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The best online collaboration apps help teams work together better, regardless of whether members are remote or all in one physical location. Typically, the best collaboration software keeps you in the loop about relevant team activity and helps you communicate your progress to others. Through these apps, you can access the information and assets you need, so you can pick up your part of the work at the right time without someone else telling you to do so. Collaboration software is a subcategory of productivity software, which we have been covering for more than a decade. Here, we collected the top team collaboration tools based on our testing and analysis. The lines between collaboration software and project management, task management, and whiteboard apps (among others) aren't always clear, so our picks span several categories.
Our Top Tested Picks
Teamwork
Zoho Projects
Google Workspace
Smartsheet
Microsoft Teams
Best for Shared Task Management
Todoist
- Cross-platform support with effortless, reliable syncing
- Excellent features, such as natural language input and productivity reports
- Efficient interface
- Supports collaboration
- Works offline
- A few important features aren't available to free users
Best for Workflow Management
Asana
- Flexible, fast, and modern design
- Capable free version
- Lots of features
- Timeline view makes it easier to manage dependencies
- Not ideal for graphics-intensive work
- Prices slightly higher than competitors
Best for Beginners to Project Management
GanttPro
- Competitively priced
- Well designed and easy to learn to use
- Includes custom fields for tasks, board view, critical path feature
- Saves history for undo
- No customizable reporting tools or customizable dashboards
- No billing or invoicing
- Light on integrations
Best for Whiteboard Collaboration
Miro
- Excellent collaboration and presentation tools
- Lots of features
- Strong support for integration with other apps and services
- Easy to use
- Little offline functionality
Best Full Business Office Suite
Microsoft 365
- The most powerful, feature-rich office suite
- Smooth collaboration features
- Distraction-free focus view in Word
- Convenient automated features in Excel
- Regular updates with added features
- Includes access to web and mobile versions
- Outlook’s new version lacks essential features from the old version
- Word’s automation features are intrusive and hard to control
- Some features are deeply hidden in obscure menus
Best Team Messaging App
Slack
- Rich set of tools and options
- Highly customizable
- Integrates with many other collaboration and office tools
- Expensive
- Audio and video call quality need improvements
Best Project Management App for Client Work
Teamwork
- Simple and intuitive design
- Great customization options
- Billing and invoicing included
- Free account available
- No PDF or image markup tools
Best for Small Business Project Management
Zoho Projects
- Excellent value
- Generally easy to set up and navigate
- Multiple ways to communicate in the app
- Deep configuration options
- Strong time-tracking tools
- Does not include premade templates
- Slightly unusual resource management view
Best for Database-Driven Collaboration
Airtable
- Light and user-friendly interface
- Highly versatile
- Excellent collaboration tools
- Works with a long list of third-party services
- Useful AI features
- Pricey
- Some formatting limitations
Best for Structured Collaboration
Basecamp
- Easy to set up and use
- Flat monthly price for unlimited users
- Supports integration with a wide variety of apps and services
- Communications can feel siloed
- Limited reports
- No free account
Best for Office Collaboration
Google Workspace
- Elegant office tools
- Works the same on any browser
- Fine-tuned collaboration and revision-tracking features
- Corporate-friendly user management
- Online-only apps
- Less powerful than comparable desktop apps
- Offline editing requires Chrome and advance planning
Best for Managing Project Work With Automations
Smartsheet
- Endlessly customizable and quite powerful
- Supports automations, input from web forms, proofing and approvals
- Robust resource management options for Business plan users
- Lacks real-time time tracking and invoicing tools
- Pages don't update in real time or autosave as frequently as we'd like
Best Kanban-Style Collaboration Tool
Trello
- Flexible and customizable kanban app
- Suitable for teams of all sizes
- Highly intuitive
- Offers desktop apps and mobile apps
- Many features require add-ons, including time tracking and billing
- Not suitable for managing traditional projects
Best for Team Chat in a Microsoft Environment
Microsoft Teams
- Highly customizable
- Tightly integrated with other Microsoft Office apps
- Plentiful integration options
- Included with Microsoft 365 business accounts and Windows 11
- Most effective in a Microsoft-centric environment
- Compartmentalized design may inhibit open dialogue
- Can be difficult to find the conversations you need
The Best Online Collaboration Software for 2025 Compare Specs
What Are the Best Project Management Apps for Collaboration?
Project management software is one of the most competitive categories. PCMag has three Editors' Choice winners for project management, all of which we also include on this list of the best collaboration apps:
GanttPro for small teams that are new to project management
Zoho Projects for small and growing businesses on a budget
Teamwork for client work
What Is the Best Visual Collaboration App?
