30 Free Tools for Startups [Updated for 2023]

If you're a startup founder or have a small side project, you know that coding is not enough. You must be a superhuman, who is responsible for the management, marketing, development, communication, and all other areas.

To manage all these, you need tools. And not surprisingly, tools cost money. Luckily, there are great products with free plans.

We curated 30 tools with excellent free plans for small businesses. This collection covers 10 startup areas. Three tools for each category:

• Project management
• Product management
• Design
• Development
• Analytics
• Sales & Marketing
• Communication
• Finance & Legal
• Productivity
• Community

Let's start with Project management tools.

Project management

1. Notion

Notion is a project management and note-taking tool. It's designed to help individuals or team members coordinate deadlines, objectives, and assignments for efficiency and productivity.

2. FigJam

FigJam is an online whiteboard to ideate and brainstorm. It has a lot of templates for diagrams, sprint designs, mood boards, meeting templates, and more.

It can help you (your team) stay organized, brainstorm creative solutions, and focus on important tasks.

3. Trello

Trello is the ultimate project management tool. Start a board in seconds, automate tedious tasks, and collaborate anywhere, even on mobile.

Product management

4. MarkUp

MarkUp lets you collect feedback directly on websites, videos, PDFs, and images. It improves the way your team collaborates on websites, images, PDFs, and videos. MarkUp.io supports over 30 file types.

5. Hotjar

Hotjar is an intuitive, visual way to discover, consolidate, and communicate user needs. Understand how users behave on your site, what they need, and how they feel.

6. ParityDeals

Optimize your product pricing across countries to maximize revenue. Fast solution - complete setup in under 2 minutes. No coding required.

Design

7. Lunacy

Free design software that keeps your flow with AI tools and built-in graphics. All-in-one solution: image upscaler, background remover, avatar and text generator. Provides free icons, illustrations, and photos.

8. Flaticon

Download Free Icons and Stickers for your projects. Resources made by and for designers. PNG, SVG, EPS, PSD and CSS formats.

9. unDraw

Create better designed websites, products and applications. Browse to find the images that fit your messaging, customise the color to match your brand and use it as a normal image, embedded code or directly in your design workflow.

Development

10. Typedream

With Typedream, you can build web pages, customize them, and even connect your existing database without code.

11. Magical

With no integrations and a simple keystroke, Magical lets anyone automate tasks by moving data between tabs. Populate messages, sheets & forms without the time-consuming copy-paste.

12. FlutterFlow

Build applications faster than ever. Create beautiful UI, generate clean code, and deploy to the app stores or web in one click. Fully extensible with custom code.

Analytics

13. Airtable

Airtable is a low-code platform for building collaborative apps. Customize your workflow, collaborate, and achieve ambitious outcomes.

14. Mixpanel

Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users. Go beneath the surface to learn which features are popular, who your power users are, and the behaviors tied to long-term retention.

15. Parsehub

ParseHub is a free and powerful web scraping tool. With ParseHub, extracting data is as easy as clicking on the data you need.

Sales&Marketing

16. Gumroad

Gumroad is a powerful, but simple, e-commerce platform. Gumroad makes it easy to earn your first dollar online by selling digital products, memberships and more.

17. MailTester

Check your newsletter's spam score and quality. This tool's free, and pretty.

18. Tally

Creating forms with Tally is free. 99% of all features are available to all users without limits on creating forms, input blocks or respondents.

Communication

19. Tella

Screen and camera recording for making an impression. Fully customisable, instantly shareable, all in your browser.

20. Tandem

The virtual office for remote and hybrid teams. See who’s around, talk, and collaborate effortlessly.

21. Whereby

Whereby makes it super simple for collaborating teams to jump on a video call. Have better video calls and integrate real-time video into your product.

Finance&Legal

22. Fundraising kit

All you need to raise a round. Guides, templates, advice on pitch deck, and tools collection. 100% Free!

23. Avodocs

Free legal documents for startups. Don’t let legal matters distract you from building your company.

24. Pandadoc

Create, manage and e-Sign docs with ease. Share documents in minutes, review quickly and confidently, maintain compliance and control.

Productivity

25. Summari

Instantly summarize text. Summari is comprehensive, high-quality summaries written by humans + AI.

26. Calendly

Calendly works with your calendar to automate appointment scheduling. It is your hub for scheduling meetings professionally and efficiently, eliminating the hassle of back-and-forth emails so you can get back to work.

27. Todoist

Organize your work and life. Become focused, organized, and calm with Todoist. The world’s #1 task manager and to-do list app.

Community

28. Discord

Discord is a community platform. Users can communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or community groups (servers).

29. Threado

The command center for community builders. Get actionable insights, automate your community workflows and activate more members across Slack, Discord, Discourse and other platforms.

30. Orbit

Community growth platform. Orbit's unique approach is based on the Orbit Model, a framework to visualize and quantify your entire community so that you can scale high gravity communities.

Conclusion

Finding the right combination of tools can be a challenge for Founders. Especially it's hard not to spend all the budget on them.

If you are anything like me, you hate spending time on it. This time can be dedicated to more impactful activities - acquiring and converting more customers.