Hey everyone,
I am Hrishikesh, co-founder of Flexiple, an exclusive freelance network for developers & designers.
I am forever on the lookout for great tools that help me get work done better & easier and I regularly feature them on remote.tools.
So here, I am sharing the list of my go-to "Free forever" tools.
For easier reading, I've categorised them based on their primary function:
- Bonus Tools
- Bug Tracking
- File Hosting
- Productivity
- Code Collaboration
- Product Management
- Project Management
- Design Collaboration
- Team chat
- Document Collaboration
- Remote Whiteboard
- Standups
- Time Tracking
- Virtual Office
Bonus Tools
Freebies.ByPeople
Freebies.bypeople is a professionally-curated repository of the best free-for-commercial use resources for developers and designers. It includes icons, fonts, plugins, UI kits, web templates, web tools & much more.
Lunchclub
Lunchclub aims to make remote networking easier. You can register on the site with your background, interests, and goals, and each week, the AI-based tool directly matches you with relevant people for 1:1 conversations
Cafecito
Cafecito is great for connecting with other people who share similar interests. Its algorithm matches you with vetted creatives to have "coffee break"-style conversations with them.
Reslash
Reslash is a video communication tool that aims to make team conversations realistic and fun. Team members can hangout in a single virtual space, where if you move closer to someone, you can hear them, and as you move away, they fade away.
Discord
Discord is a team cha tool that makes it easy to collaborate with people online. Whether you’re part of a dev team, or just a handful of friends that want to spend time together, Discord makes it easy to talk every day and hang out more often. Check out these cool tips for formatting text better on Discord.
Bug Tracking
Linear
Linear is an issue tracking tool that allows seamless collaboration between developers, designers, and peers. It helps streamline software projects, sprints, tasks, and bug tracking.
Zoho Bug Tracker
Zoho Bug Tracker is a simple, fast and scalable bug tracking application that offers a nifty set of features & dashboards with a high level of customisability.
File Hosting
BlackHole
BlackHole is secure, server-less file transfer that works on blockchain. It's open-source, and is available for Windows and Mac. It offers a simple UI, data streaming, and transfer compression.
Productivity
CoderMirror
CoderMirror integrates with your JetBrains IDEs to allow you to track, analyse, and create reports of your coding activity. It collects detailed data on your activity and enables you to perform personal retrospectives.
Metro Retro
Metro Retro is a web application that helps teams run engaging and fun retrospectives. It uses real-time updates, and a quirky sense of humor to help teams manage their retros. It also offers a wide set of templates.
Friday
Friday is a tool that can be used as a compliment to your team's Slack. It allows you to better organise and comprehend team chats and automate routine tasks. It is aimed at teams who want to efficiently run recurring communication like one-on-one conversations or standups.
Code Collaboration
CoScreen
CoScreen allows you to turn your secondary display into your "team desktop" via a single drag-and-drop interface. Peers can share their windows on the same desktop in real-time, and each of them is given their own mouse pointer to interact with the shared windows.
CodeStream
CodeStream lets coders eliminate the friction that accompanies code reviews. With CodeStream, you can get feedback on a WIP project within two clicks, allowing you to course-correct early on and obtain better code quality.
JSFiddle
JSFiddle is an online community that lets you test and showcase your HTML, CSS and JavaScript code snippets ("fiddles"). Its amazing UI and responsive editor make it a must-try for any serious JavaScript developer.
Product Management
Prioritize
Prioritize is a simple tool that is essentially a 2-axis chart. It helps you create, visualise, and prioritise tasks on a drag and drop interface with different priority boards or matrixes, including Effort / Impact , Risk / Value , Eisenhower, and MoSCoW.
Figma Product Planner
Figma's Product Planner makes it easy to integrate product planning features with its design collaboration tool. It offers a range of prebuilt templates relevant to common tasks.
Project Management
nTask
nTask is a comprehensive project and task management tool that offers collaboration, task management, meeting scheduling, project planning and more.
Tara.ai
Tara.ai is an AI-based free alternative to Jira. It helps teams deliver on planned release cycles and run weekly sprints with more predictability.
Taskade
Taskade is a remote workspace tool that aims to make teams more productive. With Taskade, teams can manage tasks, write notes, and video chat, all within a single platform.
Design Collaboration
Mockplus
Mockplus is a one-stop online design collaboration platform that helps you accomplish everything from prototyping to developer handoff. It enables designers, developers, and product managers to work together online with auto specs, assets, and code snippets.
Framer
Framer is a feature-rich prototyping tool that helps designers draw, build layouts, incorporate components, and create interactive designs. It has lots of team collaboration features such as multi-player editing and inline commenting.
