Best Collaboration Software for Small Businesses in 2025
Collaboration software is essential for all sizes of businesses today enabling cross-functional teams to coordinate, share information, and achieve common business goals through a centralized space. Collaboration software for small businesses plays a vital role in managing tasks by managing data sharing, task updates, communication, and task management in a unified platform. This makes small businesses keep track and updated of the workflow as well as deadlines and goal achievements for every year. Instead of employing multiple tools, different teams work within a single system, which makes it easier for everyone to keep track of the status of any ongoing or completed projects.
To buy the suitable collaboration software, companies mainly consider performance, scalability, and cost. They look for offers that provide seamless sharing, real-time documents co-editing, real-time messaging, instant communication through chats, voice or video calls/ group chats, etc. This article gives you an idea about the best collaboration software available in the market for small businesses.
Here’s a preview of Collaboration Software for Small Businesses:
- Best for Real Time Collaboration: Slack
- Best for Hybrid Work Experience: Webex App
- Best for Flexible Working Environment: Notion
- Best for Virtual Meetings: Microsoft Teams
- Best One-Stop Collaboration Platform: Discord
- Best Project Management Collaboration Software: Confluence
- Best All-In-One Productivity Platform: ClickUp
- Best Open Core Collaboration Software: Mattermost
- Best Open Platform for Collaboration: monday.com
- Best Open Collaboration Platform with an AI Companion: Zoom Workplace
Best Collaboration Software for Small Businesses
Best for Real Time Collaboration: Slack
Slack is a team collaboration app with a group messaging facility and aiming to simplify communications for businesses. It includes open discussions, private groups, and direct messaging, as well as deep contextual search and message archiving, and file sharing. Slack integrates with a few other tools, such as MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive. It has free plans as well as paid plans with various features and greater controls.
Features
- It has separate channels for conversations by topics. Channels are both private and public.
- Slack can integrate with other tools like MailChimp, Dropbox, and Google Drive.
- It can consolidate messages to avoid unnecessary notification noise.
- Activity tab for managing reactions, threads, responses, and DMs.
“We use Slack for the majority of our asynchronous work-related communication. This includes asking questions for feature development, project management, prioritization, managing customers and business, and more. We use a lot of the integrations as well, like Zoom, Google Calendar, Notion, or Forkable, to integrate with the other tools that we use. Slack helps us to have open communication, keep history of important conversations, track issues and resolution, and support each other debugging.”
Read Kelsey’s full review here.
Best for Hybrid Work Experience: Webex App
Webex App offers webex calling, meetings, messaging, polling, whiteboarding and video messaging into a single application, fostering collaboration and unlocking more productive ways to work. The app provides a comprehensive and intelligent collaboration experience to its users when they work on different workloads. It helps users to securely connect, communicate and get work done in every scenario.
Features
- The app collaborates across different teams or companies in a simple and intuitive way.
- The platform can be used for all kinds of organization collaboration requirements meetings, calling, messaging and connectivity to devices.
- The app is easy to use and paves the way of collaborating with peers.
- It has the ability to use different threads with-in one communication.
“We use Webex primarily because of enterprise clients that prefer using it as their communication platform. While we continue to use other tools for our standard clients, there’s something about Webex that makes it the go-to for enterprises operating in highly regulated markets. Either way, it does video calls, screen sharing, text messaging and file sharing with as much ease as any other app.”
Read this Verified User’s full review here.
Best for Flexible Working Environment: Notion
Notion has everyday work tools consolidated into one. The tool has a product roadmap, a company wiki, meeting notes, and other use cases. Under one roof, tasks can be customized to meet the needs of workflow and targets. It is designed to be a workspace for a particular team or multiple users in a company. Notion is a highly flexible collaboration tool that makes it possible for everyone to shape their tools to suit the use case.
Features
- Notion is applicable for web, desktop, and mobile apps.
- It has more than 40 block content types and 50 starter templates.
- Anyone can use the Wiki and take notes as required.
- It has databases along with easy access to tables, lists, calendars, a kanban board, a gallery, and timeline views.
