Driving efficiency and productivity is crucial in fast-paced organizations. Whether it's enhancing communication or project management, these top productivity apps can be indispensable tools for leaders to streamline workflows and team collaboration. Below, you’ll learn how productivity software can help boost productivity, increase efficiency, and improve work overall in your organization.

Benefits of using productivity apps

Productivity apps can help you organize tasks, manage and connect your team, and minimize interruptions that could disrupt focus. They can help you and your teams:

• Improve work quality: Productivity apps can help teams produce higher-quality work by streamlining processes, reducing distractions, and enabling easy collaboration. With the right tools, your organization can focus on executing work efficiently.

• More effective collaboration: These apps can help connect team members through centralized, shared workspaces, improving coordination. By facilitating communication, teams can work together seamlessly without losing productivity with the help of productivity apps.

• Better communication: Any chat and messaging features within productivity apps can enable quick, seamless communication without interrupting workflows. This open dialogue allows teams to set productivity goals, resolve issues, and align faster on goals.

• Easy performance tracking: Analytics and reporting built into productivity apps give managers visibility into team and individual performance. This enables data-driven decisions to measure and optimize team productivity.

The top 12 productivity apps

1. Best AI meeting assistant app: Fellow

Fellow is the only all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software for remote and hybrid teams that makes meetings more productive before, during, and after. With advanced AI, meeting policy prompts, time-saving templates, behavior-driving features, and seamless integrations, Fellow enables your teams to have fewer, more effective meetings and 1-on-1s.

Key features:

• AI meeting recordings, transcription, and summaries that automate note-taking and identify action items automatically

• 50+ native integrations with other tools to improve productivity and meeting workflows

• 500+ meeting agenda templates or AI agenda builder for planning effective meetings

• Collaborative agendas with assigned section owners and easily tracked action items

• Meeting feedback features to improve meeting efficiency in the future

Pricing:

• Fellow offers a free tier and paid plans starting at $7 per user/month

• Learn more about Fellow’s plans

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2. Best task management app: Trello

Trello allows you to assign tasks to and manage them through lists, boards, and cards. Together, these views approximate Gantt charts through which you can track progress toward individual or team goals. You can also access several additional productivity tools within Trello. Its main drawback is that you can only assign a card or task to one board or project.

Key features:

• Customizable boards, lists, and charts that combine to resemble Gantt charts

• Trackable progress for each team member or your whole team

• Access to additional web apps for productivity

Price: Trello offers an introductory free version, and its paid plans start at $5 per user/month.

3. Best work management app: Asana

Asana is a tool for managing your team’s work, projects, and tasks. It allows you to manage your work in dashboards, task lists, enhancing collaboration and productivity. Asana also has commenting and private messaging features regarding incomplete tasks or bottlenecks.

Key features:

• Notification and commenting features help teams prioritize tasks and boost productivity

• Private direct messaging for private task- and productivity-based conversations

• Views of complete and incomplete tasks to help determine near-future output priorities

Price: Asana offers a free introductory tier, and its paid plans start at $10.99 per user/month.

4. Best project management tool: Linear

Linear is an issue-tracking project management tool for software or product development teams. It allows teams to streamline their project workflows and collaboration.

Key features:

• Streamlined issue creation, tracking, and collaboration

• Templates for projects to standardize and save time

• Project graphs to check progress, scope, and velocity

• Automated workflows to speed up processes

Price: Linear has a limited free tier, and paid plans start at $8 per user/month.

5. Best password manager: Dashlane

Dashlane is a password management app that helps organizations protect their data and simplify the sharing of logins and passwords across teams. With Dashlane, leaders can share passwords without revealing them, manage access, and auto-fill details across any device.

Key features:

• Organizes and manages passwords in one place to streamline work across your teams

• Enables effortless and secure sharing of logins and passwords

• Auto-fills usernames and passwords to save any tedious login steps

• Allows for delegating password management to team members with different admin levels

• Evaluates password health and mitigates any breaches or risks

Price: Dashlane Business plans start at $8 per user/month.

