The Best Team Collaboration Suites

Online team collaboration tools were on the rise for years – and the ongoing pandemic has sent their usage into overdrive. Now, more people are working remotely than ever before – definitely more of them the companies themselves imagined ever to do so.

There are several such product suites to choose from, independent products and others backed by tech giants alike.

Surprising as it may sound, Google doesn’t have a dedicated collaboration suite. The best-known brand of Alphabet, now worth $1 trillion, has several independent tools that can be used for collaboration but not one brand that unifies file sharing, presentations, video conferencing, email, and such.

Others have, in turn, gathered all these under the same umbrella, giving the world complete solutions to cover all their remote working needs.

These are the biggest, most-used ones today.

Slack

Slack blasted into the spotlight in 2016 when Microsoft wanted to acquire it – the Redmond Giant has, in turn, given up its ambition to buy the tool and decided to build its own instead. But even without Microsoft behind it, Slack managed to grow into one of the leaders on its market.

Slack is a well-crafted platform with a very capable free tier, many useful features and even more integrations with third-party tools – apps – covering everything from Google Drive to Gfycat.

Flock

Flock is a bit similar to Slack but with one major difference – it is especially focused on communication. While Slack also offers video calls, Flock goes all-in, supporting channels for different teams, one on one video chat, audio calls, screen sharing, note sharing, polls, and task assignments to different team members.

Flock’s free tier is limited compared to the one above but it also comes with cloud storage.

Microsoft Teams

For businesses already using Office 365, Microsoft Teams is the logical choice for an online collaboration tool. It has advanced security and data protection features, and it comes fully integrated with the Office 365 suite.

Microsoft Teams comes with a free tier without any Office integration – but for small businesses, it has an affordable $5 “basic” plan with Office 365 Business Essentials included, and its “premium” plan that costs $20 per month per user comes with goodies like unlimited personal cloud storage, audio conferencing and support for phone systems, configurable policies, and many others.

Asana

Asana is a veteran in its area, being around since 2008. It is built as an easy way for companies to keep track of their employees’ work while also providing conversation and communication tools and features like to-do lists and reminders. It also comes with a set of handy integrations like Adobe Creative Cloud, Gmail, Salesforce, and several cloud storage services.

Ryver

Finally, let’s not forget about Ryver, a group chat, collaboration, and workflow automation service. It is, in many ways, similar to Slack, offering a highly effective communication tool as well as a very flexible one. They describe themselves as a tool that can replace Stack and Trello.

Ryver is available on pretty much every platform, from Mac and Linux to Android and iOS.