20+ FREE Popular Personal Productivity Tools

From project tracking to email scheduling to office productvity suites, here are our favorite productivity tools that you can install to satiate your needs

For: Project Management and Time Tracking

Freedcamp

Freedcamp is used for project planning, organization, and action. It allows you to share project to-dos, project files, and join in discussions with team members. It is free for unlimited number of users and projects. After initial sign up users can use a number of basic applications and can add additional functionality at a later stage. The core applications allow users to assign tasks to people, set milestones, schedule events on a calendar, use discussion boards, and track time spent on tasks.

While adding team members and syncing with Google Calendar would definitely be a pro feature with other applications, Freedcamp lets you do the vast majority of activities pro bono. If there are advanced features like CRM and invoices you want to integrate, you can pay per add-ons so that you’re only paying for what you really need. I’d definitely recommend checking this one out!

Toggl

Toggl is a simple time tracker tool to calculate the time taken to complete various tasks. It also lets you look at reports and see how much time you spent on different projects throughout the week. Time entries and active timers are synchronized in real-time via a cloud service to the web site and various applications. Reporting features lets users track the time spent on various projects and analyze productivity.

Trello

It is an another project management tool that makes collaboration easy whether you’re organizing work projects, family chores, travel plans, or just about anything else. It can also be used as a weekly planner, with lists for each day of the week. Trello has a variety of work and personal uses including real estate management, software project management, school bulletin boards, lesson planning, and law office case management.

For: Virtual Meetings

MeetingBurner

MeetingBurner is not only used to fire up online meetings, but can also be used for hosting webinars, and sharing your screen. It includes Skype integration, conference lines, and one click recording and sharing. The in-built analytics lets you know how your users interact with your content at the meeting. You can join online meetings from your mobile device and the application gives participants access to the meeting information, screen sharing, chat, participant lists, streaming audio, and more.

Join.Me

It is a simple online meeting solution that makes collaborating easier than ever and does not require downloads for viewers. Instantly share your ideas and collaborate in seconds from your desktop to your tablet to your smart phone. It allows up to 10 video feeds at a time. Presenters can also set whether participants can talk or are muted. Online chat is available in all video conferences.

Fuze Meeting

It is a web conferencing service that works particularly well for international businesses or entrepreneurs who are more on the move. In addition to being compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux, it is also available for mobile devices. The service can handle up to 12 video streams at once and also includes chat feature for one-on-one side conversations. It is also integrated with cloud wherein you can add content to the cloud at any point during the meeting to share on the screen or via a link.

For: Official Chores

Evernote

It is one of the popular cross-platform note-taking services, allowing users to take and upload notes, pictures, audio and video snippets and organize them into cloud notebooks that can be synced across different devices. Loaded with powerful organization, formatting and sharing options, Evernote is still king even with competitors such as OneNote and Google Keep. The free version lets users upload 60MB of content monthly, with paid accounts allowing more options.

Freedly

The mobile app merges the best of multiple interfaces, with a text-only list view for quick browsing through your news feed and uses different layouts for a more visual treat. Feedly lets you organize all your favorite publications, podcasts and YouTube channels into collections and receive updates when new stories and videos are published. Users can sign up for topical updates from a variety of websites and blogs, or add custom subscriptions from sources like RSS. If you are a social butterfly, the app also integrates seamlessly with Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Buffer, OneNote, Pinterest and LinkedIn so that you can easily share the stories you read in your Feedly account with your friends and colleagues.

Google Translate

Going abroad? Google Translate is the companion you need. Translate makes it easy to convert text from one language to another in ways that actually make sense. Sure, you can type in a phrase in your native tongue and have Translate move it into another language. But you can also take a snapshot of a sign, menu, or document with your phone and have Translate convert it to the text. You can speak into your phone in one language and have Translate speak back in another. And you can do it all offline, provided you download the necessary language packs in advance.

Expensify

Keeping track of expenses can be a pain while you are more on the move. Expensify can ease the burden. The app provides an easy-to-follow interface for tracking time, miles, receipts, and invoices on the go, then generating on-demand reports as needed. Expensify lets you scan receipts as you get them, after which it automatically pulls out the relevant info from the images and puts it into your records. It can tap into your phone’s GPS to log miles as you drive, and it offers offline functionality for the times when you can’t get a signal.

