The traditional workplace is no longer the only option: 39% of global knowledge workers are embracing a hybrid workstyle, according to a 2023 Gartner paper. Work from home is here to stay, making it essential for companies to adapt and make the most of work from home apps and tools.
In this article, we share with you 11 must-have work from home apps to empower your teams. From boosting productivity to facilitating seamless collaboration, these applications have become essential companions for the modern workforce.
What's the point of having good work from home apps?
You know, working from home might seem more convenient compared to the daily office grind. You no longer have to deal with long commutes, crowded subways or stressing about what to wear…
However, it comes with its own unique set of challenges. Whether you're flying solo or part of a remote team, these apps will be your secret weapons to face remote work’s challenges.
Improved collaboration and communication
Collaborating and communicating when you and your team aren't in the same place is one of the major challenges of remote work.
When everyone's in the office, you can easily ask a quick question in the open space. At home, it's harder. That's why apps like Slack or video meeting platforms like Zoom are essential to ensure smooth communication.
Coordinating and organizing to collaborate in the same place is also a challenge when everyone is working from their own sofa. It's unthinkable not to use collaboration applications like Claap, Notion or Jira to correctly assign tasks and carry them out in a shared workspace.
Enhanced productivity
Working from home has completely changed the way we manage projects. Remote working applications have been optimized to keep you and your teams productive on your projects.
Whether it's juggling the priorities, personalities and schedules of different teams, or managing who does what, you almost have to relearn how to collaborate. Applications like Jira, Trello, Linear or Miro help you efficiently manage your projects from home.
11 must-have work from home apps for 2023
- Claap: less meeting, more doing
- Miro: for visual brainstorming sessions
- Notion: your hub for asynchronous communication
- Google Drive: for storing files and editing them collectively in real time
- Jira: the most popular project management tool
- Slack: for seamless and quicker communication
- Linear: the software development tool for everyone
- Confluence: a workspace dedicated to remote teams
- Zoom Meetings: to organize video meetings easily
- Trello: for project task and progress management from anywhere
- Zapier: for juggling all your work from home applications
1. Claap: less meeting, more doing
Ok. I might be a little bit biased but I had to introduce Claap.
Claap is an all-in-one video workspace building for team collaboration. Claap brings meeting recording, screen recording and a collaboration hub.
Why should you use Claap?
At Claap, we feel that meetings take up a lot of time and energy, and it's not easy to coordinate them when teams are working from home. To solve this problem, Claap allows you to combine the best of both synchronous and asynchronous communication.
With Claap, you can replace your next meeting with a short video of your screen. You also have the possibility to keep your meeting and supercharge it with autogenerated notes and summaries thanks to Claap’s AI copilot.
Then, you’ll store and organize all your video content in one place for effortless collaboration and idea sharing.
Key features
- Record meetings with highlights: With Claap, you can record your meetings, pin key moments and share them to your teamworkers;
- Supercharge meetings with AI meeting summary software. You can get transcript and AI generated notes (99+ languages) from your recordings in seconds, according to the desired template. You no longer need to waste time editing your meeting summary and emailing them after to your team;
- Record videos of your screen and share them. Want to save time by replacing a meeting with a screen recording? Claap allows you to record a short video, and share it easily to your team. For example, it can save you a lot of time on training sessions or onboarding meetings;
- Build a video wiki. You can centralize all your video content in one place with Claap’s video wiki.
- BONUS: Claap integrates almost all the applications presented in the rest of this article. You're about to become a telecommuting superhero…
See for yourself how much Claap will boost your productivity while working from home with a free 14-day trial. You’ll experience unlimited access to all premium features (no credit card required).
2. Miro: for visual brainstorming sessions
Miro stands out as a convenient and user-friendly online collaborative whiteboard platform. It empowers remote-first and hybrid enterprises to seamlessly engage in design projects and tasks.
Why should you use Miro?
Miro will quickly become your best ally for brainstorming sessions. You can use Miro for brainstorming, without your teammates necessarily being in the same room as you.
