What are the best tools for collaboration in remote teams
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What are the best tools for collaboration in remote teams

Good collaboration is one of the key pillars of an effective remote team. Communication, documentation, and sharing of information are vital in remote work, so efficient collaboration is necessary for remote teams to function seamlessly.

Being remote, you need to seek tools that will make a remote team’s work as async as possible. While creating social bonds in remote teams helps you stay happy and productive, effective collaboration among the team is what keeps you functioning for the core work.

In light of this struggle, we’ve cherry-picked some of the best tools for collaboration in remote teams. Having managed multiple teams, these are tools that are deemed best from our experience!

Notion - for “long-term memory” documentation

A laptop running Notion

Notion is a great tool for long-term memory documentation for remote teams. It features an intuitive interface, which you can use to document as little or as big information as you want.

Notion is great for big and small things like:

  • OKRs.
  • Roadmap.
  • Feature specs.
  • Meeting notes.
  • Standups.
  • Release plans.
  • Retros.
  • Etc.

Notion comes in 4 different pricing plans. They have a free personal plan, a personal pro plan at $4/month, a team plan at $8/month, and an enterprise plan with a custom contract that caters to your needs and requirements.

Miro - for visual support

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Miro is a great tool to communicate through visuals drawings and workflows. Both in collaborative meetings and for static visuals to be linked in notion. Miro is ideal for creating roadmaps and process workflow for remote teams, as well as:

  • Ideation and road mapping.
  • User journeys and interaction maps.
  • Process workflow and such visual documentation.
  • Anything that demands a "whiteboard".

Miro has 4 different price plans. They have a free plan, a team plan at $8 per member/month, a business plan at $16 per member/month, and an enterprise plan with a custom quote depending on your needs and requirements.

Loom - for screen recordings

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Loom is a screen recording tool developed with remote teams in mind. Loom lets you record your screen and camera to be shared with your remote team members. This is to ultimately eliminate long lines of text and convey a more accurate message using visual support.

Loom is great for things like:

  • Product demos.
  • Bug reports.
  • Competitive analysis.
  • Any onboarding material that would require repeated 1:1 meetings otherwise.

Loom comes in 3 different price plans. They have a basic starter plan, a business plan at $8 per creator/month if billed annually ($10 per creator/month if billed month to month), and an enterprise plan with a custom quote according to your requirements.

Jira - for task-level information

Screenshot of Jira

Jira primarily works for sharing specific task-related information between remote team members. Feature specs from Notion are broken down into stories in Jira and assigned to team members.

Other use cases of Jira include:

  • Planning poker, which can be done async.
  • Integration with Github for PR review notifications and dependency visualisation.

Jira provides 4 different price plans. They have a Free version for small teams, a Standard version at $7.50 per user a month, a Premium version at $14.50 per user a month, and an Enterprise version with custom pricing according to how big or small an enterprise is.

Users will also get a discount for payments billed annually.

Zoom - for meetings

A zoom meeting on a laptop

Zoom is a great video/audio communication tool for remote teams. It lets you add multiple participants into a call and features an intuitive overall structure for anyone to quickly grasp its functioning.

Zoom is an ideal tool for meetings in general. However, if it’s coupled with Notion, you’ll have a really powerful system in your hands that will transform your meetings.

  • The actual meetings should be through Zoom. But the meeting agenda should go in Notion.
  • Meeting notes should be added live in Notion.
  • Action items should go in Notion and be assigned during the meeting.
  • For meetings that look like a transfer of information, record, and link in Notion.

Zoom has 4 different price plans. They have a Basic free version, a Pro version at $14.99 per month/license, a Business version at$19.99 per month/license, and an Enterprise version for large organizations at $19.99 per month/license.

Users can also save 17% if payments are billed annually.

GitHub - for anything code base

Screenshot of GitHub

GitHub is a great tool for remote teams working with anything that’s code-related. Remote teams can use GitHub to upload their code as well as to examine and evaluate their team’s code or other code-related documentation.

Use cases of GitHub include:

  • Repos
  • CI / CD pipelines
  • PR reviews
  • Etc.

GitHub is available in 3 different price plans. They provide a free Basic plan, a Team plan at $4 per user/month, and an Enterprise plan at $21 per user/month. Users will also get a discount if payments are billed annually.

Slack - for communication and notifications

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Slack has 2 main use cases: message-based communication and notification central.

You can use Slack as a communication platform for both sync and async communication. Slack is, however, not long-term memory. Hence, you should couple it with Notion to share information using Notion links.

Slack also works as a notification central. If linked, tags on Github, Jira, and Notion will trigger slack notifications.

Slack offers 4 different price plans. They provide a Free plan, a Pro plan at €7.50 per person/month, a Business+ plan at €14.10 per person/month, and an Enterprise Grid plan with custom pricing according to your requirements.

Slack also offers a discount when payments are billed annually.

Collaboration doesn’t mean communication alone. It is a lot of things blended into one for a remote team to successfully function with everything that’s necessary for their work.

This is why we resort to multiple collaboration tools to work with every aspect of working remotely. After attaining hands-on experience on these tools yourself, you’ll realise what makes them a great solution and why we vouch for them.

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