Managing A Growing Business: The MacPaw List Of 160 Tools We Use

Managing a growing business is not easy. But at the same time, can you imagine running any kind of business without the amazing range of web apps and software tools and products we can now access?

No. Neither can we.

Since January 2017, when we launched Setapp, we’ve gone from zero to over $2 million ARR. We’ve also hosted a Product Hunt Meetup in our home city, Kyiv, Ukraine and have interviewed hundreds of awesome Setapp customers. None of that would be possible, or at least as easy, without this list of 160 awesome tools we use every day across the business.

How did we collect this data?

We didn’t want to give you a list of the most obvious tools, such as Slack and Dropbox. Everyone knows those and dozens of others. In any decent sized technology company, there is rarely any central control for purchasing apps and finding new tools. Staff use and find tools they find helps them do their jobs, and then, if enough people use a particular tool, we need to buy a corporate subscription. This supports innovation and problem-solving. But this also created a challenge when it came to drilling down on the information that would give you a useful and practical list of tools. So, we set about surveying every single employee to find what tools they used, and then turned that data into this article. We hope you found it useful.

So, here is our list. This is how we — and you can too — manage a complex and growing business.

To make it simple, we’ve broken this down according to the operational area.

Multi-Departmental

Some tools are so useful that they aren’t limited to one team or department. We’ve listed these first, since they can be found everywhere and a versatile, and useful enough that we couldn’t manage without them.

• 1Password — Got too many passwords to remember? We need to remember hundreds, so instead, we free up mental space and store everything in 1Password. Login to websites, email, and apps in a single click.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader — The industry standard for viewing, printing, signing and commenting on PDF documents.
• Adobe Lightroom CC — Use any browser to upload and edit photos in full resolution. Really handy when creating marketing and sales materials.
• AirMail 3 — An award-winning, lightening fast Mail client for Mac and iPhone.
• Basecamp — Awesome project management software, with over 2.5 million customers around the world. They’re in business for the long haul to help other businesses, and have been going over 17 years, so must be doing something right.
• BlueJeans — Online meeting and cloud-based video conferencing software, with Dolby Voice®.
• CleanMyMac 3 — The ultimate cleaner for Mac. Over 1 million Macs cleaned every day.
• Confluence — A content collaboration software that changes how modern teams work from Atlassian.
• DayOne — A simple journal application for Macs, iPhones, and iPads.
• Diagrammix — The most efficient tool on the market for building attractive diagrams and charts.
• Dropbox — File sharing and storage. Really useful when sharing and sending documents between teams.
• Evernote — Remember everything with Evernote. Capture, organize, and share notes from anywhere. Your best ideas are always with you and always in sync.
• Fantastical 2 — An Apple Design award-winning calendar app that our teams find very useful.
• Gemini — Finds duplicate and similar files in every corner of your Mac.
• Google Forms — A Google tool for creating surveys, graphing data and analyzing the results. Part of the Google Cloud suite of services.
• Grammarly — Stop worrying about spelling and grammar when sending emails or writing content.
• HazeOver — Distraction Dimmer™ for Mac. Turn distractions down and focus on your current task.
• Instant Translate — A cross-platform translator, dictionary, text-to-speech and speech-to-text service that is designed to break language barriers.
• iThoughtsX — A mind mapping app for the Mac. Fully compatible with iThoughts for iOS.
• Momentum — A personal dashboard designed to eliminate distraction and provide inspiration, focus, and productivity.
• Monosnap — Perfect for making and sharing screenshots and short videos on a Mac. Also, it’s Free!
• Newoldstamp — email signature generator. Allows to manage team’s signatures and run banner campaigns as an additional marketing channel.
• OmniFocus — Getting things done has never been easier, with OmniFocus, a task management tool for Mac, iOS and Apple Watch.
• Apple Pages — Similar to Word, for Apple Mac users.
• Parallels — Run Windows on Mac. No need to reboot.
• PDF Expert — Advanced reading and editing experience for PDFs.
• RealtimeBoard — An online whiteboard, perfect for team collaborations, used by over 1 million project leaders, UX designers, lean and agile specialists and product managers worldwide.
• Roadmap Planner — A useful strategic and product management tool.
• Slack — Cloud-based communication for teams in workplaces.
• Things — An award-winning personal task manager that helps you achieve your goals.
• Timing — Because, when growing a company, you can never have too many productivity tools and apps! Timing is a great way to track time and productivity.
• Trello — A web-based project management application.
• Ulysses — An immersive experience for writers. Useful for collaboration and keeping documents synced between colleagues and devices.
• Wunderlist — Cloud-based task management application.

