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For almost all business owners, acting as a Jack-of-all-trades —at least at the beginning— is the norm. Choosing the right software tools for your small business that will do most of the job with minimal effort —and most importantly— affordably, is essential.
We’ve done your research for you and narrowed down the list for each of the following categories that offer the best service and features for UK small business needs, along with an affordable price. Between these 10 tools, you’ll have everything you need to manage your business efficiently. What you’ll need:
- Marketing software
- Sales software
- Accounting software
- Legal software
- Customer service software
- Website building software
- Communication software
- Document Management
- Data Crawling and Web Scraping Software
Marketing Software
HubSpot
The best marketing automation platform out there, HubSpot creates campaigns and strategies that convert leads. It’s pricier than other platforms but it’s worth the extra if you’re a small business looking for an all-in-one solution. You can also integrate it with HubSpot Sales and CRM, it’s accessible on mobile, and it has 24/7 customer support.
Features:
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Marketing automation
- Lead management
- Social media monitoring
- Real-time analytics
- Blogging platform
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Starter: Starting at £42/month
Professional: Starting at £655/month (+ £2,450 one-time onboarding fee)
Enterprise: Starting at £6,264/month (+ £4,900 one-time onboarding fee)
Sales Software
Freshworks
We like the customisation and easy integration of Freshworks as well as the sophisticated CRM that takes raw data and makes it into something you can work with. We find it user-friendly and appreciate the flexible and affordable pricing options.
Features:
- Open API configuration
- Multiple pipeline management
- Lead scoring
- Auto profile enrichment
- IP whitelisting
- Territories and lead assignment
- Advanced CRM customisation
- Custom reports
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Growth: $29USD /month per user
Pro: $69USD /month per user
Enterprise: $125USD /month per user
Accounting Software
Xero
Xero puts all your invoices, bookkeeping, inventory management into one cloud-based accounting software. It integrates with every major business app along with mobile support and 24-hour online assistance.
Features:
- Invoicing
- Accounting reports
- Expense tracking
- Online payments
- Bank connections
- Inventory management
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Starter: £10/month
Standard: £22/month
Premium: £27.50/month
Legal Software
Zegal
Zegal has more than 1,200 documents customised for the legal systems in the UK that are easily accessible and searchable. There is a unified dashboard that lets you have full control of the documents that you create. This also allows for easy collaboration between different parties privy to the document and, of course, e-signing. You can also get legal advice with an actual lawyer included in all the subscription plans if you should need it. What’s more, even on the least expensive Lite plan, you get one document drafted by virtual legal counsel, if you’re not comfortable doing anything yourself. If you need more than that, you can easily upgrade. Zegal helps startups from all industries navigate the complicated world of law with the essential agreements to run your business.
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Lite: £40/month including one 30min legal advice session with a lawyer.
Standard: £85/month with all the features of the Lite plan plus unlimited document creation and integration with all your other business apps as well as unlimited 30min legal advice sessions. This plan also includes one document drafted by virtual legal counsel.
Premium: £125/month including all features of Standard as well as private commenting, legal redline and template customisation with unlimited integrations with any SaaS platform and two documents drafted by virtual legal counsel.
Recruiting Software
Recruiterflow
Recruiterflow is an all-in-one recruitment software for recruiting agencies and staffing firms. It is a modern applicant tracking system and recruitment CRM designed to accelerate your hiring processes and reduce busy work.
Features
- Job posting
- Applicant tracking system
- Email and calendar integration
- Nurture candidates
- Reporting and analytics
- Recruiting CRM
- Automated workflows
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Growth: $99 Per month, per user
Scale: $109 Per month, per user
Enterprise: $129 Per month, per user
Data Crawling and Web Scraping Software
Crawlbase Crawling API
We have found an impressive and full-package crawling and scraping platform designed for business developers: Crawling API. Now, you can conduct web scraping activities while maintaining anonymity and effortlessly bypassing any restrictions, blocks, or captchas. They’ve created APIs that operate on a vast network of rotating data center, residential, and mobile proxies spanning the globe.
What’s more, if you need data for your SEO or data mining projects, you can do so without the hassle of managing worldwide proxies or infrastructure. Crawling API supports scraping from various websites, including Amazon, Yandex, Facebook, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Glassdoor, and more. It really has got it all!
Features
- Quick Integration: It’s easy to set up, taking just 2 minutes.
- Scalable API: Works well for all your data collection requirements.
- Reliable Proxies: They have proxies that rotate worldwide and offer a 99.9% network uptime.
- Real-time Support: Get help instantly from experts through live chat and email.
- Privacy Compliant: Follow GDPR & CCPA rules to keep your data safe.
- Wide User Base: Trusted by over 70,000 customers around the world.
- Cloud Storage: Special storage for data collected through web crawlers that you can move to the cloud.
