Top Tools for Freelancers in 2020

We are living in the age of the freelancer. Every year, thousands of us turn our backs on traditional employment in favor of freelance careers — and that trend looks set to increase massively in the near future.

To land clients and stay ahead in the competitive freelance development market, it’s vital to be working with the right tools.

As experienced developers who’ve worked with many freelancers over the years, we know a lot about the best and most freelancer-friendly tools on the market. Here are our recommendations:

Hosting

Assuming you’re developing a WordPress website, you should consider the following three options: WPEngine, Kinsta and Pagely.

All include: Free SSL, CDN for assets, dedicated WordPress hosting.

— WPEngine. WPEngine has an intuitive dashboard and a robust support system, which makes it easy for even novice developers to use. It updates automatically and is backed with an impressive tech array that ensures security. It works in three environments, and has an easy to use backup and restore system (including an immediate link to download a full website backup). Its GIT repo helps you to push your site to WPEngine — which is excellent for CI/CD. There’s also currently an API in Beta.

It doesn’t come with email, and it does not sell domains, so think carefully if those things are a deal-breaker for you. It also has a lengthy list of disallowed plugins which you should probably look through before making a decision. Having said that, we love its migration plugin which makes it easy to onboard your site to WPEngine.

— Kinsta. Kinsta is massively popular as a WordPress host. Its high powered servers, which make it the obvious choice for high-traffic websites. It also comes pre-optimized for WordPress, meaning you don’t have to manually install WordPress (plus its backups and security) on the server. We find its tools very intuitive and its features developer-friendly.

However, like WPEngine, Kinsta does not host email. It is also limited in the number of plugins it allows. This is an advantage if you like to leave the host to it when it comes to things like site security and backups. However, if you’re more hands-on and prefer to customize your approach, you may find Kinsta restrictive.

— Pagely. Pagely was the first ever managed WordPress hosting space, and it’s withstood the test of time. Pagely offers free site migration, daily site backups, and automatic updates, as well as a Staging service which allows developers to make changes without affecting the functioning of the live site. Its use of Amazon Web Services makes it fast, secure, and reliable.

Like the other two, it does not offer email or domains. What’s more, while it offers a sophisticated range of plans, they’re all comparatively expensive. Medium to large scale businesses will benefit from Pagely’s speed and security, but smaller businesses may find that they’d see better ROI from one of the less expensive options.

GIT

GIT software is used for sharing and tracking changes in source code during software development. It’s useful for coordinating teams on projects with non-linear workflows.

There are three big GIT software vendors: GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket

Time tracking

Time management is essential for good freelancing, and time tracking is essential for good time management. We use EverHour to track time and ensure that everyone gets paid properly for the hours they’ve worked — but there are other options available. Here are three of the best (including EverHour).

— Harvest. Harvest is built to handle a collaborative workload, which makes it a fantastic app for teams. It feeds detailed (but easily understandable) reporting information on user timesheets into administrator accounts, and can even act as an automated supervisor when it comes to things like reminding team members about deadlines, timesheet submission etc.

— Toggl. Toggl provides the most for the least. It offers a generous range of services without charging. However, it will not allow for collaboration or reporting unless you sign up for the paid version.

Toggl’s other big advantage is that it does not demand that users enter project details before starting the timer, meaning that team members can go back in and edit on the fly without having to create new tasks beforehand. It also allows for granular post-timer editing (for example, if you get distracted by a phone call in the middle of your work, you can go back and erase that chunk of downtime from the record). It will even allow you to schedule breaks.

— EverHour. We find EverHour sleek and easy to use. It integrates with a number of project management apps (we use Asana) with a timer button, meaning that workers can track their hours directly from Asana without having to open multiple tabs. It can operate perfectly well without input from a project management app, but we find that its seamless integration with Asana makes it perfect from a team management perspective. It’s smooth and efficient, and delivers everything we need.

Project management

Project management can be one of the most difficult things to master with a team of remote-working freelancers. We use Asana for to coordinate our teams and manage projects, but there are plenty of other options on the market:

— Trello. Trello is well designed and easy to use. It has a number of features which can be used for organizing anything — not just work projects. It tracks everything and displays the information in a variety of useful formats.

