Here’s a mega list of 101+ free tools you can use to build your online businesses. Most of these tools are completely free and if they’re not, they at least have an adequate free plan or free version that should be more than enough for most people.
Table of Contents
Website
1. WordPress
WordPress is the ultimate platform for any kind of website. It’s easy to use, powerful and extremely flexible. This is what I use to build 90% of my websites with.
2. Yoast SEO
WordPress isn’t perfect out of the box, specifically the platform isn’t the best for SEO. This plugin improves that significantly.
3. Blubrry Powerpress
Free plugin to turn your WordPress RSS feed into a podcast feed as well, which can be submitted to iTunes.
4. Corporate Ipsum
Lorem Ipsum is boring, Corporate Ipsum allows you to quickly generate nicer looking placeholder text.
5. Disqus
Free comment plugin for WordPress. It’s a lot better than the default WordPress commenting system, the main reason being less spam and more actual discussions.
6. Editorial Calendar
Turn your draft posts into an editorial calendar to begin scheduling your content with a content calendar.
7. Google Analytics
Track everything. Google Analytics will allow you to track conversions, track traffic and split test pages.
8. HelloBar
The HelloBar places a sticky bar at the top of your website. This bar can be used to direct traffic to a specific page or to help build your list.
9. OnePress Social Locker
Lock your content and encourage your readers to share your website with this WordPress plugin.
10. Tawk.to
This is an easy way to add live chat to any website. Live chat has helped increase conversions for many businesses, by enabling them to talk to any visitor at any time.
11. Hotjar
Get feedback on how your website’s user experience is. Get user recordings of visitors interacting with and navigating your site, as well as heatmaps to see where visitors are clicking.
12. Revive Old Posts
This WordPress plugin will automatically share older blog posts to your social media profiles to drive traffic back to older posts. If you have a lot of content don’t let it go to waste, especially when a majority of your followers haven’t seen your older content.
13. SNAP social media
This WordPress plugin will automatically share your new blog posts to all your social media profiles, saving you time.
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14. Privy
Privy gives you different ways to help build your list as well with popups.
SEO
15. OpenLinkProfiler
A really powerful SEO tool that will not only analyze backlinks, but also provide information on how well your website is optimized.
16. Alexa
Alexa can help you see the kind of traffic your competitors are getting (as well as your own site) as compared to the rest of the world. Alexa also includes more detailed analytics but it is known for seeing the kind of traffic any website receives.
17. Google PageSpeed Insights
There’s no better website to tell you how your website is performing and how it should be performing than Google. This tool can help you improve understand your site’s pageload performance better, which affects SEO.
18. Moz Local Business Listing Score
If you are a local business owner and have a brick and mortar, this tool can let you quickly see how well your business is listed in the proper directories online and what you can do to improve it.
19. Moz Open Site Explorer
A great backlink checking tool that provides a lot of insight on how well your site is performing, another great SEO tool.
20. QuickSprout
A website grader that will grade the performance and SEO of your website.
21. SERPs Rank Checker
See how well your website is currently ranking for any keywords. You even have the option to view local searches.
Social Media
22. Buffer
We love Buffer to schedule social media posts. We usually schedule all my social media posts a week ahead, automating my social media to save me time.
23. Followerwonk
The analytics app provides detailed insight on your (or anyones!) Twitter following. These reports can also help you find the influencers in your niche.
24. Hootsuite
Hootsuite allows you to schedule social media posts as well as be used as a “listening” tool to keep track of mentions and people talking about your brand so you can jump right in to the middle of their conversations.
25. Later
Later helps automate posting to Instagram. Later can notify you when it is time to post any Instagram post you schedule, and it’s as easy as pressing one button to get the post published.
26. Omnicore’s Social Media Cheat Sheet
A fantastic cheat sheet that visually shows all image sizes for the largest social media platforms and then some.
27. LinkedIn Sales Navigator
LinkedIn Sales Navigator is an excellent way to get a rundown on anyone that emails you. It will find their connected social media profiles and provide you their picture as well as some information such as their profession and website.
28. TwitNerd
TwitNerd is awesome. I use it mainly to see who’s not following me and unfollow them. This has helped grow our Twitter profiles really quickly.
29. Linkiro
Add a call to action to all websites you share with Linkiro. Content curation doesn’t need to be a drag. You can drive traffic back to your website, even with the links you share. Linkiro offers a free trial for 7 days.
Money
30. Gumroad
Gumroad is the best free alternative to selling your own digital products. Not only do they process the payments, they also securely host your file for you.
31. Mint
Mint allows you connect all your bank accounts, credit cards and PayPal account to keep track of finances, set a budget and set goals with your spending and saving.
32. ProfitWell
ProfitWell allows you to create dashboards for your subscription business, as well as business that processes payments using Stripe, BrainTree, and more. Create an easy to use dashboard for you and your team to monitor the money metrics of your business.
