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The startup journey is as thrilling as it is daunting, filled with challenges that test every founder’s resilience and creativity. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, famously likened it to “jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down,” emphasizing the importance of quick thinking and resourcefulness. To navigate this exhilarating yet demanding path, having access to the right free software tools for startups can make all the difference, providing the foundation needed to build, grow, and thrive.
At some point, nearly every startup founder grapples with questions like:
Fortunately, today’s founders have access to a wealth of free software tools designed to make that flight a little smoother. But with so many options, especially in areas like marketing technology and software inegration, the choices can feel overwhelming.
When time and money are tight, where should you begin?Which software tools genuinely deliver value, and which ones come with hidden catches?How do you navigate this crowded marketplace without wasting precious resources?
The answer lies in leveraging the insights of those who’ve been in your shoes—experienced startup leaders and consultants who’ve tested software solutions and know what works.
That’s why we reached out to 32 industry experts to uncover the best free software tools they used to grow their startups. Here’s what they shared.
If you run a startup agency or consultancy, check out our guide to software tools for agencies.
As startups aim to do more with less, generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become essential for accelerating growth, improving efficiency, and scaling operations. With its versatility and affordability, ChatGPT can support startups in multiple areas:
By embedding ChatGPT into daily workflows, startups can reduce costs, save time, and focus on strategic growth.
Once the hierarchy of decision-making expands beyond the founders, communication becomes even more critical.
However, if you stick only to email and desktop apps like Slack, you’ll become inundated with updates and little to no context included.
With the right software tools, you’ll be able to organize this constant stream of messages, updates, and projects in order to stay productive and sane.
Formerly known as Google G Suite (now called Google Workspace), this is a suite of cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools designed to help individuals and teams work more efficiently. It includes applications such as Gmail, Google Drive, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, Google Meet, and more—all seamlessly integrated into a single ecosystem.
Antonio Grasso of Digital Business Innovation Srl shares, “We are a startup and we start using Google workspace for all of our documents, emails, meetings and many other functions. It gives us the ability to read and write all the documents 24/7 on all devices without limitations and without the hassle to make backups.
For a startup, it is very important to focus on growth and be effective while writing a document or planning a meeting or creating a presentation.”Al Tepper of TepFu adds, “It has a free collaborative office suite, storage, email and calendar in the cloud. It is at the core of my business. I’m honestly not sure how I’d run my business without it.
Slack is a cloud-based messaging and collaboration platform that brings team communication into a single, organized space. It’s designed to replace traditional email chains with instant messaging, creating a more dynamic, transparent, and efficient way for teams to stay connected. Slack supports real-time communication, file sharing, integrations with other tools, and much more, making it a cornerstone of modern team collaboration.
Vinish Garg of vhite recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “Team communication is much more effective with Slack. It has been a game-changer for our team to get rid of pain points of emails, to stay in sync for product and for a shared understanding of our work and progress.
Scribehow is a user-friendly tool that allows you to document and share processes, workflows, and step-by-step instructions with your team. It’s particularly valuable for startups, where knowledge transfer and efficient onboarding are critical. With Scribehow, you can automatically generate visual guides for tasks, complete with screenshots and annotations, making it easy to train new hires or share knowledge across your team.
Rob Light, Founder of CarrierSource recommends Scribehow for easily sharing how-tos with team members and new hires: “As a founder you take on every role within a startup, but as you hire on new team members and delegate responsibilities, you need to quickly share processes. Scribe allows me to confidently transition out of certain tasks by sharing knowledge and step by steps guides with new hires.”
At an early stage, you probably only have time to develop one strong marketing channel. That could be organic, social, email or another channel.
You should be able to connect your marketing efforts to sales or signups at a later date. When you decide on a marketing channel, you should see a clear pathway towards improvement in one of those metrics. Fortunately, most of the tools listed below have strong integrations. Or, they can be tracked within Google Analytics, which can then be integrated with other tools.
SEMrush is a comprehensive online visibility management platform that offers a suite of tools designed to assist businesses in enhancing their digital marketing strategies. It provides insights and solutions across various domains, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, content marketing, social media management, and competitive research.
Key Features:
Kaushal Soni of Soni recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “If you want to learn about your website or want to know about your competitor’s website, then SEMrush comes in handy. To start, you have to do is enter a URL and run a search. After that, you will be provided with a variety of data, all of which can be used to boost your SEO efforts to the next level.”
Hootsuite is a comprehensive social media management platform that enables individuals and organizations to efficiently manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard. It offers a suite of tools designed to streamline the creation, scheduling, and analysis of social media content, thereby enhancing online presence and engagement.
Sara Johnson at Digital Marketing and Designs For You recommends this tool due to the following reasons: “HootSuite allows you to manage your social media accounts on one platform. The thing I like best about HootSuite is that it offers an account option that is free. The free plan offers more than enough tools for a small business that is just starting their social media marketing journey.”
