Best Productivity Apps 2019: As Chosen by Marketers
With so many productivity apps and tools on the market, it can almost feel unproductive finding the best ones for your business. Every day, the team at Rebrandly relies on a lot of tools and apps to optimize our jobs and our product. We use tools to manage our community, streamline our operations, manage passwords and security, prioritize tasks, and to communicate with customers.
Since we’re experimenting with new productivity tools all the time, we wanted to share our experiences with fellow marketers 🤓 On top of that, we reached out to our audience of 300,000 marketers, our blog readers, and our 20,000 Twitter followers to consult us about what their favorite productivity apps and tools are.
Check out our favorite productivity apps, and keep reading to see some helpful recommendations from our community. If you think that your favorite productivity app deserves a place on the list, let us know in the comments below, and we’ll test it out too!
We’ve also listed the apps featured below in case you want to jump directly to any of them:
- 1Password
- Rebrandly
- CloudApp
- DocuSign
- DropBox
- Google Drive
- Loom
- Skype
- Slack
- Spectacle
- Canva
- Streak
- Asana
- Teamwork
- Todolist
- StoryChief
- Trello
- Zapier
- Airtable
- HubSpot
- Outlook
- Viima
- Momentum
- Headspace
- ProofHub
- aText
- Evernote
- TroopMessenger
- Venngage
- Chanty
The Rebrandly Team’s Favorite Productivity Apps
1Password
This tool eliminates the haunting question from your life….”what’s my password for this?” All you need to do is remember one master password to unlock the tool, and there you’ll find every password and login page for all of your apps. This tool also autogenerates secure passwords for your accounts, so you can finally stop using your childhood dog’s name as you “protected” password 😉
Rebrandly
Well, do you think I’m not going to talk about Rebrandly in this article?! As they say, be your own best advocate 😉
Rebrandly saves teams of all sizes time every day through its well-optimized link management system. Rebrandly is the leader in link branding, and it provides the easiest way to create, measure, and manage short URL’s with a custom domain name. Our URL shortener has many features that save time – the ability to create various workspaces (perfect for teams working remotely, or through agency’s,) the option to edit the destination of the URL even after the link is live (super helpful on social media,) and track links through our built-in UTM builder and advanced tracking analytics. We’re also integrated with tools like Slack, Facebook, Buffer, and Zendesk to name a few.
CloudApp
CloudApp is a screenshotting, video recording, and photo editing tool that creates a short link for every image/video/gif that you create. This is beneficial for many reasons. If we’re working with a partner, and we’d like to be featured in a section of an article, we quickly screenshot the image, and share the link, rather than saving and attaching a file. It’s also helpful if we spot a bug in our product, and want to show it to our engineering team in a quick and organized manner.
DocuSign
We rely on DocuSign to electronically sign contracts every day. It streamlines the sales cycle while creating efficiency from the integrations and human resources sides as well. It saves time (and trees) while ensuring we’re all on the same page.
DropBox
Our team uses DropBox to manage all our video, photo, and branding assets. It makes it easier to store, share, and collaborate with each other securely and efficiently.
Google Drive
Google Drive might be the Rebrandly team’s most used productivity app. We move fast, and Google Drive lets us create, share, and edit documents, spreadsheets, and presentations seamlessly.
From our community:
“Google Drive makes it extremely easy to share an collaborate with others” – Ash Matthews of Smart Boy Studios
Loom
Loom is beneficial to our team to train new members on how to use different parts of our product, as well as for diagnosing any issues within the product to notify our engineering team.
Skype
Our team is located all over the world, from Rome and San Diego. We rely on many tools to stay in touch and increase our cohesive productivity. We use Skype to have meetings with our teammates, message them about projects we’re working on together, and ask each other questions. Since we are so international, Skype is also helpful for making phone calls to partners and prospective clients abroad.
Slack
Slack is amazing for teams. We use slack and its many integrations to communicate internally, communicate with external vendors, and receive alerts about our product. We have channels dedicated to each team, with separate purposes, some for general product news, for having some chats among colleagues, and some act as direct feeds from our product and customers. This keeps us all on the same page, no matter what department or country we work in.