Best for Virtual Meetings: Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams offers video conferencing software along with team collaboration tools. The communications platform allows MS Office users to conduct conference calls and share files via SharePoint, and join or initiate a group chat.
Features
- Microsoft teams come with meeting management features under one roof.
- It offers Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).
- It is easy to use web and video conferencing through Microsoft teams.
- Collaboration can easily be met between two individuals or multiple team members.
Best One-Stop Collaboration Platform: Discord
Discord is a collaboration app designed to connect users with communities over voice, video, and text chat. Through Discord servers, a gaming app can be built and it allows developers to communicate with their customers.
Features
- It helps to build a Community
- The app helps in managing internal communications among cross-functional teams.
- Collaboration within an organizational set up is flexible and easy to use with the app.
Best Project Management Collaboration Software: Confluence
Confluence has the option to create tasks or anything and everything related to project related collaboration like meeting notes, project plans, product requirements, and more. Include multimedia, dynamic content, etc. It is easy to manage documents through Confluence by sharing PDFs, Office docs, images, and other data. The app can automatically update
Features
- The app offers automatic versioning, instant previews, full-text search, and pinned comments for easy managing of files.
- Confluence has next-level task management, workflow automation, mobile access, and file tracking.
- It also supports tagging, easy search and integrates with other management tools when required.
“Confluence was the go-to channel for any internal know-how and processes needed as we were scaling our business, whilst doing our best to document changes and additions to processes. I can safely say that we would not have been able to standardize half the processes that we did, if it was not for Confluence.”
Read this Verified User’s full review here.
Best All-In-One Productivity Platform: ClickUp
ClickUp works as an all-in-one productivity platform. It’s a hub where cross-functional teams come together to plan, organize, and collaborate on work using tasks, Docs, Chat, Goals, and Whiteboard. Tasks can be customized with just a few clicks in the app. All types and sizes of teams can deliver work efficiently that boosts productivity when done through the ClickUp app. ClickUp boosts productivity by removing friction caused by using many different applications.
Features
- It offers flexible task Management along with Resource Management, Gantt Charts, Scheduling, and Workflow Automation.
- Team collaboration through this app is maintained with agile methodology, waterfall methodology, document management, email integration, time tracking, etc.
- ClickUp also supports project and financial reporting.
- The app can also be used on mobile phones.
Best Open Core Collaboration Software: Mattermost
Mattermost is a collaboration software platform designed to support critical work. It functions in complex environments of defense, intelligence, security, and critical infrastructure organizations. The app ensures focused, adaptable, secure, and resilient collaboration that keeps teams connected, irrespective of the intensity of an organization’s needs. It also provides complete data control, deployment flexibility, and customizable integration with other essential tools in order to make the organization’s mission in motion.
Features
- It supports real-time communication, file and code snippet sharing, in-line code syntax highlighting, and workflow automation, purpose-built for technical teams.
- Communication between teams through chat.
- The platform can also be accessed to share comments and feedback on a task.
- It has a user directory and online status options to maintain privacy.
- It has internal knowledge base options and integrates with Outlook if needed.
Best Open Platform for Collaboration: monday.com
The operating system of monday.com is an open platform designed for users to create tools that they need to run simple to difficult tasks. The user interface provides building blocks like apps and integrations, allowing teams to build or customize their work solutions.
Features
- It streamlines a sales pipeline, creates a marketing campaign process, runs a robust CRM, or builds a project management tracker.
- monday.com offers a collaborative space for cross-functional teams to stay aligned, agile, and efficient in everything they do.
“monday.com is being used as a Project Management tool for the main workflow of my organization. It’s been used across the whole organization since it allows to have multiple departments cross reference information, tasks and workflows. It allows the organization to manage tasks in a efficient way counting on real- time updating.”
Read Juan Miguel’s full review here.
Best Open Collaboration Platform with an AI Companion: Zoom Workplace
Zoom Workplace is an open collaboration platform with an AI Companion that supports teams to be more productive. The tool also strengthens customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle in assistance with Zoom’s business services for sales, marketing, and customer experience teams, including Zoom Contact Center.
Features
- Offers AI Document Creation, AI Meeting Assistants, and AI Writing Assistant Software services
- Facilitates businesses with appointment scheduling, collaboration, interactive whiteboard, internal communications, meeting management, screen and video capture, virtual classroom, web and video conferencing, and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).
