18 Best Software for Small Businesses in 2022

The past year saw businesses of all sizes struggle due to the pandemic, but they started adapting and overcoming the unique challenges they found themselves navigating. In turn, small businesses are bouncing back in a big way, and a big part of this is due to incorporating the correct small business software. Are you 100% sure that you’re completely satisfied with your own software? Could it improve or streamline your daily functions more?

Maybe you’re in the mindset of “it’s time for something new”, so you’re looking for the best software for small businesses. After all, automation and software technology allowed so many small businesses to survive and adapt their business management practices to meet the new circumstances. Mobile payments, online ordering, and contactless transactions are all the new normal, and they have projections to increase.

In fact, by 2021, mobile payment transaction amounts are slated to reach $161.41 billion. In order to keep up, it’s essential that you look into small business software solutions to give yourself a leg up on your competition. But, where do you start? For any smaller business that is trying to grow and thrive, it’s time to look at different small business software and see which one suits your needs the best without breaking the bank.

Since there are dozens of small business software solutions available, we’ve rounded up the best options available in the current market. We picked each one because they have a proven track record of meeting the biggest needs small businesses have. These needs include affordability, intuitiveness, and flexibility, and they have excellent support options when you need them. This is essential because many small businesses don’t have an IT team to call when things go wrong. So, without further ado, let’s dive in. However, many solutions must be adjusted to your unique operations; thus, talk with consultants to better understand you need and then seek options to outsource application development.

1. Best Invoicing Software: Billdu

First up is Billdu, a comprehensive software suite that works wonderfully for small and large businesses alike. This is an invoicing and expense tracking software platform that allows you to streamline your accounting and any payment transactions.

You can create invoices and estimates with a push of a button and personalize them with your business information and logo, track your expenses, and offer online payment options to speed up how quickly your customers pay. You can also scan all of your bills and receipts in real-time using the scanner that is inbuilt into the mobile apps.
As a bonus, you don’t have to worry about expensive and complicated accounting software with Billdu. Instead, this small business software allows you to invite your accountant right onto the platform to access all of the relevant information. They can get all of the financial reports they need to balance your books, do your taxes, and make sure you stay on track with one click.
Billdu is also available as an app for iPhone and Android and as an online web app with a 30-day free trial. So, you can take it anywhere and access your important financial information regarding your business right from your phone while you’re on the go.

2. Best Time Tracking Software: Toggl

Next up is Toggl. This small business software solution is a great choice if you want to focus on time tracking. It works well for freelancers, very small businesses, and entrepreneurs who need to use a simple time tracker. This software is all about ease of use because your employees can track time instantly across hundreds of devices, third-party apps, and computers.

All you have to do is click Start and the timer will go. It’s free with a few paid tiers that start at $8.00 a month. As you go up in tiers, you’ll get more features. For example, Toggl Track offers an auto tracker and calendar integration. Toggl Hire allows you to set up a Smart Skills test to screen potential applicants for open positions to make the hiring process smoother.

There are also add-ons you want to consider like invoicing software to help your small business streamline your accounting to ensure you get all of your payments on time. There is currently a 30-day free trial that allows you to test out all of the software’s features, and you get a free self-service help center on the website if you run into problems.

3. Best Email Automation Software: Mailchimp

It’s hard for a business to go wrong with this small business software solution because it’s affordable and flexible, and it allows you to add new capabilities and features as you notice your business needs changing. If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, you can use Mailchimp for free to help grow your business’s reach and following. You can send up to an impressive 12,000 emails every month, get chat and email support for the first 30 days, and set up multi-user accounts.

This feature is huge for smaller companies and businesses that may have trouble budgeting for software like this and want to keep their costs as low as possible while growing their business. However, you should note that even the higher plans for Mailchimp only run at $9.99 and $14.99 per month. The rate will vary depending on your subscriber count.

However, you get an excellent range of features to help grow your business, including A/B testing, behavioral targeting, advanced segmentation, custom templates, and more that allow you to effortlessly build relationships and target specific markets in set locations.

If you have questions, all subscription levels offer email support and self-service support, but you can get the phone and chat support if you opt into higher subscription levels.

4. Best Accounting Software: Xero

Any business owner will tell you that accounting isn’t their favorite thing to do, but it’s essential that you keep good records. Having the best software for small businesses on hand can help keep you on track. For accounting, Xero does a fantastic job. This is a cloud-based accounting solution that targets smaller businesses.

You’ll get the tools to help you monitor your financial performance and cash flow using real-time monitoring, and it has a host of features for accountants to help ensure your business has healthy balance sheets. You can tailor your financial reports to track specific KPIs, accept online payments from credit cards, PayPal, and Stripe, and send invoices.

