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<\/div>Coda’s Doc Gallery<\/a> showcases many ways to use this office doc mashup. There are templates for everything from project planners and investor worksheets to fun uses like baby naming apps and wedding planners.<\/p>\n As with many of these new twists on old ideas, Coda can have a bit of a learning curve. However, it’s such a flexible and powerful tool that you might get more out of it than you put in.<\/p>\n Coda is still invite-only, but it’s not difficult to get access, and currently, all features are free.<\/p>\n Whimsical may have a silly name, but its features are anything but that. Initially, it was released as a well-designed, fast-to-use flowchart app. Major updates added wireframes and what Whimsical calls \u201csticky notes\u201d to the mix.<\/p>\n One of the core qualities of its suite of apps is a focus on speed. Everything is fast, whether creating a swimlane flowchart<\/a>, wireframe, or organizing a set of sticky notes. It takes little effort to create a well-organized document with a fun but professional look, thanks partly to the app’s vibrant purple theme. This feature is particularly useful for creating an efficient document approval workflow<\/a>.<\/p>\n One of Whimsical’s direct competitors is the web app veteran Lucidchart<\/a>. Both feature flowcharts and wireframes, but Whimsical wins out with its user-friendly design, fast content generation, and eye-pleasing theme.<\/p>\n As a web-based app, Whimsical supports real-time collaboration out of the box and has robust support for comments and annotations. You can also export your creations as PDFs or PNGs, and share a link to the document<\/a> with others who can view it for free.<\/p>\n Whimsical offers five free boards, with monthly plans starting at $10 per user.<\/p>\n With so much of our lives in the cloud, knowing precisely where a particular file might be is increasingly difficult. Were the files for your most recent business logo design<\/a> saved to Dropbox? In Trello? In your email? On your laptop?<\/p>\n Nira aims to solve this problem. After you’ve added the services you’ve used to the service (and installed an app on your computer), you can search across all of them quickly from the Nira website.<\/p>\n For people juggling multiple cloud storage accounts\u2014or tools like Trello, GitHub, or Asana\u2014Nira\u2019s global search can be a huge time-saver. For example, if you\u2019re evaluating photo storage and management, several Google Photos alternatives<\/a> can help keep your visual assets organized and easy to find across platforms.<\/p>\n Nira costs $100 per year per user.<\/p>\n Go into almost any office, and chances are you’ll see at least one whiteboard. Their ability to gather a group of people’s ideas and thoughts into a shared public space is invaluable. How to replicate their benefits for remote workers and distributed teams is a challenge many companies face.<\/p>\n Enter Miro. This online whiteboard platform has continually improved and added new features since its debut in 2011.<\/p>\n Besides basic whiteboard features like drawing, text, and sticky notes, Miro also boasts mind mapping, charts, embeddable media, and many more.<\/p>\n If your company needs to collaborate with remote workers, or if you’ve wanted to integrate your whiteboard with features like video chat, screen sharing<\/a>, and much more, Miro might fit the bill.<\/p>\n For example, if you’re working on a project, such as creating a brand identity<\/a> for a new business, you’ll need to collaborate with your co-founders and likely with your designer. Collaborating by email is tough, and you’ll lose time and information. That’s where products like Miro are beneficial.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $10\/month for \u201csolopreneurs\u201d or $40\/month for five members<\/p>\n Notes, like calendars and email, are crucial to most people’s lives. So it’s no surprise there are almost as many different note apps and services available as there are people. One of the best is Notion, a popular GatherContent alternative<\/a>.<\/p>\n After its launch in 2016, Notion quickly became a darling of the maker and app entrepreneur world. That year, the community on Product Hunt, an influential site for new product launches, voted it the best desktop app.<\/p>\n It’s easy to see why. Notion is a note-taking app<\/a> at its core, but one that extends the note experience in many ways.<\/p>\n You can embed many types of content within a Notion \u201cpage,\u201d like tables, calendars, galleries,\u00a0Kanban tools<\/a> and boards, and much more. People can collaborate in real time and<\/span>\u00a0comment and tag items.<\/p>\n Notion bills itself as the\u00a0\u201call-in-one workspace.\u201d Through its extensive feature set, collaboration features, and integrations, that claim may not be just a passing notion.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $4 a month<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Sharing knowledge and information within a company can be a real challenge, no matter the organization’s size. Intranets<\/a>, the darling of the late 90s and early 00s, are often overly complicated beasts where, as some have said, \u201cinformation goes to die.