6. Best social media management app: Buffer

Buffer is an app that saves invaluable time on tedious social media management steps. With Buffer, you can publish and schedule posts, identify the most important customer responses to reply to, and analyze your posts. This suite of features can make your social media management more productive now and in the future.

Key features:

• Schedules and publishes posts in batches after drafting

• Responds to only the most important customer comments and messages

• Analyzes your social media posts for more productive future use

• Quickly translates your posts into different languages for more global reach

• AI assistant generates ideas or creates personalized posts for different audiences and channels

Price: Buffer offers a free tier or paid plans that start at $6 per channel/month.

7. Best AI calendar assistant app: Clockwise

Clockwise is an AI-powered calendar assistant and scheduling tool that coordinates your team or organization’s schedules based on unique preferences. It uses automation to calculate the best times for meetings, task completion, and focus time for your team members to improve productivity.

Key features:

• Shares calendar availability and schedule external meetings based on preferences

• Manages calendars based on preferences on working or meeting hours, lunch or flexible holds, travel time, focus time, etc.

• Automatically identifies optimal times for meetings if you mark them as flexible

• Syncs with Slack and Google Calendar for seamless alignment and ensures productivity during deep focus times

Price: Clockwise offers an introductory free tier, and its paid plans start at $6.75 per user/month.

8. Best email management app: Superhuman

Superhuman is AI-powered email software that integrates with Gmail and Outlook to help teams move through their inboxes faster, respond quicker, and regain valuable time.

Key features:

• AI features writes fast emails with a few phrases, matching tone of voice based on previous emails

• Evaluates and organizes inboxes to identify what needs the most attention

• Automatically reminds you of emails that need follow-ups

• Automates typing to insert certain phrases, emails, attachments, etc.

Price: Superhuman starts at $30 per user/month.

9. Best bookmarking app: Pocket

Pocket can streamline learning and work that requires extensive research and reading. As you encounter interesting or relevant articles, among other tasks, you can save them to Pocket to read later. This way, you remain focused on the task at hand. Its main drawback is that it’s less collaborative or sharing-oriented than other productivity apps.

Key features:

• Saves articles to read for later when you encounter them amid certain tasks

• Allows you to listen to text-based articles as you perform other tasks

• Highlights key text for future reference

Price: Pocket offers a free plan, but most features require Premium access that starts at $4.99 per month.

10. Best to-do list app: Todoist

Todoist automatically highlights your most pressing tasks so you can be more productive sooner rather than later. This automation can reduce your time choosing which tasks to start now and leave for later. Even without automation, you can use Todoist to visualize your team’s productivity rates and make manual task management decisions. But like Asana, Todoist lacks a Gantt chart view.

Key features:

• Automatically highlights your most urgent tasks

• Determines which tasks matter the most

• Provides team-wide productivity view for manually prioritizing tasks when necessary

Price: Todoist offers a free introductory plan, and its paid plans start at $4 per month.

11. Best cloud-based suite: Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365 is the best choice for larger organizations that use Outlook or Teams. The Microsoft apps offer solutions for cloud storage, presentations, analysis, virtual collaboration, and AI automations to boost productivity.

Key features:

• Large overlap of features with Google Workspace despite no integrations

• Video calls, cloud storage, graphic design, and more

• Month-long free trials

Price: Microsoft 365 Business plans start at $6.00 per user/month.

12. Best cloud-collaboration suite: Google Workspace

For organizations that use Google, Google Workspace is the best productivity suite option, with tools for email, documentation, calendars, slides, sheets, forms, video calls, and more.

Key features:

• Suite of productivity apps for word processing, presentations, spreadsheets, and more

• Streamlines real-time collaboration, minimizing time needed to finalize work

• High use rates lessens the learning curve for first-time users and further streamline collaboration

Price: Google Workspace Business plans start at $6 per user/month.

Productivity is just a few clicks away

Implementing apps for work productivity is crucial for driving team efficiency and success. With Fellow's all-in-one AI meeting transcription and management software built for remote and hybrid teams, leaders can revolutionize team communication and collaboration. By leveraging Fellow's powerful features, such as collaborative agendas, shared meeting notes, and AI transcription and summaries, you can streamline your meetings, ensure productive discussions, and drive important decisions for your team.