It’s possible to connect Xero right to your bank to make deposits, claim expenses, track projects, and set up payroll to ensure all of your employees get paid on time.

Additionally, you can send automatic payment reminders to your clients, and you get free, unlimited tech support 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You can try it for free for 30 days with no limit on how many users you allow in.

5. Best eCommerce Software: Shopify

Although there are dozens of eCommerce platforms on the market, Shopify is right at the top of the list because it’s an all-in-one hosted solution that allows your company to streamline getting an online store up, ready, and running. It allows you to easily create pages using a built-in online editor that makes the whole store look clean and professional. As a bonus, it also makes it easy for customers to browse your products, compare them, and buy them.

It’s possible for your business to sell your products around the world using local language support, and you get a host of marketing tools to help expand your reach. You can create unique URLs, meta titles, and descriptions for each product, and boost promotional sales across social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. There are several plugins available that you can use to simplify your day-to-day tasks, too, like inventory management.

Shopify gives you a 30-day trial that allows you to set up your shop and see if it’s user-friendly and flexible enough for your needs. And you get 24/7 tech support through live chats or over the phone whenever you need it. As a bonus, the free trial allows you to try all of the features Shopify has available.

6. Best Project Management Software: Trello

Managing projects when you’re a small business can be challenging, especially when you have more than one project running at a time. This is where Trello excels. It’s a task management and collaboration tool that can support all kinds of projects. You can use it for content development, marketing campaigns, sales tracking, customer support, HR tracking, and data entry. You should note that while it does work for most projects, it won’t work for invoicing and budgeting. However, you can attach these kinds of documents.

For anyone who has a smaller business, Trello also works hard for you. It’s an easy-to-use and very convenient tool that’ll help you track your projects through features like due dates, users, card cover photos, labels, task commenting, and priorities. You can attach images, files, or documents to every project management work queue. In turn, this will help your projects stay organized and on track from start to finish to ensure you hit your deadlines.

Customer support is available to all users from 9:00 to 5:00 Eastern Time, Monday through Friday. Holidays are the exception. The Trello Business Class is also available as a 30-day free trial that includes advanced features with unlimited functionality.

7. Best Team Collaboration Software: Slack

Slack is great for collaborating with your employees or teammates because you can use it to communicate with them as a unified communication service, on any desktop or mobile device. It works well for small businesses that might not have a single office or that have employees working remotely. You’ll get a huge suite of features like video and audio calling capabilities.

You can also easily integrate Slack with other business tools like Google Drive and Mailchimp to give you greater efficiency when you use these platforms to push your business forward. It’s possible to use Slack to share or upload files like JPEGs, Word docs, PDF files, MOVs, and files directly from Google Drive. It’s easy to keep track of files and discussions, and you can create unique rooms for different projects or teams. There’s also a private direct messaging feature available where you can talk to your teammates one-on-one.

You’ll get tiered pricing plans that allow you to access back beyond the first 10,000 messages you send. There is a help center on Slack that includes help request forms and self-service resources.

You can start with a free plan to try out Slack’s features and move to a paid Standard or Plus plan as your needs change and grow along with your business.

8. Best Online Payment Software Solution: PayPal

Along with Stripe, PayPal is the biggest online payment solution available for individuals and businesses of all sizes. Both platforms have a huge range of items in common, including a payment processing fee of $0.30 and 2.9% of the transaction amount. Stripe does have more customization offers for bigger companies, but PayPal is easier to use and set up. It allows customers and businesses around the world to use credit cards or bank accounts to accept and send payments. This flexibility has made PayPal one of the most widely used platforms for eCommerce.

You can easily add the PayPal button to your payment page, and this lets your customers use PayPal credits, PayPal, or Venmo to make their purchases in two easy clicks. They can also hook their bank account or debit cards directly to PayPal to pay that way.

Currently, there is no free trial period with PayPal. However, you also won’t pay termination or startup fees on most plans either. There are several tech support resources available for you, including a resolution center, community forum, email support, and text support.

9. Best Online Estimate Software – Moon Invoice

Businesses and freelancers with more than 150+ monthly clientele generally require online estimate software for creating winning business estimates and quotes. Moon Invoice is a right-click for generating the best business proposals. In addition, the software has add-on features that convert estimates to invoices with a single click. And that saves both time and resources.

Moon Invoice users get ready-made templates for creating and sending quick construction and contractor estimates to their clients. In addition, the software has programmed a single share button for emailing estimates to the clients on the go! Apart from estimate generation, the online invoicing software also helps businesses with full-cycle invoicing modules, receipt creation, expense tracking, time-tracking, purchase order generation, and business reports.