Miro makes brainstorming a visual experience. It's like having a huge whiteboard at your disposal, where you can (digitally) stick stickers, draw arrows, add comments, zoom in and out, start again, cross out...
But don't worry, Miro won't leave you with a blank page: the application offers you lots of templates to frame your brainstorming.
Key features
- Miro offers over 2500+ customizable templates. You’ll find mind maps, flowcharts, design sprints, customer question boards and much more. Thanks to Miro’s bank of templates, you can better concentrate on the “substance” of your ideas, rather than their formatting;
- Your teams can collaborate sync or async;
- Optional anonymity for your shy colleagues;
- Background sound and music. It’s great for avoiding sneezing and awkward silences during hard brainstorming sessions.
3. Notion: your hub for asynchronous communication
Notion is an all-in-one workspace for both IRL and remote teams. It makes the most of AI to help your teams create, organize, and share various types of content.
Why should you use Notion?
Notion was originally designed for note-taking. But the tool has evolved to become your Swiss Army Knife for project management: it gathers your content in one place, builds workflows, manages your databases and much more.
You don't have to work at the same time to be efficient. That's the challenge Notion has taken up with asynchronous collaboration.
The icing on the cake? Notion’s minimalist interface and color scheme. They help you stay focused and make your notes super aesthetic at the same time.
Key features
- AI as your personal assistant. Are your notes in a mess? Ask Notion's AI to summarize what's important and usable;
- User-friendly interface. Notion is straight to the point;
- Super intuitive keyboard shortcuts. We're fans of slash commands: simply press “/” in Notion to display a menu of content blocks you can choose to insert;
- Highly customizable content. You can make Notion looks and feels any way you want. You can style your content to match your brand, project, team…;
- Embed Claap videos in your Notion pages. It will help you to provide more context on a project to your teammates.
4. Google Drive: for storing files and editing them collectively in real time
Google Drive is a file storage and sharing platform. And of course, it's hard to separate Google Drive from all the other applications in the Google Workspace, designed to make life easier for remote workers.
Why should you use Google Drive?
Google Drive's workspace has established itself as a must-have for remote work. It's not just for storage and sharing. Whether you're a solo freelancer or part of a growing business, its flexible workspace adapts to your needs.
With dedicated tools like Google Sheets, Slides, and Forms, you can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys, and more. Collaborate effortlessly with features like comments, annotations, suggestions, version history, and more.
Key features
- Storage. With Drive, you can store your documents (2TB with the standard business pack from €11.5/month/user) and access them from anywhere.
- Version history. This feature allows you to track and restore previous versions of your documents, ensuring you never lose important changes or information.
- Real-time synchronization of your documents. Have you ever forgotten to save a document and lost 3 hours of work? Because I did, and it really ruined my day. This problem disappears with real-time synchronization of documents on Drive, which is a relief.
- Collaborate with several people at the same time on the same file. Say goodbye to "Can you please get out of the document so I can edit it?”;
- Access to all Google Workspace features. By subscribing to the Google Workspace (from €5.75/month/user), you actually have access to all the applications in the google suite (calendar, google meet, google slides, google sheet, google drive, gmail...) which work perfectly with each other.
Bonus for Claap users: Did you know that it's super-easy to record a meeting with Claap on Google Meet, even if you're not the meeting organizer? We explain all our tips here!
5. Jira: the most popular project management tool
Jira is a project management tool used for tracking project tasks and workflows for agile teams. It’s also used for tracking issues and bugs.
Why should you use Jira?
If Jira was in high school with you, he'd probably be the popular guy. He's the golden boy of agile project teams.
Jira is built on agile principles, enabling your company to test, iterate and consistently update on your products. It's adaptable for various Agile methodologies such as Scrum or Kanban.
Then if you're a fan of iterations, Jira is an essential tool for identifying bugs and roadblocks during sprints as quickly as possible. To better illustrate identified bugs, you can also import screen recordings into your Jira issues. Jira is a way to optimize your sprint while staying at home. Usain Bolt envies you...