Engineering

• Adobe After Effects — Is the industry-standard animation and creative compositing app. Works perfectly with other Adobe CC tools and apps to create amazing videos.
• Amplitude — Analytics that helps you understand user behavior, ship the right features fast, and drive business outcomes.
• AppFigures — A mobile app analytics and insights platform for mobile app developers.
• Atom — A hackable text editor. A tool developers can customize to do anything but also use productively without ever touching a config file.
• Automator — Next-Generation Automation, for the drag and drop creation of workflows for automating repetitive tasks into batches for quicker alteration.
• AWS — A powerful range of cloud-computing and flexible storage solutions from Amazon Web Services. Most growing companies use AWS to expand while keeping on top of costs.
• Baremetrics — Metrics, forecasting and engagement tools for teams using Stripe, Braintree, Chargify and Recurly, trusted by some exciting startups, including Buffer, Product Hunt and GoSquared.
• BitBucket — The Git solution for professional teams.
• BrowserStack — Live, web-based browser testing. A tool for testing your website for cross-browser compatibility on real browsers.
• Charles — A a web debugging proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL/HTTPS traffic between their machine and the internet.
• CircleCI — Continuous integration service for web and mobile apps.
• CodeRunner 2 — An advanced, highly flexible, and easy-to-use programming editor for your Mac.
• Crowdin — Localization project management platform and translation tool for developers and website owners. It has supported over 60,000 localization projects so far.
• DataGrip — A database IDE that is tailored to suit specific needs of professional SQL developers.
• Devdocs — Combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface. With over 100 documents stored, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, Python, Go, C, C++, jQuery, and many more.
• DevMate — An app development and distribution platform.
• Docker — An open platform for developers to build, ship, and run distributed applications, whether on laptops, data centre VMs, or in the cloud.
• Egghead — Concise courses for badass web developers. Learn the latest tools and frameworks from open source contributors and industry pros.
• Fabric — Now working with Firebase, Google’s mobile development platform. Fabric is a platform that helps your mobile team build better apps, understand your users, and grow your business.
• Expressions — An app used to debug regular expressions.
• Gifox — Delightful GIF Recording and sharing app.
• Github — A powerful, open-source development platform, built for developers.
• Gitup — A Git interface.
• Gliffy — Makes it significantly easier to collaborate as a team on flowcharts, org charts, UML, network diagrams & more.
• Hetzner — Profi web-hosting, VPS & dedicated root servers.
• Hopper Disassembler — A reverse engineering tool that lets you disassemble, decompile and debug your applications.
• IDEA — Code-centric IDE, focused on your productivity.
• iTerm2 — A terminal emulator for Mac OS, replacing Terminal and the successor to iTerm.
• Jenkins — The leading open source automation server, Jenkins provides hundreds of plugins to support building, deploying and automating any project.
• Jira — Another Atlassian product. Jira Software is built for every member of your software team to plan, track, and release great software.
• JS Bin — Collaborative JS debugging. A live pastebin for HTML, CSS & JavaScript and a range of processors, including SCSS, CoffeeScript, Jade and more.
• Jupyter Notebook — An open-source web application that allows you to create and share documents that contain live code, equations, visualizations and narrative text.
• Linode — SSD cloud hosting and Linux servers.
• MacDown — An open source Markdown editor for macOS.
• Paddle — A better way to sell software. Checkout, subscriptions, licenses, promotions and analytics that work well together.
• Paw — Advanced API tool for Mac.
• PHPStorm — A commercial, cross-platform IDE for PHP built on JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA platform, with over 600,000 users worldwide.
• Postman — Makes developing APIs easier.
• Principle — Makes it easy to design animated and interactive user interfaces.
• PyCharm — An intelligent Python IDE for Windows, macOS and Linux, also built on JetBrains.
• Quik — A boot loader designed to start Linux on Mac, from ARQA Technologies.
• iMacAmi — An environmentally conscious productivity app designed to help people waste less time on their computers.
• ScreenFlow — Video editing and screen recording software.
• Sentry — Real-time error tracking.
• SourceTree — A free Mercurial and Git Client for Windows and Mac that provides a graphical interface for your Hg and Git repositories.
• SQLWorkbenchJ — A free, DBMS-independent, cross-platform SQL query tool.
• Sublime Text — A sophisticated text editor for code, markup and prose.
• Terminal — The terminal emulator included in the macOS operating system by Apple.
• TextWrangler — An all-purpose text and code editor for macOS, based on the same award-winning technology and user interface as BBEdit, our leading professional HTML and text editor, by Bare Bones.
• Tower — Version control with Git — made easy, in a beautiful, efficient, and powerful app.
• Vagrant — A tool for creating and configuring lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments, trusted by thousands of developers, operators, and designers everyday.
• VirtualBox — A powerful x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization product, that lets you run any operating system from a USB stick.
• Viscosity — An openVPN client for Mac & Windows, from SparkLabs.
• Visual Studio Code — A code editor redefined and optimized for building and debugging modern web and cloud applications.
• WebStorm — A powerful IDE for modern JavaScript development.
• Xcode — An integrated development environment for macOS containing a suite of software development tools developed by Apple for developing software.
• Zabbix — Enterprise-level open source monitoring software for networks and applications.