10. Best Payroll Software: Gusto

It’s common for a lot of smaller companies to use seasonal or contract and full-time employees. Because of this, it’s common to need a payroll solution that can manage 1099 and W-2 workers. Gusto works well in these situations because this small business software can handle payroll tax and payroll processing responsibilities for any type of worker.

It makes it easy to onboard new employees and put them into the correct category depending on which type of worker they signed on to be. More importantly, Gusto considers both types of workers as employees, so your payroll running costs will be the same for someone you consider a contractor or freelancer versus a traditional full or part-time employee. It charges monthly fees, unlike the per-payroll cost structure that many other payroll companies use. So, you can run your payroll as much as you’d like without paying more for it. They also offer extra HR services if you need more support in your business.

When you choose Gusto, you’ll get an online help center that works for both companies and employees. There is also a 30-day trial that you can opt into with no additional commitment. This will give you enough time to decide if this small business software solution will work for you or not.

11. Best Document Management Solution: Google Workspace (formally G Suite)

Google offers a free solution for businesses to collaborate, be productive, and put cloud computing at their fingertips with G Suite. It’s great for freelancers or small businesses because it offers everything you need to manage your documents in a single centralized platform. There is a suite of individual apps that allows you to share and create spreadsheets using Google Sheets, documents using Google Docs, and presentations using Google Slides. Your team members can hold video meetings, secure data, access their email, and customize their email addresses to make them reflect your business and look more professional.

It’s some of the best software for small businesses due to these features, and it gets even better as it offers 15GB of free cloud storage space. This cloud storage space allows all of your team to upload large files and documents to share with anyone inside or outside of the company. It also allows document owners to assign permissions, access each file, and either full access, edit, or “view only” the documents.

You’ll get a 24/7 technical support team with this small business software that you can reach through email, phone, or chat. There are also multiple editions with Basic, Business, or Enterprise tier levels. You can get editions for nonprofits and schools, and you get a 30-day free trial for all of them.

12. Best Website Creation Software: Wix

Wix allows you to grow your business by designing and launching a high-quality website. No matter if you’re trying to promote your business, start a blog, open a store, or showcase your products and services, this is the small business software you should take a look at. 

If you only need a small website, Wix allows you to use the drag-and-drop site builder to create it. You can easily choose from hundreds of free templates as your background too. Wix will give you its own web hosting and domain names, and you can choose from free and paid options. There is an App Market that you can use to add extra features and functionality to the website, like eCommerce and photo galleries to showcase your products or services. As a bonus, your website is mobile-ready once you launch it, and the editor is very intuitive and user-friendly. The image editor allows you to customize and tailor your images, and you can choose from over 40 galleries and stock images.

Wix has four pricing tiers starting at Combo, and going through Unlimited, Pro, and VIP, with prices that range from $14.00 a month to $39.00 a month. Each plan has customer support and care, but the VIP packages give you priority care.

13. Best Social Media Content Management Software: Buffer

This is an internet-based app that allows you to seamlessly manage your business’s social media content. The primary function of this business software solution is to share content across today’s most popular social media platforms. You can spread your content to reach a broader audience using a simple approach. Additionally, you can seamlessly connect to all of your business’s social media accounts while making it very easy to create posts and schedule their launch times.

Instead of logging into LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Google+, this software will do it all at once for you with a single click. It also makes it quick and easy for you to upload posts all at once, and there is a browser extension available that allows the app to connect to Chrome, WordPress, and RSS readers. You can manage your profile, get insights and analytics, and compare stats, and it offers team collaboration. There is customized scheduling, Buffer support, and multimedia format sharing all at your fingertips too.

There are four pricing tiers for publishing that range from free to $99.00 a month, and there are two pricing tiers for analytics ranging from $35.00 to $50.00 a month. You can save 20% by billing annually, and each plan comes with a 30-day free trial.

14. Best Helpdesk Software: Freshdesk

This is a cloud-hosted helpdesk that can work well for your small business. Since it’s unlikely that you can afford to have staff on hand 24 hours a day, Freshdesk can come in handy to help you deliver excellent customer support. It can broaden your company’s reach by offering multi-channel support, using gamification to increase productivity levels, and streamlining your operations using automation tools. Moreover, you can connect Freshdesk with numerous integrations, such as Freshdesk time tracking from TimeCamp, Jira, Dropbox, and many more. It also helps reinforce your customer service support by offering self-service portals.

There is a phone system built into Freshdesk that allows your business to take calls from clients, and it currently covers over 30 different countries. So, you can have call center operations for your business without needing to have a full-fledged business phone system to save you money. It has a feedback mechanism, real-time analytics, customized reports, customer and help desk satisfaction reports, identity and access management, custom ticketing, apps, and URLs, and much more.