If Jira is the ally of all sprinters, it's also useful for all your project tasks. Jira provides transparency into active projects at any phase, enabling you to monitor all activities, from issue progress and task assignments to team discussions, and more.
Key features
- Software development tools. You’ll find help to build plannings, efficient task management, monitoring of deadlines or optimized workflows;
- Collaboration tools. Discussions, comments, tags, mentions, status updates…;
- Customizable workflows. You can create and tailor workflows to match your unique processes, ensuring a seamless fit with your project requirements. Because Jira is highly flexible, just let your creativity do the work;
- An infinite number of templates. Sometimes accused of being a little complex to get to grips with, the platform is fighting back by providing lots of templates. It has become DevOps heaven with bug tracking features, Scrum templates and Kanban boards.
6. Slack: for seamless and quicker communication
Do we still need to introduce Slack in 2023? It's become a work from home apps classic. Slack is a collaborative instant messaging system that lets you communicate with everyone on your project in real time.
Why should you use Slack?
If you're going to work from home, you need a tool to communicate with your teams. In 2023, Slack is proving to be far more efficient than emails, phone calls and other carrier pigeons for day-to-day interaction between teammates
Slack is an instant messaging system that lets you send short messages to any of your teammates. It also lets you make calls and share files. Discussion channels are open to all Slack members, but it's also possible to chat privately with anyone, in pairs or in groups.
Key features
- Real-time interactions. Slack offers instant messaging and chat features for remote teams to communicate promptly. No need to rack your brains writing an email for your everyday questions. Your contacts will get back to you much faster. What's more, it's a great way to lighten your mailbox;
- Collaborate on your files. You can share your files, images and videos with your teams with a click. You can also create canvases to store all the work elements you need (meeting notes, projects, to-do lists, etc.);
- Cool chat features. Chat features include threads, emojis and reactions to keep your discussions casual. Provide context to your colleagues by replying them with your Claap’s videos directly in Slack;
- Make calls. Slack isn't just a messaging service. You can also make audio or video calls to your contacts;
- Discussion channels. Slack's channel-based setup empowers teams to create dedicated spaces for specific projects or departments. You can keep your conversations and files well-organized and easily accessible through those channels.
7. Linear: the software development tool for everyone
Linear is dedicated to software production and development. Linear helps your teams monitor and control their progress and problems. This tool makes your life easier by offering you automations that will speed up your projects.
Why should you use Linear?
Linear was originally designed to notify you and help you correct bugs and now its possibilities have expanded. Linear is a software designed for all stages of project development.
Key features
- Task management software. Linear is your radar in the ocean of a software development project. You can use Linear to monitor backlogs, have a big picture of sprints, find out issues or even create roadmaps. You can even embed Claap videos to your Linear issues;
- Super user-friendly interface. You don't have to be a computer scientist to understand how to optimize your workflows. With its numerous shortcuts, you could even say that the app has something sexy about it…;
- Fast load time with real-time synchronization.
- Collaboration tools. Work with your team thanks to discussions, comments, updates…
8. Confluence: a workspace dedicated to remote teams
Confluence is a workspace designed for remote collaboration. You can do anything, from storing your files to collaborating on complex projects.
Why should you use Confluence?
Confluence goes beyond being a simple collaboration space. In addition to offering basic collaboration features (comments, all-in-one workspace...), Confluence is a great tool for tracking the progress of projects and teams.
Confluence is also very practical for leveraging your knowledge management or building a cool knowledge base. What’s more, you can embed Claap’s videos automatically in your Confluence knowledge base.
Key features
- Super flexible. Confluence adapts to your growing business needs;
- An all-in-one workspace. No need to dig through 3 different applications, Confluence lets you find and collaborate in the same place;
- Lots of different templates for lots of different teams. Confluence knows that each team (sales, marketing, design...) has different needs. To facilitate their cooperation, Confluence supports you with an extensive bank of templates (business plan, strategic plans, company vision...);
- Top-Notch integrations. Confluence integrates with 3,000+ applications, including Claap.