Visual collaboration apps are growing in popularity, and our two favorites are Editors' Choice winner Miro and close runner-up Mural.
Both take the form of a digital whiteboard or canvas that multiple people join simultaneously. They have tools for drawing, posting sticky notes with text, uploading files and images, embedding videos, and adding other kinds of content. Miro offers video calling, so you can chat with colleagues while simultaneously brainstorming and working on visual projects. Mural purposely offers only audio calls. The idea is to keep the visual focus on the board.
Miro and Mural both include a healthy stock of templates. Mural's library includes many for team building and group icebreakers. They work almost like tabletop games. Miro offers more in the way of library objects and templates for making charts, diagrams, and other visual aids you can reuse in other business materials, such as presentations. If neither of those apps fits your needs, consider Conceptboard or Lucidspark.
What Is the Best Multipurpose Collaboration App?
A few of the entries on this list don't fit neatly into any one category. In a way, that's what makes them special. They're customizable multipurpose tools.
Asana, for instance, started as a task management tool but now has tools for managing ideas, projects, workflows, and more. If you want to use it as a full-fledged project management app, you can, but Asana's real strength is its flexibility.
Basecamp belongs among the best multipurpose collaboration apps, too. It's one of the stronger examples of an app that balances work management and communication. With it, you can manage both project and non-project work. It's a great place to have asynchronous discussions with in-house colleagues as well as partners on the outside, such as contractors and clients. It all depends on what you need the tool to do.
What Is the Best Collaborative To-Do List App?
Todoist is our Editors' Choice winner for to-do list apps, but it's also a highly valuable collaboration tool. If your team needs an inexpensive app that helps a group of people write down, prioritize, and manage everything they need to get done, it's unbeatable.
What makes Todoist better than other collaborative to-do list apps? For starters, it has apps for every major platform that all work reliably and sync effortlessly. It also gives you a ton of tools for organizing tasks, such as priority ratings and labels, without creating a cluttered interface. That keeps the app easy to use and highly accessible to newcomers.
What Are the Best Collaborative Database Apps?
Two apps on this list specialize in changing the way you manage and interact with relational databases: Airtable and Smartsheet.
Before the word database makes you run away, know that Airtable is an approachable collaboration tool with a variety of uses. You can set it up to manage information, such as an editorial calendar, or any kind of collection, such as inventory. You can use it to track and monitor work as it goes through a workflow, moving, for example, from one person to another for edits or approvals. It's surprisingly easy to use, highly customizable, and downright versatile.
Smartsheet is another app that lets you work with relational databases, though it's a bit beefier than Airtable. At PCMag, we cross-list Smartsheet under project management software because it can do that, too. What makes Smartsheet powerful is its support for automations. Here's an example: When new information comes in through a client intake form, alert the team manager and automatically assign one of the junior team members a task to follow up with the new client within three days. When you automate rote tasks, it saves the entire team time that they can spend on more important work.
What Is the Best Collaboration App for Kanban?
Kanban is a system for working that's applicable in a variety of fields, though it's especially popular among software developers and other kinds of technical workers. Simply put, here's how kanban works: It uses cards on a board to represent tasks or ideas. The board contains columns, and each column is (usually) a stage or step in the work process. So you might have a board with the columns To Do, Doing, Done. You write down all the tasks that you need to do and put them into the To Do column. When you start a task, you move the associated card to the Doing column. When you finish, put said card in the Done column.
Trello is one of the friendliest kanban tools on the market. Anyone can sign up for an account and start using it quickly. Even free users can use an unlimited number of Power-Ups (that is, add-on features) per board that expand its functionality.
Many collaboration apps, including Asana, Teamwork, Todoist, and Zoho Projects, now offer a kanban view, often called a board view, so you always have the option to work in this style.
What Else Qualifies as a Collaboration App?
Among the other products we include here are collaborative office suites, such as the venerable Microsoft 365 and fully online Google Workspace.
Team messaging apps such as Microsoft Teams and Slack also make the cut. They support one-to-one and group text communications, along with some basic video meeting functionality.
Culture Is Key to Collaboration
One important point about all tools for team collaboration and communication is that they must have a company culture behind them. Throwing a new tool at a bunch of people and telling them to use it instead of email doesn't work. To start using a collaboration tool successfully, all the key players on the team need to buy into it. It has to become part of the culture.
When you're up and running with a collaboration app that fits your needs, and everything starts clicking, you might be amazed at how much more productive and organized your team becomes.