Moz is a comprehensive suite of SEO tools designed to assist businesses in enhancing their online visibility and search engine rankings. It offers a range of features tailored to meet the needs of both beginners and seasoned professionals in the digital marketing space.
Eden Gray of Click Intelligence shares, “One of the best features is the Domain Authority (DA) score. The Domain Authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how a site will rank on a search engine results page. A great benefit of Moz.com is that it uses algorithms to do the hard work for you.”
It’s not easy to know which KPIs to track for sales, marketing, and customer success in a SaaS company. There are many possibilities, and so much to do! Why not start with the basic metrics that determine the health of your company?
If you want to track these in Stripe, you can do it easily by building a plug-and-play dashboard that takes your Stripe customer data and automatically visualizes the right metrics to allow you to monitor your SaaS revenue performance at a glance.
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up this Stripe dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your Stripe account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Daniel Burstein of MarketingSherpa and MECLABS Institute shares, “Content Experiments lets you conduct A/B testing (or split testing) on your website. It’s not the only tool that does this on websites. And there are tools that allow you to test in other places as well. For example, many email service providers (ESPs) have A/B testing tools built right in.
A challenge I’ve found with startups is that they are so passionate about their products. This is essential of course to get through all the obstacles a startup must endure, from long hours to financial difficulties to endless pitching for funding.
However, it presents a major blind spot: The customer does not share your passion. For example, I did some marketing and copywriting consulting work with a startup earlier in my career. And right when I was coming on to help, one of the folks told me, “If you’re going to be working on this, you have to come at it with the belief that we have an industry-leading product that will rock the world.” And I replied, “No. I have to come at with the attitude of, ‘who gives a crap about your little company?’ Because that’s what the customer thinks.” The customer does not wake up in the morning excited about your startup. They are inundated with marketing messages and products, and could care less.
With A/B split testing, you don’t have to assume the customer is as passionate as you. You don’t have to ask the customer or a startup what they think about your product (polite approval or hypothetical interest is very different than real consumer action). You can test their responses in real-world situations. And you can learn from customers’ behavior. Much like the lean startup mentality, A/B split testing allows you to create a hypothesis, and then run experiments to either validate or invalidate that hypothesis.”
oast SEO is a widely-used WordPress plugin designed to enhance a website’s search engine optimization (SEO) capabilities. It offers a suite of tools and features that assist users in optimizing their content and website structure to improve visibility on search engines like Google.
Yoast
Clemens Rychlik of Bourbon Creative says, “Yoast is a simple but effective tool that helps companies optimize search engine performance and boost organic traffic to their website.
Startups launching new products or services often struggle to attract attention in the noisy digital environment. Since they frequently run on tight budgets, competing in paid ads spending on search engines, social media and other digital channels can present challenges. Therefore, focusing on growing organic traffic through content marketing and SEO is typically a more efficient and budget-friendly option.
When considering the SEO approach, Yoast is an invaluable tool for four reasons:
Thanks to Yoast, startups can ensure their content is keyword optimized, easy to read and more engaging on social media. It allows users to add specific meta descriptions, SEO titles and slugs and avoid any duplicated content issues. Yoast enables startups to implement crucial SEO best practices and boost organic traffic to websites.”
Hotjar is a comprehensive product experience insights platform designed to help businesses understand user behavior and gather feedback to enhance website performance and user satisfaction.
Joshua Hobson of Statement recommends Hotjar, “As a Shopify Plus eCommerce agency, it’s important to us that our clients’ online stores are as optimized for conversions as possible. We use software tools such as Hotjar to analyze the user experience of eCommerce sites and understand where customers may drop out of the conversion funnel. Being able to see heatmaps, user recordings and other analytics from Hotjar allows us to make recommendations to improve the experience on-site and ultimately generate more sales for our clients.
Google Tag Manager (GTM) is a free tag management system developed by Google that enables users to efficiently add and update website or mobile app tags—such as those for analytics, marketing, and conversion tracking—without directly modifying the underlying code.
Zoltan Laczo of ClickFactory recommends Google Tag Manager:
“The “best” marketing technology stack is different for every startup as each company has different goals, marketing strategy, target audiences, customer journeys, marketing processes, data process flows.
As a bare minimum, each startup should have:
Additionally, you may also want to include social engagement, ad delivery, content, SEO and productivity software tools.
If I have to pick one single tool that almost everyone should use, it would be Google Tag Manager. In short, GTM is a user-friendly solution that helps managing tags, or the snippets of JavaScript that collect and send information to third-parties, on your website or mobile app.
Adding other services to your site, including but not limited to AdWords Conversion Tracking and Remarketing, Google Analytics, Facebook Conversion Tracking is absolutely simple.