- Abundant Proxies: Offers 140 million residential proxies and 98 million datacenter proxies.
- Global Coverage: Supports 30+ countries for geolocation needs.
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes. Get the first 1000 requests for free. No credit card required.
The pricing plan is made super easy and affordable based on the number of requests you make. Start from $0.002 /request
Customer Service Software
Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk is a customer support tool for small businesses. It provides analytics and reports, automates tasks, and helps increase productivity. It has easy integration with other apps and is accessible on mobile.
Features:
- Insights and impact
- Multi-channel help desk
- End-to-end ticket management
- ZIA – AI customer support feature
- Automation
- Call centre and social support
- Self-service
- Knowledge base
- Agent productivity
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Free: £0 for up to 3 agents
Professional: £10/month per agent
Enterprise: £20/month per agent
Website Building Software
Squarespace
This website building platform helps businesses to develop an online presence, which every small business, no matter the service or product, needs. It’s easy for even the least tech-able among us with pre-built website templates and drag and drop features to create webpages and their mobile app allows for blogging and updating on the go.
Features:
- Create a website
- Host content
- Register domains
- Sell products
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Personal: £10 per month
Business: £15 per month
Basic Commerce: £20 per month
Communications Software
Slack
Slack was a must for talking to your team and has become even more indispensable in the world of daily remote working. The searchable message history, real-time replies, and easy navigation make it a cinch to use and it easily integrates with other applications.
Features:
- Notifications
- Conversation channels
- Private groups
- Voice/video calls
- File sharing
- Data encryption
- Two-factor authentication
Pricing
Free Trial: On request
Free: £0
Standard: £5.25/month per user
Plus: £9.75/month per user
Document Management
And, to organise it all, this is the best there is. Create and store documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the cloud that you can share with your team and edit as you go, from anywhere. Even without a subscription, it offers a host of features and generous storage.
Features:
- Easy to use interface
- Share files
- Store videos, PDFs, presentations, and photos
- SSL encryption.
- Access documents from anywhere
Pricing
Free: £0
Premium: – From £1.59/month for 100GB of storage
Storage: Up to £80 /month for 10TB of storage
The Takeaway
There you have it. Get yourself these apps and your small business will be on its way to running as smoothly as you wish it would. You’re only eight clicks away from the organised business operations you’ve seen in your dreams.
This article does not constitute legal advice.
The opinions expressed in the column above represent the author’s own.
Start managing your legal needs with Zegal today
BECOME A ZEGAL REFERRAL PARTNER
ABOUT ZEGAL
Zegal is the end-to-end platform for the legals smaller companies need.
Our story
Zegal was founded in 2014 by lawyer friends Daniel Walker and Jake Fisch. Having been a part of the system that preserves quality legal advice only for those that can afford it, the two were determined to build a model that delivers the ‘corporate law firm’ experience to small business.
Today Zegal is the world’s only end-to-end platform for smaller companies to create, negotiate, and sign both the simple, and complex contracts they need to run their business, with expert legal advice, 100% online every step of the way. Since our launch, we have helped more than 20,000 companies close commercial contracts, run leaner HR teams, and enter new markets. You can use Zegal for your company in the UK, Australia and across Asia. Make your legals simple.
Bonus Tools:
Background Remover
Background Remover by Icons8 is an essential tool for small businesses seeking to enhance their visuals. This user-friendly tool easily removes backgrounds from images, ensuring a clean look. With its intuitive interface and precise results, it empowers small businesses to create engaging, eye-catching product photos and marketing designs, saving time and resources.
Features:
- Background removal
- User-friendly interface
- AI-powered
- Batch processing
- Manual correction
- Transparent PNG output
- Web-based
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Starter: Starting at $0.20 per image
Professional: Starting at $9/month
Enterprise: Discussed individually
Smart Upscaler
Smart Upscaler is another useful small business tool by Icons8. This tool upscales image resolution up to 8x and provies crisper visuals for marketing materials, product images, and more. With the user-friendly interface, this image upscaler empowers small businesses to easily elevate their visual content to increase user engagement. Just drag an image into the upscaler, pick from 4x or 8x enlargement, and get your high-res picture.
Features:
- Image upscaling
- Ai-driven
- User-friendly
- Batch processing
- Customizable settings
- Web-based
Pricing
Free Trial: Yes
Starter: Starting at $0.20 per image
Professional: Starting at $9/month
Enterprise: Discussed individually
Sceyt
Sceyt is a low-code to no-code Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) focused on providing lightning-fast Chat API worldwide. It is a powerful alternative to PubNub and Sendbird for building real-time chat experiences.
Features
- Easy to integrate and use
- Highly scalable and secure
- Customizable chat interface
- Supports one-on-one and group chats
Pricing
Sceyt offers a variety of pricing plans to suit your needs. They also offer a free trial so you can try out their platform before you commit.