“We use Zoom Workplace for our weekly all-team meetings. We like that it auto-records our meetings (an option we enabled). We then use those recordings after some editing to share with our board members and others not invited/missed the meeting. The reactions are fun and the avatars are fun. We can see people’s personalities shining through whether they are on video or have a profile picture.”
Read Lisa’s full review here.
What is Collaboration Software?
Collaboration software is an application tool used to increase teamwork within an organization. The software is deployed effectively by using a centralized platform where cross-functional teams can openly share data and documents to meet targets or achieve goals. It also helps an organization to solve specific business issues or complete projects by collaborating with different segments of the project. Team members can communicate from any location on the cloud, discuss innovation and progress towards business growth. A few aspects of collaborating through software are defined below:
- Internal Communication: Internal communication is topic-based, where employees communicate on relevant or common topics. The communication can take place between two persons in an individual chat or multiple members in a group chat.
- Handling Documents: Collaboration software helps in easy document management through the Cloud. Cross-functional teams can collectively draft and edit documents and share individual comments on the documents as feedback.
- Task management: Task management is the prime aspect of any collaboration software. It is easy for multiple team members to keep track of project tasks in the centralized platform. It also helps in monitoring project progress, keeping team members aligned.
- Easy-to-use user interface: Collaboration software applications are built with a smooth user interface. The collaboration tools are mostly user-friendly and can easily be installed and used on a desktop or a mobile device.
- Search Engine: Collaboration software also helps in easily tracking down required data and can easily manage projects, along with solving issues. A simple search on a single platform takes the user to avail easy research in no time.
Collaboration Software Benefits
Collaboration software has a lot of benefits when used in small businesses. A few of those benefits are:
- Security measures
Collaboration software offers protected permissions at different levels to secure internal data access. Additional applicable authentications and security protocols are included in many platforms to secure locked-down data.
- Consolidated Data Management
Collaboration software provides a one-stop communication platform where consolidated data is managed efficiently. Searching for and finding documents, tracking document status, and sharing feedback under one roof with multiple team members involved can actually be achieved through collaboration software. This saves time for employees.
- Seamless Productivity
Productivity is an essential aspect in any business, and when shared information with proper conversations saves time, employees are empowered to achieve goals. They remain focused on driving efficiency.
- High-quality Team Work
Quality of work automatically improves when collaboration takes the right approach. Employees get the opportunity to have advice or input through communications, and that paves the way to knowledge sharing and building expertise across an organization through a collaboration platform. This also makes way for creativity and innovation.
- Transparency
A good collaboration software manages to maintain transparency within a team. It helps in quick error spotting and solving issues with several opinions and approaches. Access to calendars and internal reports provides a broader understanding of the organizational goals, along with how to distribute the work to be done.
How to Choose the Best Collaboration Software
Collaboration software is one of the essential needs for any business today. There are various factors that drive the purchase of collaboration software. The main factors are the size of the business, the needs of the business, and the cost. For small businesses, cost is a crucial aspect to consider. Thus, a collaboration software with required features that meet the organizational budget, perform without hindrance, and achieve business goals should be good to consider. A few examples are ClickUp, Notion, and Confluence.
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The products in this article were chosen utilizing TrustRadius’ proprietary ranking algorithm, along with independent research conducted by the TrustRadius Research Team. The products featured in this article are frequently reviewed by small business users in the collaboration software category.
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Choosing the Right Collaboration Software for Small Businesses
Collaboration software for small businesses requires a few factors to consider. The main factor being the cost of the software, small businesses must consider the basic benefits and needs that a collaboration software is offering at a budget price. To meet organizational goals and keep updated with work progress, the collaboration software must be flexible with basic features like task management, communication, document management, knowledge sharing, and reviewing.
To make an informed decision, it’s crucial to dive deeper. At TrustRadius, we believe in the power of real user feedback. Every review on our platform is verified and authentic, providing you with genuine insights from peers who have used these tools in real-world scenarios. Ready to continue your research? Learn more about collaboration software and related categories at the links below.
