We recommend Hostwinds to small businesses seeking affordable, reliable, and user-friendly hosting with strong customer support. It's an excellent service with many server configurations, including shared and dedicated hosting, though its virtual private server (VPS) hosting is particularly outstanding. Hostwinds offers a great selection of fully managed and self-managed VPS servers in both Linux and Windows formats, providing small businesses with tremendous flexibility.

Wix is ideal for building a website for your business. Its intuitive and robust design tools empower you to create sites that truly capture your vision. Hundreds of templates and numerous widgets provide visual variety and extra functionality, too. The free tier lets you safely sample its offerings, and then you can scale up into a service your company can rely on.

FreshBooks stands out for its exceptional user interface on mobile and web. If you are trying to keep costs down for your business, you should explore its Lite plan. This tier supports a maximum of five clients but lets you accept ACH and credit card payments, keep tabs on time and expenses, pull in and manage your bank account transactions, and spin up an unlimited number of invoices and estimates. Reports are flexible and attractive, and you can easily export them to Excel. Just keep in mind that FreshBooks works best for service-based businesses rather than product-based ones; QuickBooks Online is what you should choose in the latter case.

When it comes to payroll services, OnPay is a superb value. It offers exceptional depth across its employee profiles and payroll run pages, while plenty of customization options are available for the main dashboard and reports. Its mobile and web experiences are top-notch thanks to snappy performance and effective use of attractive, colorful graphics. We also appreciate the extent of OnPay's HR components; a centralized page includes links to company resources and onboarding workflows, and an especially effective tool helps employees sign up for health insurance.

Whether you're an e-commerce novice or a seasoned vet, you'll want to use Shopify, a flexible and powerful tool for setting up an online shop. With it, you can build a website, enjoy unlimited inventory and storage, explore store-enhancing plug-ins, and, most importantly, accept payments from major credit cards. The super-basic Starter plan ($5 per month) lets you sell wares via social media, while the high-end Plus plan supports 200 physical inventory locations (for a hefty $2,300 per month, with a three-year commitment).

PayPal might suffice if your small business doesn't need a robust online store. With a PayPal Business account, you can create and send invoices, enjoy seller protection benefits, and set up recurring subscriptions, as well as accept digital payments from the more than 400 million active accounts (as of Q4 2024). That's a lot of potential customers, hopefully ready to fork over their money for your products or services, already in the ecosystem.

GanttPro is an especially beginner-friendly project management solution with a competitive price. As its name suggests, it helps you create Gantt Charts, which include key details such as what tasks you need to complete and by when, how long you should expect each one to take, which tasks you can't start until a previous item is complete, and who is responsible for each task. It doesn't overwhelm you with features, but it does let you create custom fields for tasks and switch to a board, calendar, or list view. The critical path feature is especially helpful because it quickly lets you determine which items absolutely can't slip so that others can stay on track.

Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) is a comprehensive marketing hub that includes email and SMS marketing features. It also offers advanced automation functions and built-in CRM capabilities. Plus, it has excellent third-party integration options, including e-commerce staples like Shopify and WooCommerce, other CRMs from Hubspot, Salesforce, and Zoho, and SEO tools like Google Analytics. Its reasonable pricing, streamlined marketing features, and user-friendly interface make it fantastic for small to midsize businesses.

Even if you have never used CRM software before, Bigin by Zoho CRM is highly accessible because of its straightforward user experience and affordable price (it even offers a completely free version for sole proprietors). It provides clear formatting instructions for importing contacts, customizable profile pages for customers, and effective sections for managing leads. You can build workflow automations with Bigin, though you need to pay for the full Zoho CRM product if you want advanced AI tools for tracking client sentiment and predicting sales. A streamlined analytics section and generous support for integrations round out the experience.

Webex by Cisco's generous free tier lets you conduct 40-minute video meetings with up to 100 people. Within meetings, the breakout room, captioning (including sign language interpretation), messaging, Reactions (it recognizes gestures you make and displays the corresponding emoji), and screen-sharing features all work smoothly. We especially like that it lets you create an unlimited number of whiteboards for collaboration, while the VidCast tool is extremely useful for creating short video tutorials for internal use. Upgrading to a paid tier unlocks 10 GB of cloud storage for meeting recordings, AI tools for drafting messages and summarizing what's transpired, live polling and Q&A features via Slido, and more generous meeting length and participant limits.

RingCentral RingEX's full-featured base plan supports unlimited domestic calling, text messaging, and video chats for up to 100 people. You also get some advanced AI features at this level, including real-time call transcriptions and summaries of video meetings. The software is easy to set up and administer, thanks to its sophisticated interface across all platforms and an abundance of customization settings. We also appreciate its reliable performance and class-leading support for third-party integrations. If you don't want to pay extra for international calling, however, go with Intermedia Unite, which stands out for many of the same reasons.

Asana is a superb, flexible collaboration app that falls somewhere between the project management and task management categories. At its core, it helps you keep track of what tasks you and your team members need to do and when. But it doesn't put many restrictions on how you go about organizing everything or force you to follow certain workflows. As such, you need to dedicate time to figure out how it works most effectively within your business. The good news is that the free version is robust enough for a very small team to use long-term. We like its slick, user-friendly interface, too.

Zendesk for Customer Service starts at a reasonable price ($19 per person per month, billed annually), making it an attractive option for small businesses. The base tier unlocks all of the platform's core ticket management features, including automations, canned responses, and routing. You can handle tickets from Facebook and X, connect with any prebuilt integrations, and set up a knowledge base, too. Zendesk's user experience is straightforward and professional, so it shouldn't pose too steep a learning curve. Just keep in mind that you need to spring for at least the Suite + Copilot Professional plan ($155 per person per month, billed annually) to get the full range of AI capabilities, such as AI-assisted knowledge base building and natural language prompting in the admin and reporting areas.

HaloITSM helps you support internal employees and, as its name implies, follows the Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) approach. Its fixed pricing plans start at around $95 per person per month, and a license includes all the platform's features. The software provides a comprehensive set of automation, knowledge base creation, and ticket management tools within an extremely intuitive, visually compelling interface. Seamless AI tools for building knowledge base articles, evaluating employee sentiment, summarizing resolutions, and triaging tickets also impress. Integrations with a good range of popular apps and highly flexible reporting tools round out its impressive feature set. HaloITSM dives deeper into asset, change, and project management than many competitors, too. 24/7 support is available via email or phone.