Marketing

• Google AdWords Editor — A free application for managing large AdWords accounts.
• Ahrefs — Tools to grow your search traffic, research your competitors and monitor your niche.
• Alexa — An Amazon company. Powerful and invaluable keyword research, competitive analysis and website ranking tools.
• Microsoft Bing Ads — Another PPC tool, one that reaches an audience that searches 5 billion times a month.
• Campaign Monitor — Easy-to-use, professional-grade email marketing and automation.
• CharacterCounterOnline — An online tool that lets you easily calculate and count the number of characters, words, sentences and paragraphs in your text.
• Coggle — simple collaborative mind maps. An easier way to share complex information in a marketing team.
• Copyscape — A free plagiarism checker.
• Facebook Business Manager — Manage Facebook Ads, Pages and collaborate within a team to support customers.
• Google AdWords — Google’s five network PPC platform.
• Google Analytics — Google Analytics Solutions offer marketing analytics products for businesses of all sizes to better understand your customers.
• Google Search Console — Search Console to monitor Google Search results data for your websites. Another invaluable tool from Google.
• Google Trends — Tool for tracking the latest trends, data and visualizations from Google.
• Gtmetrix — A free tool that analyzes your web page’s speed performance, and actionable recommendations on how to optimize them.
• Instagram — Popular image-based social network, owned by Facebook.
• Keywordtool.io — Find great SEO/PPC keywords using Google Autocomplete (also includes Bing, Amazon, YouTube, eBay and the Apple App Store — very useful for us!)
• Magestic — Largest link index database on the planet.
• MindNode — Visualize your ideas. Another great mind mapping tool, useful for sharing and collaboration.
• Mixpanel — Product analytics for product managers.
• Moat — The web’s largest digital adverts search engine, measures real-time Attention Analytics over 33 billion times per day
• Moz — An all-in-one SEO tracking and research toolset built by industry experts.
• Moz ProPlugin — A browser plugin for Moz Pro. Makes SEO searches quicker and easier.
• Netpeak Checker — Research tool for bulk SEO analysis. Once you’ve found the keywords, they need analysing.
• Netpeak Spider — An SEO crawler, used within the analysis process.
• Pingdom — Website and performance monitoring. Pingdom delivers reliable and instant insights with unified, holistic digital experience and availability monitoring.
• Raven Tools — Save time and money by automating the reporting of all of your digital marketing campaigns and include performance metrics from Google Analytics, AdWords, Facebook, Bing Ads and more.
• RStudio — Open source and enterprise-ready professional software for R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.
• ScreamingFrog SEO Spider Tool- Trusted by thousands of SEOs and SEO agencies worldwide for technical SEO audits.
• SelkaTool — Freeware search engines result pages parser.
• Serpstat — an all-in-one SEO platform for all SEO issues. It consists of 5 features: keyword research, rank tracking, competitor analysis, backlink analysis and site audit. Tools to find all errors on your site, spy on your competitors and get a significant traffic growth.
• SEMRush — Competitive intelligence suite for online marketing, from SEO and PPC to social media and video advertising research.
• SerpParser — Similar to the SelkaTool, this is a free search engines result pages parser.
• Serps — Search engine results rank tracking software, to assess the impact of organic and promoted SEO and PPC activities.
• SimilarWeb — Digital market intelligence and website traffic software.
• Speedtest — A free website speed test, from Ookla — the global standard in network testing.
• Growthmentor.io​​ — On-demand sessions available with vetted growth marketing professionals​.
• SurveyMonkey — An invaluable cloud-based online survey tool.
• The Internet Archive — a non-profit library of millions of free books, movies, software, music, websites, and more. So far, they have over 308 billion web pages recorded.
• Whois Lookup — See who owns a domain name, register one and protect the ownership.
• Wordstream — A tool to make PPC significantly easier. Vastly reduces research time.
• WordTracker — With this free keyword research tool, you can reveal thousands of long tail keywords from Google, YouTube and Amazon, all in one tool.
• Yahoo — News, email and search, owned by Verizon Communications.
• YouTube — Google owned, hugely popular online video platform, for viewers and creators.

