14 Best Team Communication Tools for Small Business (2024)

Are you looking for the best team communication tools for your small business?

As businesses move to remote work, they need tools to communicate with team members. Choosing the right tools can boost productivity, enhance morale, build community, and enhance efficiency among your team.

In this article, we have hand-picked some of the best team communication tools for small businesses.

These recommendations are based on our hands-on experience because we have been a remote company since we started in 2009, and now we have over 320+ team members across 45 different countries. As a remote company, our teams use several of these tools to collaborate.

How to Choose the Best Team Communication Tool for Your Business

There is a growing need for better team communication tools as more and more businesses adopt remote and hybrid work cultures.

For a small business website, these tools improve employee communication and team collaboration, which enables them to work more efficiently.

However, there are so many different communication and collaboration tools available that it becomes hard to decide which one to choose without spending too much money.

First, you need to decide what kind of tools your team needs to work better.

For instance, if your sales team needs to make calls and follow up on leads, then you need a virtual business phone system like Nextiva or RingCentral.

Similarly, if you need to make sure that teams can collaborate on different projects, track progress, and get work done, then Slack + Asana may be the right tools for your business.

You can save money by not opting for separate tools for the same tasks.

For instance, if you are using Google Workspace, then Google Meet is the perfect alternative to Zoom. Similarly, Office 365 with Microsoft Teams will save money on Slack + Zoom.

Tip: See our comparison of Google Workspace vs. Office 365 to see how they stack up against each other.

Quick Picks: Best Team Communication Tools

Before we jump into the reviews, here’s a summary of the top tools we’ll cover in this article:

Now, let’s take a closer look at the best team communication tools.

1. Nextiva

Nextiva is the best omnichannel communication toolkit for businesses. It combines multiple communication channels like phone, chat, audio/video meetings, contact management, and more in one suite.

Employees can collaborate via chat, SMS, and video calls. Their business phone service offers toll-free numbers, and teams can share the same phone numbers to easily manage contacts and leads.

It also comes with video collaboration features like screen sharing and built-in live streaming capabilities for hosting workshops and webinars. Users can also share files during video meetings in 1-click.

Nextiva offers easy-to-use automated reminders for teams and customers around forgotten tasks, follow-ups, or check-ins to increase workplace productivity.

Plus, it integrates with popular calendars, email, Google Workspace, Microsoft Teams, and many more. In addition, Nextiva has mobile apps for Android and iOS to help you improve teamwork from anywhere.

We use Nextiva in our own business because it helps us get a virtual business phone number that can be shared with our team members so we can help our customers. The auto-attendant feature helps guide the call to the right person.

Pricing: Nextiva starts at $18.95 per user per month. For more details, see our complete Nextiva review.

2. Slack

Slack is the most popular small business team communication tool on the market right now.

It is used by many Fortune 500 companies like IBM, T-Mobile, NASA, Target, and more.

Slack offers a digital HQ for businesses and teams. You can organize your virtual workspace in channels. These are chatrooms where your teams can collaborate and post updates. Team members can also do 1:1 chats.

Slack also comes with audio calls, video updates, and integration with almost all top productivity tools, CRM software, virtual phone services, and more.

We use Slack in our management company, Awesome Motive, because it allows for asynchronous communication across teams. Slack has notification features that respect time zones, considering we have team members in 45 different countries.

Pricing: Paid plans start from $7.25 per user per month. There’s also a free version that you can get started with.

3. Google Workspace

Google Workspace is Google’s business productivity suite of applications. It includes Google Drive, Gmail, Calendar, Google Meet, Chat, Forms, Sites, and more.

You can use your own domain name for your Google Workspace account and create a professional business email address for yourself, your teams, and your employees.

Your team space will be hosted on Google’s cloud infrastructure, making it fast, reliable, and an extremely secure internal communication tool.

We have been using Google Workspace for over a decade for our business email address. It gives you the familiar Gmail and Google calendar interface, which your team will love. We use the Shared Drive feature for cloud storage, which is really good for access control on documents & files.

This year, the quality of Google Meet calls has improved drastically, so we have canceled our Zoom subscription and are using Google Meet for our group meetings.

See our detailed Google Workspace review to learn more about how you can use it to improve team communication.

Pricing: Starting at $6 per user per month.