Skype

Skype is a handy communication tool that offers free instant messaging, video and voice calls, and file sharing. Its paid features include mobile and landline calls, text messaging and access to Skype Wi-Fi public hotspots. It’s a great, low-cost option that facilitates communication and collaboration with team members.

For: Customer Relationship Management

Sugar CRM

A complete CRM system for businesses of all sizes. Core CRM functionality includes sales automation, marketing campaigns, support cases, email, calendaring and more. Developers can easily extend the application with new CRM functionality unique to your business. It has email integration that allows you to email clients from within the application without needing to open an additional program and toggle between the two. Many of the tools included with SugarCRM also doubles up to keep track of your employees’ workflow and performance. It can also display which project each employee is assigned to and follow his or her interactions with your clients.

VIENNA Advantage

It is a full ERP and CRM covering all functional areas such as Document Management, Sales Force Automation, Order Management, Materials Management, Financials, Purchase, Budgeting and Controlling, Support, Service Contracts, Marketing, HR, Payroll, Workflow Management and many more. It is based on C#.Net with a HTML5 UI. It also offers a mobile UI for iPhone and Android.

OpenCRX

It meets the needs of organizations requiring multifunctional, enterprise-wide coordination of sales generation, sales fulfillment, marketing and service activities to customers, partners, suppliers or intermediaries. It is flexible and can be extended and customized in all aspects and at all levels: starting from simple, XML-based GUI customizing up to modifying the standard business-logic or even extending the API.

For: Social Media Marketing

Buffer

Buffer is a tool designed to manage social networks, by providing the means for a user to schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin. Its best feature is its scheduling which allows you to pre-post content to go out at specific times of the day whether you’re around or not. It also allows you to build up a queue of content to share with your friends and followers, and keep an track on your posts with Buffer’s analytics to see which posts performed best.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management system for brand management created by Ryan Holmes in 2008. The user interface is clean and takes the form of a dashboard, and supports social network integrations for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Foursquare, MySpace, WordPress, TrendSpottr and Mixi. Additional integrations are available via Hootsuite’s App Directory, including Instagram, MailChimp, Reddit, Storify, Tumblr, Vimeo and YouTube.

Rignite

It covers all your social media needs at one social media platform, covering daily posting, goal-based campaigns, and analytics data. Its campaign based posting feature is unique which allows you to set a specific set of posts to promote a product, an event or a promotion and track the results of that campaign.

For: Email Scheduling

Boomerang

Write an email, schedule it to be sent automatically and Boomerang will take it from there. You just need to compose the message as you normally would, then click the Send Later button. The textbox in the app understands phrases like “next Monday” to tell Boomerang when to send your message that also adds for the convenience. It can also bring your email back to your inbox, marked unread, starred or even at the top of your message list.

Right Inbox

With Right Inbox, it does not matter when you have an idea be it day or at night. You can set a date for sending the email and it will automatically send your emails at the specified time. You can also add a reminder to an email, get notified when you need. When a recipient opens a tracked email, Right Inbox for Gmail will send you a detailed report including their location and IP address.

For: Presentations

Prezi

It is a cloud-based presentation software that employs a zooming user interface (ZUI) allowing users to zoom in and out of their presentation media. Under Prezi Collaborate up to ten people that may be in same location or geographically separated can co-edit and show their presentations in real time. Users participate in a Prezi simultaneously, and each is visually represented in the presentation window by a small avatar. You can also invite participants to edit the Prezi presentation at a later time if they wish wherein a link will be sent and the participant has up to ten days to edit the presentation.

Slide Rocket

It is an online presentation platform that lets users create, manage, share and measure presentations and is provided via a SaaS model. Being a cloud based app it can extract information from the Web. Thus if you want to add a video to a slide, just click on the Video button on the main toolbar that opens a Web page where you can select a video from Flickr or YouTube, or upload a video from your hard disk.

#Slides

It allows anyone to create a professionally designed presentation in mere minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse. To make your experience with #Slides seamless and to further customize your slide, you can open your #Slides presentations within PowToon Studio. You can also mix your slides with funky animations and designs that will give you a great presentation in the end.