Gone are the days, when 9-5 jobs were most preferred and termed as the safest option. People have started indulging themselves in freelancing more. Especially after Covid-19, when work from home becomes a common process. The work from home process supported the rise of freelancers as this is what every freelancer has been doing since the beginning; they were already adapted to this. While full-time employees took time to get adapted to this nature
A report stated that 68% of workers who are working from home are showing their interest in freelancing. Millions of people lost their jobs when due to Covid the economy got hit. Plus the work from home setting gives a rise to people who show their interest in freelancing.
Freelancing can be sure a tough job. Once you realize being ‘your own boss’ means putting the hats of the legal expert, financier, routine planner, and work manager, all at once. But there are always ways to help with that, aren’t there? We have crafted for you a list of 50+ such freelancer tools that come to your rescue whenever, wherever you need a virtual assistant.
Before proceeding, you can also have a look at the 100 proven ways of Lead Generation.
Niku Mandal
Accounting Tools for Freelancers:
ZipBooks
Momenteo
Harpoon
Bonsai
Xero
Freeagent
Freework
Expensify
Freshbooks
Portfolio Creation Tools for Freelancers:
Behance
Prospero
Bidsketch
Pixpa
Squarespace
Project Management Tools for Freelancers:
Asana
Basecamp
EverNote
Writing Tools for Freelancers:
Proposify
Zen Writer
Write Room
Email Management Tools for Freelancers:
Sanebox
Inbox
MailChimp
Aweber
Scheduling Tools for Freelancers:
Productive
RescueTime
Remember the Milk
Google Calendar
Timely
Cushion
Tickspot
Klok
Ora Time and Expenses
ToggI
OfficeTime
Timesheet
MyClientSpot
Focus Booster
Streaks
Azendoo
Freedom
Flow
GetHarvest
Backup Tools for Freelancers:
iCloud
DropBox
Mozy
Marketplace Platforms for Freelancers:
Truelancer
Upwork
Fiverr
Workana
Social Media Management tools:
Social Oomph
Buffer
Tweriod
Other Important Tools for freelancers:
Linkedin
LifeHacker
Plagiarism Check
Termsfeed
Pro Blogger
LKR Social Media
Contently
Trello
TinyScanner
SlideShare
Briefbox
MindMeister
Text Expander
Accounting Tools for Freelancers:
Bonsai
Pricing-$19/ Month
Bonsai is an integrated all-in-one software suite designed to help with all the admin tasks. Bonsai lets you create invoices, send contracts and collect payments without the least effort. Apart from its functionality, Bonsai is famous among the freelancing community for its efficient design layout. Here are some reasons you should go for Bonsai:
- The interface is clean and easy to use.
- Bonsai is affordable, offering multiple pricing plans.
- Bonsai has you covered from proposal to tax season.
- Bonsai Cash business account lets you manage your finances, save on taxes and get paid faster with no hidden fees or minimums.
- The products are integrated seamlessly.
- Bonsai’s products are automated.
- Bonsai offers a massive library of free templates of contracts, proposals, invoices, agreements, quotes, scope of work, and briefs.
ZipBooks
Pricing- $15/Month
ZipBooks is founded by Tim Chaves in 2o15. ZipBooks is a free accounting tool that you can use to create invoices, manage clients, payments, and expenses and track your time. You can even set up late payment reminders for your clients.
Momenteo
Pricing- $3/Month
Memento is founded by Chelsie Patterson in 2019. Memento is a pretty convenient invoicing tool that makes generating invoices a quick, hassle-free experience. It is a paid service though and it comes with a price tag of $200 per annum.
Harpoon
Pricing- $19/Month
Harpoon is founded by Andrew Johnson, Ryan Battles in 2015. Quite a lifesaver, Harpoon is an extremely handy tool that lets you track your average revenue per project(or per month, day or hour), plan your schedules, check outstanding invoices and keep track of your goals.
Xero
Pricing- $13.50/ Month
Xero is founded by Rod Drury and Hamish Edwards in 2006. A one stop destination for all your financial engagements, Xero is a paid service that offers online accounting, invoicing, billing, and banking.
Freeagent
Pricing- $24/ Month
Freeagent is a money managing app that assists in bookkeeping and generating invoices. A well-designed app, this one is specifically designed to keep small businesses and freelancers in mind.
Freework
Pricing- Free
This freelancing tool is designed to help you manage your day-to-day work, save time, send invoices, keep statistics, manage clients, take notes, and a lot more. It is built on a mobile platform and can be assessed by both android and iOS users.
Expensify
Pricing- $5/ Month
With Expensify, you can manage your receipts better. All you have to do is photograph your receipts and upload them. It works on iPhone/iPad, Android, WebOS/Palm, and BlackBerry phones.