4. HubSpot

HubSpot is a business communication suite that offers a sales platform, marketing tools, CRM software, and more.

It allows your teams to easily manage leads and customers using a robust dashboard. This can improve communications between team members and customers to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks.

Unlike other communication tools on the list, HubSpot doesn’t offer team chat, audio, or video calls. However, as sales software, it allows sales and marketing teams to communicate and work together more efficiently.

We use HubSpot to organize our partnership contacts, and it acts as a single source for our various teams.

Pricing: Limited free account, paid plans for marketing, sales, and customer service software with different pricing for each.

5. Asana

Asana is the best project management software for remote teams on the market.

For remote teams, keeping up with their projects and goals is where most communication takes place. Asana makes it super easy for teams of all shapes, sizes, and industries to collaborate and communicate.

Asana doesn’t have chat, SMS, or video conferencing features. All team communication takes place in comments, tasks, projects, and forms. Each task can have its own thread, and nothing slips through the cracks.

You can organize work among teams and projects, set long-term goals, add tasks, and then view them in lists, timelines, Kanban boards, or card views.

It comes with brilliant tools like templates, rules, forms, and approvals to automate the workflow.

Plus, it integrates beautifully with other popular productivity tools your organization may already be using.

In our business, Asana is an absolute must-have. We have tried many other task and project management solutions like Basecamp, Trello, etc., and nothing comes close to Asana. It has provided us with a great way to streamline our internal workflows while giving greater visibility on the progress of each project.

Pricing: Free and paid plans start at $10.99 per user per month.

6. RingCentral

RingCentral is one of the top business team communication toolkits available that offers virtual phone numbers, phone calls, and SMS for teams.

Their business communication suite includes phone, SMS, online fax, video for virtual meetings, messaging for internal team communications, and more.

For sales and marketing teams, they offer rich insights, quality-of-service reports, comprehensive alerts, and customizable dashboards.

Integrations are also available for Google Workspace, Office 365, popular CRM software, and marketing platforms.

If you’re tired of having all your discussions, emails, and resources scattered across multiple platforms, RingCentral can streamline your small business team communication.

Pricing: Pricing starts at $20 per user per month, and you get unlimited domestic calling, SMS, and MMS. If you need call recording, call analytics, file sharing, and other messaging features, you’ll want their Ultra plan. This plan costs $35 per user per month.

7. Microsoft Teams

Microsoft Teams is the Slack alternative created by Microsoft. It supports multiple teams, channels, one-on-one chats, private channels, audio/video calls, and video conferencing features.

It works well with Office 365, and you can get it with Office 365 subscription as well. Team members can open, edit, and view files within teams and projects.

Microsoft Teams have superior video conferencing features baked in. Each team member can view that a video conference is happening with an icon on the top and can join in if they are invited.

Teams also have a shift management feature that allows managers to create shifts, manage time-offs, assign members to shifts, and more.

Pricing: Free and paid plans start at $4 per user per month or $6 per user per month with Office 365. It includes Microsoft Teams, Outlook, PowerPoint, OneDrive, and more.

8. Zoom

Zoom is one of the most popular video conferencing software on the market. It allows you to run video meetings with a chat feature.

It is widely used in business, education, government, and finance sectors. Zoom also offers business phone services, mail, and calendars to connect your teams under one platform.

We were big users of Zoom, but as the quality of Google Meet has improved, we have switched away from Zoom to reduce costs in our business.

The cost of Zoom really adds up once you go above 10 users in your organization and then again when your organization grows to 100+ users.

What Zoom is really good for is large 100+ people meetings, especially if you want to do random breakout rooms. It’s also really good for customer webinars because Zoom calls are very reliable, and the quality is top-notch.

Pricing: It comes with a limited free plan. The paid plans start at $159.90 per user per year, but the per-user pricing increases after 10 users.

9. Chanty

Chanty is another excellent employee communication platform with video conferencing, chat, and project management features.

You can create chatrooms or channels for your teams and view all things happening across your organization under the teambook.

For task management, you can create tasks on the fly, view them in lists or Kanban view, assign them to team members, and more.

Pricing: Chanty has a limited free forever plan, and paid plans start at $3 per user per month.

10. Ryver

Ryver is another business communication platform that combines various functionalities into one app.