\u201d<\/p>\n Nuclino was created to solve this problem. The service aims to gather a company’s knowledge in one place by combining notes, images, and video, visualizations, and tagging features.<\/p>\n Nuclino shares many features with note-based apps like Notion or Notejoy, and other meeting note taker<\/a> tools, but focuses more on knowledge-base<\/a> style documentation than individual notes.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $5 per user per month<\/p>\n \u201cWhen are you available?\u201d This question can be challenging to answer if you’re trying to organize a meeting with someone outside your organization. It’s equally difficult to let the world know when you’re<\/i>\u00a0available.<\/p>\n Calendly attempts to solve this problem. It connects to your existing calendar and finds times when you are available. It makes these available to people visiting your page so they can book time with you.<\/p>\n You can integrate your calendar with apps like Zoom, GoToMeeting, Salesforce, and more. \u00a0It works with Google Calendar, Outlook, iCloud, and Microsoft Office.<\/p>\n Calendly is one of those apps that solves a single problem well. For people who take a lot of meetings, it’s an invaluable service that makes answering \u201cwhen are you available?\u201d a simple click away.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $8 per user per month<\/p>\n Lists make the world go round. Who doesn’t like making a list? It’s a simple but powerful way to organize your thoughts, keep track of your tasks, and much more.<\/p>\n Taskade blows the list concept up into something more significant and valuable.<\/p>\n It features what you’d expect from a list: bullets, checkboxes, number lists, and even hearts. Taskade enables users to collaborate on list items and organize them through various views. You can view your tasks as a board (ala a site like Trello), \u201cAction\u201d view (which turns the list into a table with actions), or as a standard list.<\/p>\n Collaboration features play a significant role in Taskade. You can chat with other users via text, voice, and even video, which makes working on a shared list or tasks easy. You can also attach files to a list item, set a due date, or tag it with a co-worker’s name for their attention.<\/p>\n These features are wrapped in a friendly, colorful design that makes working with lists easy and fun. If you need to create a list (and almost all of us do), Taskade may be your number-one choice.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $7\/month<\/p>\n And if you use Slack, a tool like Workfast<\/a> could be useful for your team. Workfast helps teams using Slack organize their work, including delegating tasks and managing projects.<\/p>\n One of the best methods for organizing your thoughts is to use a mind map. The term “mind map” was first popularized in the 1970s by British psychologist Tony Buzan. However, organizing thoughts in a tree-like structure has been with us for centuries.<\/p>\n Mind maps are deceptively simple. Their power is in their ability to organize vast amounts of information in a visually attractive, easy-to-follow system. If you have a subject or idea you need to get out of your head, the freeform nature of mind mapping may be the right tool for you.<\/p>\n Many mind mapping options are available, but one of the best is MindMeister. This online service started in 2007 and has steadily grown in popularity and features.<\/p>\n It now boasts over 7 million active users and is localized in 12 languages. In addition to the online service, MindMeister has iOS and Android apps and integrates with several popular online storage and productivity apps.<\/p>\n Free, with plans starting at $4.99 a month.<\/p>\n Organizing your contacts can be a real pain. Your information may be incomplete, full of duplicates, or plain wrong. Preventing your contact list from exploding into a chaotic mess often requires a lot of tedious pruning and gardening, and who has time for that?<\/p>\n Cloze thinks it has a solution. It’s an online service that imports your existing contact list, finds duplicates, and scours the social web for updated information. It aims to be your central source of truth for the people and businesses you interact with.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130403\/whimsical.png\")
<\/p>\nWhimsical<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130402\/chrome2x.png\")
<\/p>\nNIRA<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130401\/realtimeboard.jpg\")
<\/p>\nMiro<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130400\/use-case-screenshot-note.gif\")
<\/p>\nNotion<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130359\/team_company.jpg\")
<\/p>\nNuclino<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130359\/734122-70c790a67c89f3bbb3d03db98f56fcebb1171b3a.png\")
<\/p>\nCalendly<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
Taskade<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130347\/mindmeister_web_2017.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/h2>\n
MindMeister<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/27130348\/cloze.jpg\")
<\/p>\nCloze<\/a><\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/images.crowdspring.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/05\/06164945\/small-business-blog-master-cta.png\")
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