You can use tags for all sorts of purposes, including scroll tracking, tracking form submissions, remarketing, or tracking how people arrive at your site. GTM can be also used to track specific events like file downloads, clicks on email addresses, clicks on certain links, or items being removed from a shopping cart.
Moreover, GTM makes it easier to implement some of the more complicated Google Analytics features, such as User ID tracking, Custom Dimensions, Cross-Domain, and Enhanced E-commerce.”
When your company is at an early stage, you probably don’t have a big sales pipeline to track. However, you still need to stay on top of the small number of active deals. A free CRM is a great way to add a simple tool to your stack that will scale alongside your company.
Yet Another Mail Merge (YAMM) is a Gmail add-on that enables users to send personalized bulk emails directly from Google Sheets. It streamlines the process of email campaigns by integrating seamlessly with Google Workspace, allowing for efficient communication with multiple recipients.
Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers shares, “First, I’d like to say it’s very difficult for me to only choose 1 tool to recommend to startups. Indeed, when we work with startups on a daily basis, we use so many tools. There are great tools for automation, email marketing, social media, etc…
But, if I had to choose 1 free tool to recommend, I tell startups to try YAMM. This is a Chrome extension that connects to your Gmail account. Thanks to it, you’ll be able to manage your inbox and also send bulk messages with a delivery rate that is close to 100% (Because your emails will be sent from your Gmail account).
This is not all. YAMM will allow you to personalize your emails with ease and will track if your emails are being opened. With YAMM, you can create campaigns directly from your Gmail. What’s incredible is that YAMM is free and even the paid version is (very) affordable ($2/month).”
HubSpot CRM is a comprehensive, user-friendly platform designed to streamline and enhance customer relationship management for businesses of all sizes. It offers a suite of tools that integrate marketing, sales, customer service, and content management functionalities, enabling teams to work cohesively and efficiently.
David Denning of Jumpanzee shares: “We absolutely could not operate our business without Hubspot! Hubspot has a lot of features, but the most important one for us is its Customer Relationship Management (CRM).
It helps us keep track of all of our customers/prospects/vendors/etc., all of our call/email/meeting history, assign tasks to our team (such as to follow up on a certain date), and tracks & log our emails by integrating with Gmail. There are other features we plan to use (still free) such as their deal tracker to keep track of what’s in your pipeline and some of their marketing tools.”
As soon as you start adding more software tools to your organization, you will see that team members spend more time on manual data entry. You set up the tools to save them time, and instead, they just redistribute that time into data entry!
A workflow automation tool can eliminate these tedious tasks using “if this, then that” logic. So, for example, if a new support ticket is logged in your support system, you can automatically update your CRM without asking your support team to update all records at the end of the day.
Zapier is a web-based automation platform that enables users to connect and automate tasks across over 7,000 applications without requiring coding skills. By creating “Zaps,” users can set up workflows where an event in one app triggers an action in another, streamlining processes and enhancing productivity.
Stuart Dixon of Provance shares: “When starting out your new company, time resources are often one of the most challenging aspects. Enter Zapier! Zapier is an online automation tool that connects your favorite apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and over 1000 more! By connecting your apps, you can automate literally 1000s of tasks that before were laborious and time-consuming. Now tasks that you’d had to remember to do are now being done automatically which is a huge benefit to any start-up company in any industry.”
For a startup, focusing on the financial balance is critical. If your want your startup to grow, you have to know and record where the money is coming from, where is it going, how will the business perform in the coming months, and more. And that can’t be done with pen and paper.
Embroker is a digital insurance platform that simplifies the process of obtaining and managing business insurance. By leveraging advanced technology, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, Embroker offers tailored insurance solutions for various industries, with a particular focus on startups and tech companies.
Key Features and Offerings:
Navigating the world of startup software tools can feel overwhelming, but the right selection can make all the difference in your journey toward success. You don’t need every tool under the sun—in fact, trying to use too many can distract and overwhelm your team.
Instead, focus on tools that align with your current goals and growth stage. Start by identifying what will help you acquire your first 10 customers, then expand to the tools needed to serve 100, and eventually scale to 1,000.
The tools highlighted in this guide—from communication and marketing platforms to automation and analytics solutions—are all designed to simplify your workflows, enhance collaboration, and drive results. By learning from the experiences of other startup leaders and strategically implementing these solutions, you’ll be better equipped to optimize your operations and focus on what truly matters: growing your business and delighting your customers.
Remember, every great startup begins with smart decisions—starting with the tools you choose today.
Pete Caputa, CEO at Databox, shared his thoughts on how to organize your strategy according to those limitations on the Ground Up podcast (the official Databox podcast). You can learn more about setting the right strategy for each stage of your business here.
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Tamara Omerovic is a marketing consultant with 8 years of experience in content marketing and SEO. She specializes in leading high-performing teams and developing effective marketing processes for B2B SaaS brands.
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