Freshbooks
Pricing- $13.50/ Month
A boon for freelancers in the midst of a financial lurch, Freshbooks lets you create invoices and manage them and organise them with the click of just a button. What’s more, the service is free as long as you have three clients. After that, it comes with a price tag.
Portfolio Creation Tools for Freelancers:
Behance
Pricing- $14.29/Month
Behance is founded by Scott Belsky in 2006. One of the most popular websites out there, Behance is nothing but a boon for freelancers. Be it showcasing your creativity, or creating your online portfolio for work. Behance supports a variety of platforms from Photoshop to PDFs, allows you to view and appreciate other’s projects, and lets you collaborate and upload your work.
Prospero
Pricing- $8/ Month
One of the best-known tools for freelancers, proposal helps you to create a proposal for your client and price your projects. Prospero analyses your work, project deadlines, and your working rate to self-design an editable proposal that is relevant to the services you offer.
Bidsketch
Pricing- $29/ Month
Bidsketch assists you to create client proposals with its wide range of customizable templates. Besides letting you create templates, this tool also helps you distribute them and offers related analytics about the distribution, like who downloaded it, who viewed it, and for how long.
Pixpa
Pricing- $5.09/ Month
If you are looking for a space, where you can showcase the work created by you and sell them as well. This platform helps you create professional websites, where you can publish your own blogs, showcase your portfolios or set up an online store.
Squarespace
Pricing- $16/ Month
Considered to be one of the best platforms for portfolio/ website making, as a freelancer, you can carve your own personal identity on Squarespace using its wide range of customizable templates.
Project Management Tools for Freelancers:
Asana
Pricing- $10.99/ Month
A popular people collaboration tool, Asana allows you to form groups of up to 15 people. You can start group discussions, and send tasks to each other. You can even send timely notifications to group members as reminders.
Basecamp
Pricing- $99/ Month
A friendly freelancing tool, Basecamp is a popular project management tool that lets you keep track of all your projects and keep them organized. This online collaboration tool focuses on managing work and lets people communicate with each other.
EverNote
Pricing- $7.99/ Month
One of the most popular apps out there, Evernote lets you store notes, receipts, and other miscellaneous files associated with each project and also sets timely reminders to keep you on track.
Writing Tools for Freelancers:
Proposify
Pricing- $49/Month
Proposify is founded by Kyle Racki, and Kevin Springer in 2013. Proposify is a proposal writing tool that comes equipped with a host of templates and customizable features. It comes with a set of basic drawing tools and almost looks like a mini word processor to help you with the job.
Zen Writer
Pricing- $18 Onetime Fee
ZenWriter is a full-screen writing app that comes with a serene, minimalist design and friendly layout. One of the best-looking apps out there, this one promises to not only get your work done but also give you a great working experience.
Write Room
Pricing- $9.99/ Month
Designed only for Mac users, this tool comes to your rescue when you have big writing projects in your kitty. Write Room comes with a clean, minimal layout ( there are no distracting menu options or even toolbars) and a simplistic design that helps you focus on your work better.. Nothing will give you more focus than a full-screen writing tool, and WriteRoom is the original offering that is available for Mac.
Email Management Tools for Freelancers:
Sanebox
Pricing- $9.99/Month
Sanebox is founded by Stuart Roseman in 2010. This app helps you with one of your most important handles, the epitome of your professional existence, your mailing inbox. Sanebox helps you organise through stuff and keep your inbox clean.
Inbox
Pricing- $9/Month
Call it a way better version of Gmail, this app lets you organize your mails, categorise them efficiently, have attachment previews, built-in snooze buttons, automatic labeling, and intelligent search. With its user-friendly design and easy-to-navigate layout, this one is sure to make your work easier.
MailChimp
Pricing- $9.99/ Month
This E-mail marketing platform is said to be one of the best. A fantastic promotional tool, this one helps you send your email marketing newsletters, keep your clients updated about a new post or product and market your services.
Also read: Tools for Email List Building
Aweber
Pricing- $19.99/ Month
A networking and personal marketing tool, Aweber lets you build an email campaign, which can help to maintain relationships with all your previous and current clients.
Scheduling Tools for Freelancers:
Productive
Pricing- $10/Month
Productive is founded by Jan Varljen in 2014. This tool helps you form productive work habits, It comes with an easy-to-use interface that lets you plan and schedule habits for any time of the day, set smart reminders for each time of the day, and stay right on track.
RescueTime
Pricing- $9/ Month
A time planner tool, RescueTime offers to save your time by keeping track and letting you know of the amount of time you spend on each of your tasks. It was founded by Brian Fioca, Tony Wright, and Joe Hruska in 2007.
Remember the Milk
Pricing- $39.99/ Year
Remember The Milk is a reminder tool that was founded in the year 2004, it is an online to-do-list app, that lets you take care of important tasks so that you are never late again.