Design

• Adobe Illustrator — Vector graphics design software.
• Adobe Media Encoder — Your go-to application for all media processing. Ingest, transcode, create proxies and output any format you can imagine. Integrates with other Adobe CC products, such as Premiere Pro CC, After Effects CC to provide a seamless workflow.
• Adobe Photoshop — World-respected photo editor from Adobe, part of the Creative Cloud.
• Adobe Premier Pro — An amazing tool for videos. Turn raw footage into flawless productions with Premiere Pro CC, the industry-leading video editing software. Integrates with other Adobe CC products.
• Behance — Showcase and discover the latest work from top online portfolios by creative professionals across industries.
• Blender3D — 3D Creation Software. Free and open-source.
• Cinema4D — Professional 3D package for your creative projects.
• Craft — An InVision product. A suite of plugins to let you design with real data in mind.
• Dribble — Dribbble is where designers get inspired and hired.
• Gravit Designer — A cross-platform design tool, with full vectoring capabilities.
• InVision — A digital Product design platform powering the world’s best user experiences, with a powerful and growing suite of features and tools. Used by Shopify, Netflix, Dropbox, Airbnb and dozens of other high-growth companies. They also have a great design-centric blog.
• Lingo — A Mac App that makes building and using your design language easier than ever, a design library every designer in a team needs.
• Sketch — A digital design toolkit.
• SketchUp — A friendly and forgiving 3D modelling software.
• V-ray 3.6 for SketchUp — Built for artists, designers & jacks-of-all-trades, our 3D rendering software helps you visualize anything imaginable. Chaos Group software.
• WhatFont — A tool to find out the fonts used in a webpage
• Zeplin — Collaboration app for UI designers and frontend developers. Generate styleguides and resources, automatically.

Support

• Docker — An open platform for developers to build, ship, and run distributed applications across platforms.
• TeamViewer — TeamViewer connects people, places, and things around the world on the widest array of platforms and technologies. Great for collaborative working in a large team.
• Wireshark — The world’s foremost and widely-used network protocol analyzer.
• Zendesk — Help Desk and customer support software.

HR & Operations

• BambooHR — HR software for small and medium businesses.
• LinkedIn — The world’s largest professional social network. So useful for recruitment, and as another marketing channel.
• Apple Numbers — An Apple version of Excel.
• Typeform — An easy to use and intuitive online forms tool.

Finance

• Xero — Accounting software and online bookkeeping.
• Fathom — Financial intelligence and performance reporting.
• Quickbooks — Accounting software for small business.

What are your top 5 tools for a productive workplace? What apps could your team not manage without?

I have originally posted this article on Setapp blog.