Marvel
Marvel is a holistic platform that enables designers to transform ideas into digital products by providing them with an environment to create, test, iterate as well as gather feedback.
Feedback by Pixelic
Feedback by Pixelic allows you to seamlessly share your designs with coworkers. It lets them add visual feedback to your design, which you can even organise with version control.
Team Chat
Twist
When Slack becomes a bit too chaotic, you can turn to Twist. Twist aims to keep team conversations organized, on-topic, and easily searchable. It has thread-based and asynchronous-friendly messaging to allow team members to focus on work without missing out on important discussions.
Document Collaboration
Slite
Slite is a great-looking, simple collaborative documentation tool that helps your team stay organised. It offers everything a team needs: collaborative writing, feedback and sharing, powerful search, integrations, and easy permissions.
ntile
With ntile, you can start a blog, build a knowledge base, open an info portal, or use pre-made document organisation solutions for business and daily life. Moreover, you can create a digital ecosystem by overlapping disparate entities.
Tettra
Tettra is an "internal wiki" tool that helps teams document important processes, policies, and procedures in one centralised place, reducing the need to answer repetitive questions.
Coda
Coda is an all-in-one platform that brings together documents, spreadsheets, and apps. It allows teams to share notes, track tasks, and more.
Notion
Notion has been one of the best documentation tools around, and recently they've also started offering a free forever version. It has a highly flexible interface for taking notes, creating to-do lists, and much more.
Remote Whiteboard
Explain Everything
Explain Everything is a presentation app that can be used by teams to present ideas with remote team members or clients. This simple tool is especially effective for teachers who want to create fun and interactive lessons for students.
A Web Whiteboard
A Web Whiteboard is a touch-friendly, easy-to-use web browser-based collaborative tool that can be used by remote workers to draw sketches, and collaborate and share them with others.
Miro
Miro's whiteboard toolkit can be used for creating mockups and schemes, writing down ideas and leaving feedback on other collaborators’ inputs. It comes with a range of pre-loaded templates and an integrated library of icons, wireframes, and other content.
Milanote
Milanote is excellent for organising your ideas and projects into visual "moodboards". You can use the simple and easy-to-use tool for gathering inspiration, collating your team's ideas, and exploring creative possibilities.
Standups
Olaph
Olaph is a tool that integrates into Slack and facilitates stand-ups for your team. It brings teams closer together by encouraging communication and exchange.
Armadill
Armadill provides remote teams with a transparent work structure by combining Kanban workflows with automatic daily standups.
Time Tracking
TopTracker
TopTracker is a simple and lightweight desktop app, that works really well as a time tracking tool for freelance developers. However, it lacks essential features like invoicing and integrations with other project management tools.
Code Time
Code Time is a powerful time tracking plugin built for developers, that integrates with over 15 code editors and IDEs. You can set daily coding goals and view coding stats right in your editor.
Worklog
Worklog is an extension that enables seamless time tracking and synchronising work logs between different time trackers. It works well with a host of apps including Jira, Toggl, and Keen.
Virtual Office
Pragli
Pragli is a virtual office tool that enables remote workers to dive into impromptu conversations with audio channels and direct conversations, similar to a walkie talkie.
Loop Team
Loop Team aims to bring the best parts of in-office working to a remote setting, and enables distributed teams to communicate faster and capture face-to-face discussions.
Wurkr
Wurkr is a video platform that aims to replicate your physical office in an online setting. Distributed team members can internally communicate and work with each other visibly and in real-time, regardless of their location.
Top comments (18)
Great list, thank you! Few more good services, which you can use for free: uptime.onl/ for simple website monitoring, datadoghq.com/ for webserver resources monitoring, bugsnag.com/ for bugs tracking.
Thanks! I will add the suggestions you mentioned as well.
Really a great list. Tks
As a beta tester, you can get FREE access to my JIRA for Remote Teams omnited.com
Thanks for the suggestion Stefan :)
One more productivity tool that is forever free & open-source: Freeter
And here is a story on how I boosted my productivity with it: dev.to/alexk/how-i-boosted-my-prod...
These are all services, and thus no free tools. You pay at least with the data you provide. And for how long you can use the tool depends on the whims of the provider of this service.
So yes, the quotes on "free" and "forever" are not to be taken lightly.
Definitely a useful list. Thanks for the bug and time trackers.
Cheers :)
I would like to suggest Codever for dev bookmarks and code snippets management.
Awesome list, thanks for sharing!
In case you're interested, I've put up a bunch of developer tools on devresourc.es, so feel free to check them out too! :)
This great article shows positive 2020 outcomes
Would like to suggest DronaHQ a low code internal tool builder that just announced a free developer plan.
Hello, I use this time tracker tmetric.com/