Google Calendar
Pricing- $5/ Month
Google Calendar is an amazing planner tool from Google that lets you organise your schedule and plan tasks accordingly. It became available in 2009, one can create and edit events here and location can also be added.
Timely
Pricing- $15/ Month
When you take up too many projects, it can be quite overwhelming. Timely is a time tracking tool Timely helps you to maintain a time log to track the amount of time you have spent on each of the projects undertaken.
Cushion
Pricing- $36/ Year
The cushion is quite a reliable tool that helps you make an efficient work schedule for your freelancing ventures. It focuses on the time you spend on a particular project, highlights when you are overbooked, and helps you plan your time better.
Tickspot
Pricing- $149/ Month for Unlimited Projects
This one allows you to keep track of your work hours as well as the time you spend on each project. In fact, you can even see how close you are to using up your client’s allotted budget.
Klok
Pricing- $18.99 Per Feature
As the name suggests, Klok is a time management tool and it allows you track of your time. You can keep track of the time you spend on each project; just start and stop tracking by just clicking a button. You’re able to generate multiple reports based on this information.
Ora Time and Expenses
Pricing- $6/ Month
The name says it all. Ora lets you track expenses, keep a list of your tasks, run a timer on your tasks and well, keep things organised. It is where you can work with your team and have everything the team might need during the time for work.
ToggI
Pricing- $10/ Month
A productive time tracking tool, ToggI lets you track time the time you spend on each project. You can manage your own time as well as the time of your collaborator’s time to work out the total time spent on each project.
OfficeTime
Pricing- $69 Onetime Fee
OfficeTime helps manage your time better. That being said, it allows you to see exactly how much money you are earning per hour and know who is really paying you your actual worth.
Timesheet
Pricing- $4.50/ Month
Timesheet is a time tracker tool that makes it easier for you to record your work hours. With timesheet, you can calculate your estimated income, handle hourly rates, keep stats, generate time or expense reports and manage expenses, among other stuff.
MyClientSpot
Pricing- Not-known
A very handy tool, this one offers to keeps track of your billable hours and helps you keep your work organized. It provides online project management functions and helps out with time management.
Focus Booster
Pricing- $4.99/ Month
Focus Booster is a time management tool that allows you to break your tasks in segments and time them accordingly. All you have to do is start and stop the timer. Besides, the tool also makes provision for automatic 5-minute breaks after every 25 minutes of work.
Streaks
Pricing- $4.99/ Month
This app follows the model of the popular “don’t break the chain method”, everyday. Use your goals, to track your per-day activities and progress and even set up goals. This to-fo list tracks every certain goal of yours.
Azendoo
Pricing- $10/ Month
Another tool that helps you manage your workflow, Azendoo lets you view analytics, attach documents and work as your personal organiser. It also lets you add checklists, plan your calendar, send direct messages to team members, and set due dates.
Freedom
Pricing- $8.99/Month
Freedom is founded by Fred Stutzman in 2009. This tool is designed to cater to just one unique purpose that is to stop you from wasting your time on your phone. It helps bar out unnecessary distractions by letting you set a work schedule on its platform, during which it blocks distracting apps and websites.
Flow
Pricing- Free
This tool helps you to manage your workflow by letting you create workspaces and tasks, collaborate with your team members through inbuilt chat, and organise all your assignments and private tasks.
GetHarvest
Pricing- $12/ Month
A time management tool, Harvest offers time tracking and invoicing services with pricing plans from free to premium. It works on iPhone, Basecamp, Beanstalk and has a WordPress plugin and more.
Backup Tools for Freelancers:
iCloud
Pricing- $9.99/ Month
The apple app, iCloud lets you backup and sync your devices using your Apple ID.
You can store anything here, from photos, notes, files to other data. While signing in this, you get 5GB free storage at first.
DropBox
Pricing- $16.99/ Month
This tool lets you upload and transfer any files of yours and share them. IT is a great backup service, DropBox automatically backs up all the data of your computer, without you having to worry at all.
Mozy
Pricing- $10/ month for 125 GB
While you are working on so many projects, you need a backup. Mozy is a backup tool that lets you do just that. It was founded in the year 2005 by Josh Coates. It can be used both in Windows and Mac.
Marketplace Platforms for Freelancers:
Truelancer
Pricing- $50 or 5% of total project value
Truelancer is founded by Dipesh Garg in 2014. If you call yourself a freelancer, you already know what a blessing Truelancer is. Truelancer not only helps you find more work but also helps you find and meet potential clients and build a network.
Upwork
Pricing- 20% for the first $500 project
Upwork is founded by Stratis Karamanlakis, Odysseas Tsatalos. Yet another platform for landing work, Upwork lets you make a free profile, crate and promote gigs, bid on projects, and meet clients.
