Best Productivity Suite Software in 2024

How many times have you observed high-growth businesses and wondered what it is that makes them so successful? Contrary to what you’d expect, they’ve embraced a fairly simple concept called software productivity, or more precisely, they’ve automated their expanding online operations to make better decisions for the acceleration of their short-term goals. It is your turn now to do informed comparisons to discover the best productivity suite tools and make them work for you.

We recommend you start your search for the best productivity suite tools for enterprises by signing up for the free trial plans or demo offered by leading vendors to do a comparison of the various features. Here is the list of programs that have received high SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our productivity suite software reviews: Samepage reviews, Slack, and GoSpotCheck.

• Freelancers, startups, and small businesses can use productivity software to boost efficiency.
• Mid-size and large organizations can also boost their employees’ productivity with the software.

• Samepage: Samepage is a comprehensive collaboration app for business teams.
• Intuit QuickBase: QuickBase is a useful tool solution that helps individual users and small
• businesses to build a database for effective collaboration and better output.
• Slack: Slack offers real-time messaging, search, and archiving for modern teams.
• Workboard: Workboard is a productivity and collaboration tool for both small business and big organizations that is designed to help them achieve team goals.
• Zoho Docs: Zoho Docs is a great app created for effective document management.

Productivity suite software providers offer tools/applications that allow companies to produce and manage eloquent databases, and create and process documents, presentations, worksheets, graphs, and specialized files. The definition is often broadened to embrace collaboration and communication programs, or basically to cover every sector that can make a business more effective in the accomplishment of its day-to-day activities.

The role of a good productivity program is to facilitate tricky tasks, as for example converting data-packed spreadsheets into analytic charts, but it also handles the initial task of data production. Generally, it is available as a desktop/mobile app or a web service, and while many users indicate that web service is better in terms of support and implementation, we’d argue that desktop versions with all their bells and whistles are still a more robust choice. Choosing between the two will depend solely on your functionality requirements, but looking at some basic Microsoft Office-like set of application can help big time:

Word Processors: Word Processors are incorporated/separate apps which create, edit, organize, and manipulate written information, and are also used to share and print files when necessary. Quite often, they have advanced features such as word count functions, renaming bookmarks, and extracting embedded text from other files, inserting exponents, creating auto-backups, and so on.

Spreadsheets: Spreadsheets are used for organizing both textual and numerical data, and they therefore support calculating functions and advanced formulas used for complex statistical/financial computations.

Presentations and slideshows: These apps are used to display multiple documents in a sequence, meaning that they can help you communicate your ideas in a visually involving way, regardless of whether you intend to use it on a screen or web browser.

Database management: The storage power of these systems is such that they save data in a highly-organized way, and they can de-fragment it into small parts than can be edited separately. The functionality is just cut for custom reporting, also because of its categorization, prioritization, and filtering powers.

Graphics: Productivity software also has a creative side, and can be used to edit and manipulate imagery both freely and coordinately.

Equations & Formula Editors: These tools are either included in the basic capacity of the app, or installed as independent add-ons. Their role is to communicate mathematical logic and to do simple calculations, and they are most applied to write mathematical formulas using text.

Contact management: Good productivity tools are also supposed to keep track of your contacts, and connect to their emails to extract and summarize important information. Quite often, you will find calendars, scheduling tables, and task-monitoring systems, and they will all be integrated with the rest of your suite to allow sending content to the correct location.

Personal organizers: This is one of the features that were deliberately developed for mobile usage, as it allows users to create their own lists, convert activities into trackable tasks, and keep notes of upcoming assignments. Most of the time, the add-on is synced with the contact management one, so that users can share relevant files with other interested parties.

Project management: Together with scheduling and management of personal tasks, productivity software is expected to manage projects including large-scale ones where multiple people have to be monitored.

Converting: Advanced productivity programs don’t simply create or read content: they can convert it too! There are multiple tools that perform basic conversion, but the real magic of productivity software is that it allows converting text to images (or vice versa) and to edit it even afterwards.

• Subtasks – To help you break down big tasks into smaller ones to make work easier
• Tags – Tags can help to make search easier and more effective
• Offline access – You can continue working even when not connected to the internet
• Support for all main platforms – such as Windows, Mac, Linux, Web, iOS, and Android
• Quick add actions – To make your work more productive
• Intuitive interface – This makes the app easy to learn and use
• Keyboard shortcuts – These help to save time and accomplish tasks faster
• Sync with calendar – You can keep up-to-date on your commitments and deadlines
• Task assignments – You can easily assign tasks to the right team members
• Reminders – These ensure you do not miss any deadlines and accomplish all tasks on time

Well, it depends on your current mechanism for creating and processing files, but we honestly believe that having all capacities (sharing in particular) in the same basket is always a good idea. In case you have no mechanism yet, than it is the best idea you’ll ever have.

So, how can productivity suite software tools actually improve your work? To start, they will give your business the personal touch it has craved for so long. Instead of standardized documents, you’ll get to produce amazing and professional letterheads, custom reports, unique brochures, delightful business cards, and entire emailing campaigns. And that list is non-exhaustive!

Secondly, productivity software is super-robust, as can be seen from the previous section. You install one product, and you get a word processor, a personal organizer, a calculation app, a manager, and a comprehensive database. We leave it to your imagination to calculate the time you can save by having all functionalities under one roof.

Thirdly, you can reward your exhausted team with automated managing of inventory and business finances, for instance benefits and payroll checks. Finance management is usually a considerably expensive add-on, but ROI rates show that the investment is perfectly justifiable. Besides, the mere fact that it is an add-on means that you don’t have to use it: the segmented structure of productivity software will allow you to create your own package of features according to your needs.

Finally, you get to create and organize documents on the go. This is useful both for employees who’ll become more engaged, and also for you to track progress wherever you go. As a matter of fact, being able to access database information everywhere and at any time is one of the main reasons why you need productivity software in the first place.

The best news when it comes to productivity software is that most popular products are free, or at least they have an unpaid basic package. The usual price for premium suites and individual apps varies between $50 and $500, mostly depending on its calculation and storage capacity. What you need to consider is that productivity software is often related to long-term costs, even if they are completely irrelevant once you calculate the benefits from the system. Recurrent costs will be lower than the original investment in any case.

As we head into a new decade, business owners will see new productivity trends that will influence how work will look like. Here are a few trends:

Artificial intelligence. AI will be one of the biggest things to affect productivity in the workplace, whether remote or not. As machine learning progresses and better AI is there to interpret this data, expect to see productivity soar as more and more repetitive, administrative tasks are automated.

Remote work. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that businesses not only can survive in a lockdown scenario but even thrive from it. As companies can save up to $11,000 a year on each remote employee, remote work or working from home will be the new normal. Expect more investment in this field, including advances in connectivity, to facilitate the production of a distributed work team.

There are various issues that obstruct productivity wherever the employee is working. Here are a few:

Bad management. One of the biggest causes of bad productivity at work is bad people management or conflicting instructions. When people spend more time trying to please their bosses instead of working, productivity will inevitably take a hit.

Poor working conditions. Lack of lighting, lots of noise, and uncomfortable heating and lighting can tire employees out.

Unintuitive office layout. Navigating the workplace should be as easy and intuitive as possible. It shouldn’t take too much time to locate a file or even something as simple as a pencil.

Communication problems. Like bad management, communication problems prevent colleagues from collaborating well with each other. If you can’t figure the best and fastest way to do your work, you’ll end up being unproductive as well.