33. PayPal
PayPal is a staple. Everyone needs a PayPal account as most customers expect it to be available as a payment option.
34. Wave
Wave makes payroll, accounting, bookkeeping and taxes less of a nightmare. Period.
35. Boomerang
Boomerang is one tool we use to help us reach inbox zero everyday. It allows us to schedule emails to be sent later, and removes emails from our inbox that we wish to respond to later.
36. Canned Responses
We love Canned Responses. It’s easily one of the most underrated lab apps for Gmail. Create a bunch of canned responses to emails you regularly receive and cut down on your time responding to common emails.
37. Mailchimp
There aren’t any real free ways to build an email list, the infrastructure and serverload required to send and collect tons of emails is massive. However, Mailchimp does offer a lot of important features to collect and send emails for free, out of the box.
38. Streak for Gmail
CRM (customer relationship manager) right in your email! Excellent if you use Gmail a lot and have a lot of clients that you need to manage.
39. Zoho
Free hosting for your email. If you use a custom domain for your emails, or need a host for your business email, Zoho offers a free plan.
Business Tools
40. Bplans
Business plans are not as relevant as they were 20 years ago. With the lean, bootstrap startup trend, business plans are seen as procrastination. Still, BPlans offers a huge number of business plan templates for almost any industry, for free, for you to take a look at.
41. Calendly
Calendly allows you to send a link to people that want to meet with you and gives them options to schedule the meeting based on your availability. It integrates nicely with Google Calendar and makes scheduling meetings, interviews or anything else really easy.
42. Faxzero
The fax machine is dead. That’s why we love Faxzero. For free, you can send a fax (with an ad placed over your page) without needing a fax machine.
43. Meetup
Find or create meetups with other local people that share your passions and interests. This is especially useful as a networking tool. Find meetups for the industry your business is in, and network. Or, run your own!
44. LegalTemplates.net
Free legal templates such as contracts, policies, budgets and a lot more.
45. Hubspot CRM
Powerful CRM software packed with features.
Graphic, Video and Photo Editing
46. Biteable
Biteable makes it easy to create and generate videos for everything from Facebook Ads to YouTube videos, to animated Instagram videos to explainer videos. It’s easy to use and comes with pre-built templates that will take you through creating a gorgeous looking video, step-by-step.
47. Canva
Canva is fantastic. Photoshop, who? If you need to create beautiful images for social media or your website, Canva provides the templates, layouts and tools to make it possible.
48. Icon Finder
Icon Finder have over half a million free icons and vector graphics to make your website pretty.
49. Pablo
A simpler and quicker way to make really great looking social media images or even featured images for your blog posts.
50. Photovisi
Create photo collages and unique designs for social media and your blog images.
51. PicMonkey
A free and decent image editor with enough features to get you by if you don’t have more powerful software such as Photoshop.
52. Piktochart
Surprisingly great way to create infographics really quickly and easily.
53. Unsplash
A huge free stock photo website that are great for your blog images.
54. Placeit
Great free tool to create small sized mockups of your apps, websites, or products.
55. Quozio
Quickly and easily create images from quotes.
56. Skitch
Screenshot and annotation app for all platforms including mobile.
57. TinyPNG / TinyJPG
The best image compressor on the internet and it’s lossless compression so the image quality doesn’t suffer.
Misc
58. Declutter The Mind
Need a break? Try Declutter The Mind. It’s great for meditation or as a quick stress buster.
59. Chrome
Chrome is the most flexible and arguably the most powerful browser available. It makes development of websites easy with the inspect tool, and likely has the largest collection of extensions that can help make your browser more useful for your business.
60. E.ggtimer.com
Egg timer is great to set timers for tasks to make sure you follow a strict schedule.
61. Social Blade
Social Blade is an extremely useful Chrome Extension if you own or manage a YouTube channel. It can give you insights into competitor videos, making it easier for you to create and rank videos on YouTube.
62. Evernote
There may be more and perhaps better options for a tool like Evernote, but it still remains to be one of the more popular business tools.
63. F.lux
Flux has saved our eyes from a lot of irritation. It’s an app that changes your monitor colors to a warm orange in the evening to prevent you from being overly stimulated at night and disrupting your sleep. It also makes staring into your monitor late at night, working long hours, a lot easier on your eyes.
64. IFTTT
If This Then That is compatible with most apps and SaaS out there, and it allows you to automate a lot of processes such as “If I change my profile picture on Twitter, change it on Facebook” or “If a new customer is created on Stripe add their email to Mailchimp”.
65. LastPass
LastPass is easily one of our favorite extensions of all time and we’ve been using it forever. It allows you to generate a very secure, random password for all websites you have accounts for and auto-fill your logins. The nice thing is that all your secure passwords are behind one master password, so you only need to remember one password, without having to use one password for every single website. It also allows you to securely store logins for your team.
66. Momentum
Momentum replaces the default new tab screen on Google Chrome with something a little more inspiring and motivating.