Trello integrates with a number of productivity apps (including Harvest and EverHour) — but it can get glitchy when combined with too many other applications. However, it provides such a comprehensive service in its own right that this isn’t often an issue.

— Wrike. Wrike acts as a project command center. It groups all the tools you need in one place and enables you to create custom workflows with as many intermediate stages as you like. Its focus is on streamlining projects and enabling collaboration without the need for hundreds of emails flying around all over the place.

It has a user-friendly interface which allows you to track project progress at a glance. The paid version also offers Gantt charts — a great visual planning resource.

— Monday. Monday’s strength is in the number of details it shows at a glance. It’s weakness is in its interface, which can be difficult to learn. Once you get used to its format, though, you’ll find that it can cram an amazing amount of information into a small amount of space.

Monday is perfect for basic task management. It comes equipped with robust templates and good metric displays — but it lacks the finesse that apps like Asana have. It’s not as good at facilitating communication as it could be, and its interface is not as intuitive as those of Asana, Trello, and Wrike.

— Asana. Asana is what we use to manage diverse teams spread out across the globe. It has a number of advanced features which allow you to compile portfolios, distribute resources, and create workflows with ease. It lets collaborators communicate at project, team, and task level without the need to open their email inboxes, and helps both workers and managers to coordinate efforts without difficulty.

Finance

Getting paid can be awkward in the freelance world. Every freelancer needs a payment method that suits both themselves and their clients. Old fashioned invoices and bank transfers often aren’t reliable, so we recommend these platforms for both paying and getting paid:

— TransferWise. TransferWise is a good option if you’re dealing with many different currencies. They don’t profit from the exchange rate, so you can be sure that you’re getting the best deal possible when currencies are converted. They’re also very transparent, and they make a point of very clearly telling you what fees will be applied before you finalize any transaction.

— Payoneer. Payoneer take regulations and security very seriously. This is important, of course, whenever money is concerned — but it does also make signing up for Payoneer a more complicated process than the others on this list. However, once you are signed up, it’s easy to use and very reliable, particularly for international transfers.

— PayPal. PayPal is well known, but it’s not as good for business transfers as Payoneer or TransferWise. Its fees are much higher than the previous two, and it also often takes days rather than hours to get money from sender to recipient. Having said that, it’s easy to use and a lot of people have it, so you may find it useful for small or sporadic accounts.

G Suite

G Suite is the set of synchronized business management tools and apps offered by Google. You can combine G Suite features with most of the other tools here (for example, GoogleDocs and Google Drive can be used to create and share content that’s been assigned in Asana and tracked via EverHour). Gsuite’s tools are very shareable because most people have some kind of Google infrastructure already in place, they benefit from Google’s own safety protocols, and are often completely free.

Consider G suite tools for:

• File sharing. Through Google Drive you can share files far and wide.
• File storage. Google provides a substantial amount of free storage, and more is always available for the paying customer.
• Personalized domains. G suite allows you to customize your business email — fantastic for branding. Larger or more complex operations can create a variety of domains as and when needed.
• Seamless syncing. G suite files stored in the Cloud sync effortlessly with G suite apps across every kind of device and platform. G suite eliminates many of the issues freelance teams have with incompatible tech.

Design collaboration

We’ve chosen to separate ‘Design’ and ‘Design collaboration’ tools, but there is a fair amount of overlap between the two. Collaboration is a vital element that often gets overlooked in the design process. It’s important for everyone involved in a project to be able to share, use, and feedback on prototypes and templates with ease.

— Zeplin. Zeplin enables smooth collaboration between designers and developers. You can export your artboards with a single click through a Sketch plugin (more on that in a bit), meaning that there’s no need to resize or pre-optimize your files. We find that Zeplin works wonderfully as a single source of truth. It keeps designers and developers on the same page (literally!) and eliminates the kind of confusion that can arise within complex collaborative projects.

— Figma. We’ll be talking more about Figma when we get to design tools, but it’s worth mentioning here as well. Figma is great for collaborative design, because it allows multiple team members to work on the same project in real-time. Rather than having to communicate, check, and edit each change, team members can see them occurring as they happen within the tool. It’s a quick and efficient way to produce designs as a team.

