It can often be difficult to find the right tools for your business, either due to budget or uncertainty as to what is required.
This can often cause you to miss out on handy tools that can minimise staff workload pressure. Fortunately, you don’t have to go over budget and, in some cases, you don’t have to spend at all to get the right tools.
Free tools may not suit everyone as some may limit the sort of features you’re after, but there are some full-featured tools available at no extra cost. If you’re after anything from website builders to account management, you should be able to find a free tool that offers close to what you’re after.
It’s also a good place to start to familiarise yourself with things in the early stages of your business.
We’ve handpicked some of the best free tools to choose from.
You can also check out some of the best free remote working tools.
Wix
Wix is a free website builder that can be used to create a website from scratch. It is particularly useful if you don’t have any website design experience, as it offers a full-featured and mobile-friendly website.
It follows a very simple interface of just creating an account and then you can immediately begin creating your own website.
With the inclusion of a user-friendly drag-and-drop editor, Wix will guide you towards building the website you want with 500 templates to get started.
Alongside the free version, it also has a package starting from £3 a month to connect your own domain name.
Sighted
Sighted is a free invoicing software tool that includes expense tracking suitable for small businesses and freelancers.
It offers user-friendly features including the ability to integrate card and PayPal payments, PDF invoices and cash receipts that can be sent to customers easily.
Other features include fast expense recording, business finance reports and integrated time tracking to create bills for tracked hours. This can be useful for creating payslips for employees and also when managing the payments to third-party vendors.
Sighted is available on desktop, iOS and Android devices.
ProtonVPN
ProtonVPN is a free VPN service that isn’t supported by ads and also doesn’t impose speed restrictions.
It also offers unlimited data and a zero-logs policy with data protection under Swiss laws. Alongside this are its strong encryption, forward secrecy and strong protocols features which are paramount to defending your network against network-based attacks.
Although it limits users to three servers (US, Netherlands and Japan), the free ProtonMail email account is a bonus.
However, ProtonVPN is still one of the least restrictive free VPN services available on the market.
Here are some more alternatives of the best free VPNs.
Paymo
Task and project management tool, Paymo, offers a free package that includes to-do lists, Kanban boards and time tracking features to manage all projects.
Along with its task and project management, Paymo also provides time tracking, timesheet reporting and invoicing features that come handy for account management requirements.
Although it is limited to only one user at a time, it could be used by one dedicated person in the company who will then have the ability to assign tasks to other employees.
If you do need to have staff working on a shared project, however, then you may need to consider the paid option starting at $8.95/ £6.86 per user, a month.
Avira Free Antivirus
Avira Antivirus provides free access to its malware-detection engine.
You also get access to a full-featured interface, ransomware and phishing protection, a password manager, a driver updater and a file shredder, which are normally found only in the paid option of antivirus software.
The free version also provides real-time protection and repair, online privacy and optimisation features.
It is currently available on Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a free email marketing software that includes email automation, campaign reports and more.
With its user-friendly interface, it includes a drag-and-drop editor to create campaigns and landing pages. The software also provides a website builder and other features needed to increase your subscribers.
The free version includes the ability to create a landing page either hosted by MailerLite or on your own domain.
The free plan allows up to 1000 subscribers and 1200 emails per month.
Infinity Free
Infinity provides a full-featured web hosting service that does not include ads on the website.
It provides unlimited bandwidth and disk space, along with a trusted cPanel hosting control that enables users to set up email addresses and access the file manager.
Another unique feature is the ability to host your own domain name and also pick a free subdomain name from over 25 domain extensions.
See some more alternatives for the best free web hosting service.
LastPass
LastPass is a free cloud-based password manager that enables you to save your passwords securely when logging into online accounts.
It also includes the option to store personal information, as well as the ability to securely share passwords with colleagues or family/ friends in case they need to access accounts.
LastPass also includes access across all devices, without a limit and multi-factor authentication for free.
Audacity
Audacity is a free audio editing service that can also be used to record audio files.
The open-source software is available for Windows, Mac, OS X, GNU and Linux operating systems, with the ability to output the exact audio required for MP3 mode.
Additional features include export and import to combine files, spectrogram view mode for analysis and real-time sound preview.
This is also a great software for post-processing of all types of audio such as podcasts.
Check out some other free software downloads for your laptop.
Author: Hannah Williams, Small Business Editor
Hannah is Small Business Editor. She writes news, tutorials and buying advice tailored to very small companies, covering software from Excel to Sage and hardware including laptops.