From our community:
“My team and I have used Slack for the past two years, and we’ve drastically reduced our time on email back and forth. We were using Google Chat tools which got extremely confusing as we switched the conversation between clients. Slack made processes and projects clear and improved productivity.” – Nora Leary of Launchway Media
“We use Slack to communicate quick, short messages or conversations with co-workers. We have set up different “groups” of people based on a specific project or team. As most of us work remotely, this tool helps us stay in communication with each other, and on client tasks and projects no matter where we are located.” – Sarah Snider of SEO.com
Spectacle
It seems simple, but Spectacle is a productivity app that allows you to divide your screen with simple keyboard shortcuts. This is helpful and saves time if you’re working without a second monitor, or toggling between multiple windows.
From our community:
“Branded links give my leads and clients confidence to click on links since my brand name is in the link, as opposed to sharing generic links. It also creates a cohesive look for all of my links and makes them easy to remember. The ability to change the link destination is immensely helpful and is what initially interested me about Rebrandly. I can update the link without worrying about updating my website, blog posts, and email templates.” – Tammy Howell of Tammy Howell Photography
Best Productivity Apps in 2019 From Our Community
Here are the top picks from the Rebrandly Community.
Note: If you see a 🌟 next to an app suggested by someone in our community, that means it’s also a productivity app that we use and love!
Canva
Design anything, publish anywhere
“Canva, because it’s amazingly simple and it makes me feel like a graphic designer.” – Iva Divic of StoryChief
Streak
” I love Streak as both project management and CRM tracking software for my small business in career consulting/resume writing. In fact, I love Streak so much that I convinced my husband to start using it for his local deck restoration business. Streak integrates with Gmail which is the primary point of contact for all of my prospects and clients. I’m able to easily create and organize tasks, track clients, even set automated emails for future delivery dates. It’s helped me get organized and the best part, the free version is very capable and the paid versions are super affordable” – Candace Barr of Strategic Resume Specialists
Asana
Make more time for the work that matters most
“I work with a lot of clients at the same time and have tried and tested many different project management tools over the years like Trello, BaseCamp, Monday, etc. and have so far found Asana to be the perfect balance of simplicity and flexibility. I now use Asana to keep checklists and templates for all of the work I do, occasionally I also use it to collaborate with colleagues and clients and also as a bookmarking tool to log any ideas, articles and other sources of information I need to save for later so everything is all in one place. Instead of using a handful of different tools and services I only need one and that’s Asana. Creating repeatable systems is one of the essential ingredient for any business and with a project management tool you can easily create templates and checklists you can use over and over for different clients to streamline your process.” – David Alexander of Mazepress
Teamwork
Working together, beautifully
“Teamwork keeps our entire company connected and on track.” -Laura LoPresti of Automaton
Todolist
Organize life, then go enjoy it
If you’re one of the millions out there who struggle to stay organized and be on top of deadlines, look no further than Todoist to solve all of your problems. It’s the perfect tool to help you keep track of everything you have to do and when you have to do it so that you can be as productive as possible. It will help you prioritize your “to do list” items and look ahead to future weeks so that you can plan strategically. Plus, Todoist will help you monitor your progress so that you are motivated to keep going. – Nate Masterson of Maple Holistic’s
This app allows me to schedule times for me to complete my to-do list items and sends me desktop notifications when they are due! It has mobile too so I can schedule to-dos even when I’m away from my computer. – Emily Clifford of Fueled
StoryChief
Create and publish interactive articles across multiple platforms with one click
“StoryChief is such an easy-to-use tool that saves tons of time for us marketers. I can collaborate in one centralized dashboard with colleagues and guest writers, and once the story is ready, select the channels where I want to share it and distribute it with just one click!” – Iva Divic of StoryChief
Trello
Work more collaboratively
“I have been using Trello since last year and I’ve seen tremendous improvement in my productivity ever since. It is an easy to use task manager which helps me stay organized and collaborate with my team on different projects.. Every morning, I create a list of all my tasks to be done on the Trello board, prioritize them and keep checking my progress throughout the day. Moreover, I use a shared Trello board with my team which helps us in keeping track of all the projects everyone is working on. We can easily comment and share files on Trello which helps in getting rid of a lot of back-and-forth emails. This keeps everything streamlined and helps us to stay on top of things.” – Hamma Amjad of Gigworker
Zapier
Connect your apps and automate workflows
“Zapier allows every form, social media, survey, email, data, information, anything, immediately reroute to one place, and alert me when necessary.” – Osmir Diaz of the Technology Access Foundation
Airtable
The all in one collaboration platform
“One of my most loved tools for projects and collaboration is Airtable. Its uses are truly infinite, I can always find a template for what I’m looking to organize and collect information on, and my assistant and marketing team can collaborate seamlessly. Airtable is truly groundbreaking in its versatility in my daily life.” -Lily Maley of Visme
HubSpot
Marketing, sales, and service software that helps your business grow
HubSpot offers a full stack of software for marketing, sales, and customer service, with a completely free CRM at its core.