It comes with messaging, task management, and audio/video calls under one roof. It comes with SSO Single Sign-on, which allows team members to sign in with the single account used by your organization.

Integrations are also available for many popular productivity and CRM software.

Pricing: Starting at $69 per month for up to 12 users.

11. Flock

Flock is another good alternative to Slack. It offers voice/video conferencing, chat, to-dos, file-sharing, and more.

Teams can be organized into groups with their own to-dos, video conferences, and in-line file sharing.

It has integrations available for all top productivity suites so you can collaborate in real-time in channels.

Pricing: It comes with a limited free plan, and paid plans start at $4.50 per user per month.

12. Zoho Cliq

Zoho Cliq is the Slack interactive created by the folks behind the Zoho software suite. The company offers Zoho CRM, Notes, Calendar, Email, and several other tools for businesses.

Zoho Cliq offers team chat for real-time collaboration. It includes chats, group chats, project management, video chat, voice calls, and more.

It integrates well with other Zoho applications as well as many other third-party software.

Pricing: Limited free plan, paid plans start from $1.80 per user per month.

13. Dialpad

Dialpad offers a collaboration platform for teams and customer support. It includes VoIP service for calls, messaging, group chat, and video conferencing.

It offers an omni-channel customer engagement platform as well, which comes in handy for sales teams to follow up with leads.

It supports Google Workspace and Office 365 integrations. If you operate in multiple countries, then Dialpad offers local numbers for up to 70 countries.

Pricing: Starting from $15 per user per month.

14. GoTo Meeting

GoTo Meeting is a popular webinar software and video conferencing platform. It has a user-friendly interface that makes it super easy to conduct video meetings with teams, clients, and customers.

Their GoTo Connect suite provides phone, text, and meetings for real-time communication. It allows teams to follow up with leads, offer customer support, and stay in touch with chat and text.

The company offers several addon solutions for businesses, particularly those providing remote IT support to customers.

Pricing: GoTo Meeting offers a free trial for some products. For paid plans, you’ll have to contact sales.

Note: We also looked into other team communication software like Zendesk, Salesforce, Jira, Dropbox, and so on. But, we decided it wasn’t best to include them because we don’t want to cause choice paralysis.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Unlike most other businesses in the world, we have been remote since we started in 2009. This means we have 15+ years of experience running a distributed team and managing team communication. Over this period, we have helped thousands of users choose the best team communication tools.

Below are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.

What communication tools are most effective in working closely with the team?

Whether you’re working closely with a remote team or an in-house team, here are the best team communication tools.

1. Google Workspace – Email is essential for working closely with a team. Google gives you Gmail, Calendar, and Google Drive for file sharing.
2. Nextiva – Essential for phone calls, SMS, and video conferencing tools.
3. Slack – Best for group chat. However, for small teams, you can get away with using a simple messaging app like WhatsApp.
4. Asana – Top project management tool.

What is the most effective communication method for remote teams?

For remote teams, the most effective communication method is a combination of written communication along with verbal face-to-face communication over video calls.

For remote team check-ins, the most effective method is virtual check-in software like Standuply, which integrates seamlessly with Slack and it’s completely asynchronous.

What is the best team communication tool for online collaboration?

For online collaboration, the best team communication tools are Google Workspace and Zoom. With Google Suite, you get Google Docs, Spreadsheets, and Slides, all of which allow for collaborative work, and their built-in comment feature is really good.

You can also use Zoom Whiteboard, which is an excellent virtual communication tool for collaboration and brainstorming.

What is the best team communication tool for asynchronous communication?

The best asynchronous communication tools are:

1. Slack – Great for instant messages and group messages. It gives users full control over their time zones and notification preferences. You can also schedule direct messages to be sent at certain times in different team members ‘ time zones.
2. Email – Great for asynchronous communication.
3. Loom – Allows you to easily record videos and screencasts that can be watched by your team members.
4. Droplr – Allows you to create screenshots or quick screen recordings to communicate with team members.

Which is the best team communication tool for small businesses?

In our opinion, the best team communication tools for small businesses are Nextiva, Google Workspace, Asana, and Slack.

We hope this article helped you find the best team communication tools for your business. You may also want to see our guide on must have tools to manage and grow your business and follow our guide on how to grow a small business on a shoestring budget.

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