Fiverr
Pricing- 20% of the gig fee
Fiverr is a freelance haven that allows you to find jobs or ‘gigs’. The service sellers have the option to choose a starting price for their gigs, the quote starting from $5 (hence the name!). Consequently, one gets to offer different gigs at different prices.
Workana
Pricing- $4.90/ Month
As the name suggests, this online tool helps you to find work on a variety of work genres. Businesses can hire freelancers from this site for their work. It is one of the finest places where freelancers and small businesses to big ones can get connected.
Social Media Management tools:
Social Oomph
Pricing- $13.94/ Month
Social Oomph was founded in the year 2008 and it comes with a set of some great social networking tools that help you market your services and stay at the top of your game.
Buffer
Pricing- $15/ Month
BufferApp is founded by Leo Widrich. This one is a social media management tool, it helps you manage all the social media platforms of your business. This includes a number of articles that will help you learn and run your business better.
Tweriod
Pricing- Not-known
Tweriod lets you handle your social media (especially Twitter) with ease, by constantly providing you with statistics, your campaign’s reach, their popularity, all the while, analyzing your followers, keeping reminders, and providing charts displaying the most popular hours on Twitter for your followers.
Other Important Tools for freelancers:
Pricing- $29.99/ Month
LinkedIn is founded by Reid Hoffman, Allen Blue, Konstantin Guericke, Eric Ly, Jean-Luc Vaillant in 2002. LinkedIn is a widely acclaimed platform that not only lets you establish your professional identity, but also build a network, find jobs and connect with possible clients with its built-in mailing and messaging service.
LifeHacker
Pricing- Not-known
LifeHacker is founded by Gina Trapani. Just as the name suggests, this site helps you by keeping you updated with recent technology, lessons on innovative thinkers, and daily life hacks.
Plagiarism Check
Pricing- $39.95 Per Feature
Plagiarism is a sin to any creator. Any content that is copied, this tool helps you detect the amount of plagiarism your copy contains by screening your document for plagiarism with 5 search engines- Google, Yahoo, Babylon, Google Books, and Google Scholar. You can also use other websites for it, there are tons of tools available for plagiarism checking.
Termsfeed
Pricing- $56 Onetime fee
Termsfeed comes to your rescue when you need some legal assistance. This tool offers a range of templates to help you craft statements for a variety of purposes- return policy, terms and conditions, privacy policy, and terms of service. And all you have to do is answer a couple of questions to frame the right contract.
Pro Blogger
Pricing- $5.99/ Month
Pro Blogger step into the market in 2004 and since then it has been the best bet for Freelancing, this tool helps you to curate content, organise ideas and create blogs to promote your online market presence.
LKR Social Media
Pricing- Not-known
This is a blog run by social media marketing expert, Laura Roeder. The blog is a great source of learning, for freelancers looking to promote themselves online, covering a wide range of topics, from designing an effective sales page to top tools to organize your work.
Contently
Pricing- Not-known
This platform is a SaaS content marketing platform that gives organisations an opportunity to create great content that helps them get the audience and build their brands.
Trello
Trello is a collaboration tool that lets you organise your work projects, invite coworkers to collaborate and create shared perspectives, add checklists, upload photos and videos, and a lot more. Trello does offer free service, open to one and all with some limited offers. if you want extra features, you have to pay.
TinyScanner
Pricing- Free
A handy app for android and iOS, TinyScanner lets you scan your work documents from your device’s camera and turn them into PDFs. It even lets you customize page size and share the scanned PDFs.
SlideShare
Pricing- $19/ Month
Slideshare helps you present your ideas in an organised manner and thus showcase your clients your skills, expertise, areas of interest, and competency. Any kind of presentation, infographics can be shared here by businesses.
Briefbox
Pricing- $9/ Month
Offering a collection of hypothetical briefs or templates for a variety of genres, Briefbox allows you to simply pick one of the editable briefs and start designing, as per your need.
MindMeister
Pricing- $2.49/ Month
Mind-mapping is the predecessor to great ideas and MindMeister offers you that by ditching the traditional pen and paper method. Create mind-maps on your electronic devices free or buy the premium plan and enjoy additional benefits.
Text Expander
Pricing- $3.33/ Month
Text expander helps you send emails faster, by pre storing all the information, predicting content from the stored info, predicting pictures, and making sure the content does not sound too similar or contain duplicate info. You can also pre-program to fix typos you often, use different signatures for different clients, and auto-insert forms.
Conclusion
The freelance industry is going in a tremendous way and it is not going to stop anytime soon. With the different advantages of working as a freelancer, more and more working professionals are choosing this industry. All the above tools are to make the work of a freelancer a little bit easier.