67. Noisli
Noisli is a simple and easy to use background noise generator. Great for when you need some background noise to help you work or meditate.
68. Pocket
Pocket allows you to save articles for later reading across any device. It’s also a way to discover new content to share.
69. RescueTime
RescueTime allows you to track and see how you use your time on your computer. It breaks down all of your activity into categories such as productive and non-productive and lets you see where most of your time is going and let’s you become more aware of your bad habits.
70. StayFocused
StayFocused is an extension for Chrome that lets you block out distracting websites for a certain amount of time so you don’t procrasinate.
71. Google Calendar
Google Calendar helps keep you accountable and on track with appointments and a schedule. If you’re not already using a calendar to manage your time and days, Google Calendar is a must.
72. Toggl
A great time tracking tool to either stay focused or track time on projects to properly bill clients.
73. Wunderlist
Wunderlist is a classic to-do list app. Back in the day, before Trello, this was our go-to productivity app.
74. Google Alerts
Track your brand, your name or anything on Google. Everytime new content with the keyword you are tracking is indexed on Google, receive a notification.
75. Google Keyword Planner
Keyword research is crucial if you want to rank in search engine results. Fortunately, Google offers this free tool.
76. Keyword.io
A free keyword research tool to help you create better content with an SEO focus.
77. Nuzzel
A great tool to see what content your friends or followers are sharing on either Facebook or Twitter. Another great research and content idea tool. See what your audience likes.
78. Voiceflow
Create your own Alexa and Google Home apps without writing a single line of code.
79. Airtable
Airtable is like Excel Spreadsheets on steroids. Use it to organize projects, collaborate, and brainstorm ideas.
80. Social Count
See the top shared posts on social media for any website (including your own). This gives you an idea of what is popular and what you should be writing about for your niche.
81. Sumall
Extremely powerful and versatile tool that allows you to connect all of your social media profiles and platforms to gain insight on what you’re doing right and wrong.
82. Survey Monkey
Survey Monkey allows you to send surveys to your readers and collect data and feedback. This is great for validating an idea or doing some research.
83. TweetReach
Get deeper analytics for your Twitter account. If Twitter is the core of your business, this is a must.
84. Typeform
Easy form creator for surveys, payments, contests and more.
85. Audacity
Audacity is a free audio editing tool. Use this to edit the audio for podcasts as well as other miscellaneous audio editing work.
86. Google Docs
We love Google Docs. We’ve used it to write all our blog posts as well as collaborate on ideas and projects.
87. Feedly
Feedly is an RSS feed reader. WE use it to follow all our favorite blogs. This also plays a role in content curation for us.
88. Loom
Loom is a free screen recorder that allows you to share the recording link with friends. This is great if you’re quickly trying to teach someone how to do something or use something.
89. Pamela for Skype
Pamela allows you to record Skype calls. This is great if you do interviews on Skype.
90. Quuu
Receive content suggestions for your niche and industry. This makes finding high quality content to share with your audience a lot easier.
91. Asana
If you’ve heard of the collaberation tool, BaseCamp, Asana is the free version of that. This is a great tool if you have a very large team and need a way to collaberate and communicate.
92. Slack
Slack is an internal chat tool and, we’ll admit, sometimes we’re really addicted to it. It reminds us of IRC if you are old enough to remember it.
93. Coggle.it
Coggle is fantastic. It’s very underrated. Coggle is a mind-mapping tool that we’ve used to plan many of our projects. Useful for brainstorms as well.
94. SimilarWeb
SimilarWeb makes it easy to do some competitive research. Just plug in a competitor website and SimilarWeb will provide guesses on their sources of traffic, and even the technology used to build their website.
95. Personapp
Visually create the personas of your audience, helping you drill down what type of customer you want and are targetting for your business.
96. Trello
We love Trello. It is probably our favorite tool on this list. It allows us to easily organize, manage, and collab on projects and subprojects around our business.
97. Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts just works. It’s a video conference app that allows you to chat with your remote team or community without someone virtually.
98. Skype
Skype is still relevant. A lot of people still use it. Even though it’s not our preference for video chat, it’s good to have for those freelancers or interviewees you need to contact that still prefer Skype.
99. HelpAReporter.com
Help A Reporter Out helps connect you with reporters and writers that need interviews, experts or help for their stories and articles. This is a great way to get your name and business out on bigger sites such as Entrepreneur.com.
100. Triberr
Triberr is a blogging networking website that gets people to share your content on social media when you share theirs.
101. Dropbox
Dropbox is cloud storage. If you’re not using Dropbox, you’re missing out. The ability to sync files across many different devices and backing up important files to your business, is required.
102. Atom
Atom is a text editor that can program in virtually any language. There’s plenty of addons and features that make it very robust and easy to use.
What do you think? Is there a free tool we missed? What’s your favorite tool from this list? Let us know in the comments below. We engage and respond with everyone!