— Invision. Invision works well for creating and presenting interactive prototypes. In terms of client communication, it’s probably the best on this list. Invision lets you present clients (and/or teammates) with ‘live’ versions of your designs. Viewers can then give you feedback in real-time as well as leaving comments on pages or specific elements. It’s a lot more effective than presenting screens or PDFs of static wireframes and designs. However, it can be fiddly to use at the design stage of the process.

Design tools

These are the three major design platforms used today. Photoshop and Sketch (and, to a more limited extent, Figma) will all integrate with a variety of plugins, so if they don’t have the capabilities you need straight out of the box, it’s definitely worth shopping around for tools which will help.

— Photoshop. One of Photoshop’s major advantages is that it’s very well known. It will integrate with most popular design apps and platforms. There is also a wealth of free Photoshop educational material on the web, so it’s easy to learn how to use it. On the other hand, Photoshop’s scope is way wider than web design. If you want something that’s streamlined and focused primarily on design, you’re better off with something like Sketch or Figma.

— Figma. Figma works in a browser rather than from an app, which makes it more accessible than Sketch or Photoshop. As we mentioned above, Figma certainly has the edge over Sketch in terms of collaboration, both because of its accessibility and its format. It allows you to collaborate with team members in real time — meaning that you eliminate all that back and forth which usually accompanies collaborative design projects. However, it doesn’t allow you to work offline, which can be restrictive, and it only allows you to integrate a limited range of plugins.

— Sketch. Sketch is more UI-design focused than Photoshop. For example, its vector-based format means that you can resize every element of your design without losing sharpness — so your designs will look great on even the most sophisticated of screens. It works beautifully with design-based plugins (we mentioned this when talking about Zeplin earlier), and its settings are very easy to control. Sketch allows you to get right down to the minute details of UI design with ease.

— Adobe XD. Adobe have a proven history of making great design products (see Photoshop, above), and with XD they’re powering into the world of UI/UX design. Adobe XD is well worth looking into if you already have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, as (combined with the other tools in there), this makes it the most cost-effective option on this list. If you’re familiar with Adobe’s products, you’ll find the interface easy to use, and its Creative Cloud ecosystem certainly makes sharing and adding plugins easy. Adobe XD is relatively new, and still playing catchup to a certain extent, but Adobe is pouring a lot of funding and research into it so it’s growing very fast. Results so far are impressive.

Communication

Freelancers need to be able to communicate effectively with clients, teammates, and supervisors. Without a good communication infrastructure, projects are doomed before they even start.

— Slack. Slack is a comprehensive messaging service which offers one-on-one, team, and project based chat formats. It allows for different topics to be compartmentalized, which is great when you need to stay focused on the matter at hand. It also makes it very easy to search back through messages for vital information. You can both video and audio call in Slack, and sharing files through its drag-and-drop interface is fast and simple. As a neat touch, Slack also lets you message yourself — great for setting reminders!

— Skype. Skype is well known, and integrates well with other Microsoft services, which makes it pretty accessible. If you’re used to Office suite tools like Word and Powerpoint, Skype is probably the service for you. However, it’s less flexible than Slack and arguably less intuitive. If you need a space to hold meetings and make remote presentations, Skype is great. But it can’t beat Slack in terms of scope and agility.

Video comms

Face to face is often the best and most efficient way to communicate. These tools enable teams from all over the world to come together and talk things through in as close to an actual ‘meeting’ situation as possible.

— Google Meet. Google Meetoffers free video conferencing services for up to 25 people. The premium version can accommodate up to 100. It’s simple to use, and integrates seamlessly with other Google services, like Calendar and Gmail. Unlike Zoom, Hangouts does not put a time limit on calls. All in all, it’s great for focused meetings with smaller groups of people, and its Google integrations make it very accessible.

— Zoom. Zoom rose from a little known conferencing app to a globally recognized brand during Covid 19. It overtook former frontrunner Skype because it’s easy to use, offers a lot for free, and can run on a variety of platforms without the need to download anything. It also lets people have fun with custom backgrounds and the like. However, it does have a number of problems with privacy and security. The company is working hard to fix bugs and to upgrade its security protocols, but they’ve risen very fast so be aware that it may take them a while to ‘catch up’ with their own success.

Know of a great tool that we’ve missed?

Get in touch and tell us all about it!