9. Zoom Meetings: to organize video meetings easily
Zoom is a video and audio meeting platform for hosting online meetings, training sessions, and webinars. Zoom is ideal for both one-on-one and group meetings.
Why should you use Zoom?
If you work remotely, you'll probably need to organize video meetings. Zoom is a video meeting platform that lets you host such meetings with your teams, or with external collaborators.
We've studied video meeting platforms carefully, and in our opinion Zoom is the platform that can't disappoint you. It offers top-quality audio and video and gathers all the basic features (see the list below) needed to organize an effective meeting. And Zoom is guaranteed to be super robust.
It's super easy to import your Zoom meetings into Claap to bring all your videos under the same workspace
Key features
- High-quality video and audio;
- Screen sharing. With Zoom, you can share your screen while seeing all meeting participants;
- Chat. You can interact with meeting participants via chat. You can reply to everyone, or chat privately with just one person;
- Break-out rooms. Need to get together in a small group? Break-out rooms are a great way to collaborate more effectively in smaller groups;
- Waiting rooms. It allows you, the host, to control when a participant joins the meeting;
- Share files. You can send your multimedia files via the application, so collaboration doesn't just stop at the meeting;
- Custom backgrounds: Show off your tropical beach or outer space vibes—it's your call;
- Gallery view feature: Zoom allows all your participants to see each other. Even better: the "Together mode", allows users to see all participants in a shared virtual environment.
10. Trello: for project task and progress management from anywhere
Trello is a project management and task organization tool. It uses a card-based system to help you and your teams manage your work.
Why should you use Trello?
Trello lets you manage projects and monitor their progress wherever you are. Who's doing what? Tables, lists and cards give you a clear view of which tasks need to be done and by whom.
You don't have to be physically present in the office to be told what to do by your boss. Simply consult Trello in the morning to get a clear view of the work ahead.
And if you're the boss, it's all the same. You can delegate tasks to your teams and still keep an overview. All from the comfort of your own home.
Key features
- Different views to keep track of your projects’ progress. Ideas for your project are racing through your head and you're struggling to get a handle on your workload and priorities? Trello helps you organize your project’s tasks visually. It’s even possible to provide more context to your teams by embedding Claap’s videos in your cards. Trello makes it easy for you and your teams to understand who's doing what and when;
- Timeline to manage deadlines. Time is money, and Trello gets it. With the Timeline feature, you get a clear view of your project deadlines and can easily revise your prioritization. For example, you can adjust start and due dates as priorities change;
- Built-in automation tool. Trello has a high-performance, code-free automation to optimize your repetitive tasks such as archiving a task or assigning a task manager.
11. Zapier: for juggling all your work from home applications
Zapier is a platform that lets you automate actions and workflows between several web applications you use every day.
Why should you use Zapier?
We've come to the end of the list, and I can already see you downloading the previous 10 tools. Well, Zapier already anticipates that juggling between all your different applications will be no easy task…
With Zapier, you create “Zaps” which are commands to be executed in one of your applications when a condition is met in another application. Zaps save you time by automating many of the tasks you perform on a daily basis. It lets you keep your focus on the job in hand, and not on the tools.
Here are few examples:
- You can have a prospect you've met in a Zoom meeting automatically added to your CRM;
- You can have attachments from some of your emails automatically uploaded to your Google Drive account;
- You can have a message sent in a Slack chosen channel when a new task is created in Trello.
Key features
- Build the workflows you want. You can design and construct personalized automated workflows in a few minutes between all the supported apps;
- Integration with 6,000+ applications;
- Tailored automation. You can custom logic to execute actions according to specified if/then rules. No need to be an experienced coder to get started with Zapier;
- Cloud-based tool accessible from anywhere.
While you can still work without the right tools, maximizing your productivity and time efficiency necessitates the use of specific collaborative apps. Pick from our list of the 11 best tools for working from home, and you can't go wrong!
