from scratch.
• Convert files to/from dozens of formats, including PDF, JPG, Excel, PNG, TXT, and DOCX.
• Use advanced editing features to add, rewrite, and remove text, paste and modify images, mark up content, rearrange page elements, change fonts, and more.
• Create and fill out PDF forms.
• Compress documents without quality loss.
• Password-protect and e-sign files.
• Annotate PDFs.
• Organize files by deleting, extracting, rotating, and inserting pages.
• Split and merge documents.

AI Service: PDFSummarizer

PDFSummarizer is a must-have SaaS for small business owners struggling with information overload. The tool is designed to simplify sifting through data-rich content, allowing users to get essential insights immediately. Powered by cutting-edge AI algorithms, PDFSummarizer analyzes files and produces concise responses to user questions, making interaction with lengthy PDFs much quicker and easier. Leverage its power to:

• Capture the essence and key points of lengthy documents accurately
• Chat with PDF, asking content-related questions
• Understand the meaning of complex terms mentioned in the text
• Generate summaries for different file types (contracts, agreements, reports, etc.)
• Translate content in multiple languages
• Rephrase separate parts of a document
• Detect grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors

Customer Service: Zendesk

Zendesk is one of the oldest customer service tools operating on the SaaS model, and it is still widely used by companies to enhance communication with their customers. It started as a cloud-based ticketing software and, transformed into a large and versatile platform catering to various use cases across all types of companies over the years. Today, Zendesk ranks among the must have tools for small businesses and can be used to:

• Add messaging to a mobile app or website so that users can reach the company instantly.
• Provide teams with a unified working environment to simplify their collaboration.
• Keep customer messages from different platforms in one place.
• Introduce AI into every integration with a customer.
• Enhance agents’ productivity with Zendesk bots.
• Take voice calls and measure phone support performance with real-time analytics.
• Enhance online security with BYOK encryption.

Project Management: Trello

Trello is a collaboration and task management tool designed to enhance a team’s productivity by simplifying complex business processes. It offers companies an easier approach to staying organized while managing all their tasks, responsibilities, and projects in one place. Trello has many useful features to take the workflow to the next level. Therefore, you will have a chance to:

• Organize project steps with coded labels to categorize priorities
• Get a clear view of the team’s responsibilities using cards, boards, and lists
• Set due dates for tasks
• Drag and drop attachments into a card
• Create checklists
• Integrate with other services like Outlook, Gmail, and more
• Enhance Trello’s functionality with a variety of Power-Ups

Team Communication: Slack

This is one of the most efficient small business tools aimed to streamline communication and collaboration within a company. Thanks to its flexibility, Slack helps teams stay connected wherever they are and whatever devices they use. The platform also supports integration with 2,600 apps to centralize workflow and boost the team’s productivity. It allows users to:

• Arrange video and audio meetings.
• Communicate via text messages.
• Organize, manage, and track projects.
• Start and automate everyday tasks.
• Create, share, and organize information using canvases.
• Record video and audio clips.
• Work smarter with Slack AI.

Final Thoughts

SaaS tools foster productivity and efficiency in many business operations, from social media marketing and sales to document management and team communication. Although the abovementioned platforms cater to different needs, they all help small companies grow and succeed in the highly competitive business environment. Feel free to try these tools firsthand and choose which works best for you.