Outlook
Effortless email and calendar
Outlook.com is a free personal email service from Microsoft that doesn’t scan your email.
Viima
Make more innovation happen
“I’m certainly biased here, but the simple truth is that for a company to succeed, it needs to find ways to get better and what better way to do that than to systematically collect ideas from the people that matter the most for your business: your employees and customers. Viima makes the whole process easy and effortless.” – Jesse Nieminen of Viima
Momentum
The personal dashboard
“My favorite and most used tool in terms of my own productivity throughout the day would have to be the Momentum Chrome extension. This tool replaces the default chrome tab with a different dashboard of a regularly changing background image of a beautiful landscape, a personalized good morning/afternoon/evening message, and, most importantly, a to-do list. For me, I have always found it intensely satisfying to cross jobs off a to-do list, and Momentum allows you to do this by ticking off those jobs you have done and viewing those you still need to complete. Having it right there and easily accessible gives you no excuse to miss out or forget about certain tasks.” – Katherine Rowland of YourParkingSpace
Headspace
Meditation made simple
There are over 2,000 meditation apps out there, but Headspace committed to advancing the field of mindfulness meditation through clinically-validated research.
ProofHub
aText
Typing accelerator
“This text expander is great. I write the same response so many times a day, I create shortcuts to expand text whenever I need it. It saves my life when I need to handle responses to large email campaigns.” – Emily Clifford of Fueled
Evernote
Feel organized without the effort
In my opinion, the best thing since the invention of the wheel for entrepreneurs. The app helps me manage my daily schedule, to-do lists, projects, contacts, business trips – everything. I can easily say that this is the most used app on my phone. – Rune Sovndahl of Fantastic Services
TroopMessenger
TroopMessenger is a business chat application and collaboration tool built to address your business needs. With the help of this tool, you can upgrade your team communication and collaboration to the next level. It’s available for Windows, Linux, macOS, Android and iOS, and can be used by anyone without needing much training.
Venngage
Venngage is a leading graphic design platform. It helps you create infographics, presentations and other visual designs easily with thousands of customizable templates, charts, icons, and design elements. With a few clicks, anyone can create beautiful visuals for their business, organization or even school. Venngage is free to use and has both a Premium & Business version with additional features.
Chanty
Chanty provides an elegant platform through which you can communicate and collaborate with your team. The team chat app offers a variety of possible ways to contact your team, including text messaging, audio and video calls, audio messages, and screen sharing. What sets the platform apart from similar apps is that it also comes with a built-in project management feature – you can turn messages into tasks. Moreover, Chanty has an unlimited message history in the free plan so you can test it out as much as you want before committing to a paid plan.
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, this list of productivity apps and reviews from our team and our community brought you some value and advice. As mentioned at the start of the article, if you’d like to add your favorite tool to our list, we’d love to hear from you in the comments or by reaching out directly to beth@rebrandly.com
Further Reading:
- 150+ Best Marketing Tools: Ultimate List
- Best Task Management Software 2020
- Best Chrome Extensions For Digital Marketers
- Best Marketing Blogs: As Chosen By Marketers
- Quora Marketing: How to get Traffic From Quora
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