For the helpdesk, you’ll get five pricing tiers that start with free and go up to $99.00 per month. There is also an Omnichannel option with two pricing tiers, and you have customer support on hand when you need it.

15. Best Chatbot Builder: Botsurfer

Many small businesses have realized the power of conversational marketing. Especially on platforms such as Facebook Messenger, you need to respond fast. Chatbots have proven themselves to be great helpers in engaging with conversations about your company and products.

There are some solid no-code chatbot builders available on the market but Botsurfer is dotting the i’s and crosses the t’s. It’s super easy to use and produces powerful results. That’s why we’ve decided to feature it as a bonus in this list of the best software for small businesses.

16. Best Customer Relationship Management Software: Salesmate

Salesmate is an ideal CRM and customer journey platform that enables you to automate your sales, marketing, and customer support processes.

You can also use it as a Google CRM platform that seamlessly integrates with your favorite G Suite apps, like Gmail, in seconds and improves your team’s productivity.

Salesmate’s marketing automation feature is highly advanced and allows you to automate various processes such as lead scoring, sending email blasts, conducting NPS surveys, A/B testing, and much more!

17. Best All-In-One Sales Automation Software: Snov

Every small business needs a tool that would work as a single platform for growing sales. Snov.io is such a software. It combines the power of a CRM (absolutely free, by the way) with the cutting-edge functionality for lead generation and cold outreach.

With Snov.io, you can find email address of potential customers all through the web including such giant socials as LinkedIn, verify emails to be sure your contact list is valid, create email drip sequences and program follow-ups triggered by the reaction of your potential customers to the previous email message. On top of that, Snov.io allows you to track the performance of your email campaigns and identify any bottlenecks for further improvement of your sales outreach strategy.

If you only start your way in email marketing, Snov.io has got an email warm-up tool to help you gain the reputation of a credible sender and grow your email deliverability. In case you have any issues with the inbox placement, the tool will also come in handy.

A simple yet effective CRM, which goes as a free addition to every Snov.io plan, enables you to create sales pipelines with up to 100 stages and organize your leads throughout every stage so that you clearly understand how close your prospects are to becoming your customers.

The abundance of Snov.io tools and features impresses by the mild pricing. The minimum plan that would embrace all required functionality will cost you only $39/a month. Meanwhile, Snov.io has got a forever freemium in case you want to try it all and identify your own scale. As soon as you, Snov.io will offer you the best-fit plan including the fully customizable option.

18. Best Backup & Replication Software: Nakivo

Nakivo Backup & Replication is the complete backup solution and disaster recovery of physical, virtual, cloud, SaaS and hybrid environments. All data protection activities can be scheduled and managed from a single dashboard in a web-based interface available from any location or device with internet access.

Nakivo can be used to recover individual files and application objects, as well as entire virtual machines, physical machines, hosts, and clusters.With the help of this software, you are able to plan backup operations and have them carried out automatically. Controlling and managing activities that are dependent on a schedule is made possible by the calendar dashboard feature.

Nakivo enables you to create as many versions of your backups as needed without any restrictions. You can create backup copies automatically once the backup workflow is finished and send copies to multiple locations, such as the cloud, tape, hard drive, etc. Multiple backup copies across various storage options increase your chances for a successful recovery.

Both subscription and perpetual licensing options are provided for purchasing VMware, physical, and cloud-based data backup, as well as Hyper-V backup solution. The Nakivo solution is suitable for SMBs and enterprises due to its flexible licensing and five different editions. The subscription price for all IT infrastructures begins at $29 per workload per year. Perpetual backup for physical machines; prices start at $19 per workstation and $58 per server. Perpetual licensing for Hyper-V, Nutanix and VMWare – starts at $229 per CPU socket.

Honorable mentions (Bonus tools)

If you are looking for some extra tools or alternatives to the tools we showed you, here is the bonus list. We picked the best paid and free tools that will help you run and scale your small business smoothly.

Time tracking: Clockify, My Hours, Harvest, DeskTime
Scheduling online meetings with clients: Calendly, Appointly
Email marketing software: MailerLite, Sendinblue, ConvertKit
Project management software: ClickUp, Monday.com
Payment processors software: Stripe
Grammar corrector: Grammarly
Graphic editor: Canva

Start Your Free Billdu Trial Today

If you’re ready to take your small business to the next level with the best software for small businesses, try Billdu. You can quickly sign up for a free 30-day trial to access all of the platform’s exclusive features and see how it fits your needs. Use it to keep your business on track.