Small Business Collaboration: Beyond Email & Slack

We all know we use way too many apps to get things done.

But here’s context that’ll blow your mind: We now toggle between apps roughly 1,200 times a day. 🤯

That means we’re losing nearly 4 hours every single week just reorienting ourselves to all these different tools. That’s nearly a tenth of our work week!!!

For small businesses, especially remote ones that depend on multiple collaboration tools, this is like a productivity tax you pay every day. Unlike bigger companies, you don’t have the luxury of extra headcount to patch the cracks.

That’s why modern remote collaboration can’t stop at Slack and email. Those tools are great for communication, but they weren’t built to run your projects, track accountability, or keep everyone aligned when nobody’s in the same room.

This blog will show you how to consolidate your team’s scattered workflows into a unified collaboration system—with remote team collaboration tools that work for a small business.

Let’s go!

What Are Remote Team Collaboration Tools?

Remote team collaboration tools are digital platforms for distributed teams, which help you communicate, manage projects, and share files in one organized place. As the central nervous system of a remote or hybrid workplace, these tools go far beyond simple messaging. They offer a structured environment where work actually gets done.

Different types of remote collaboration tools include:

Communication platforms: For real-time (synchronous) chat and video calls
Project management software: For organizing, assigning, and tracking tasks asynchronously
Document collaboration hubs: For creating and co-editing knowledge, plans, and notes
Visual collaboration boards: For brainstorming and mapping out ideas visually

🤝 Friendly Reminder: While you can use separate tools for each, a Converged Workspace—a single platform where projects, documents, and conversations live together—like ClickUp combines these categories into a single platform. With such a tool, you needn’t constantly switch between apps, keeping your team focused and aligned.

remote team collaboration tools small business — Use ClickUp to power remote team collaboration for your small business

Start using ClickUp for free

Why Small Businesses Need More Than Slack and Email

If you’re already using email and maybe a chat app like Slack, work shouldn’t feel so…disorganized, right?

Um…wrong.

Yes, Slack and email are great at what they do. But they were built for just one thing: conversations. They’re great for quick updates and back-and-forth, but they don’t turn these conversations into clear next steps.

The result?

Decisions get buried in threads
Tasks fall through the cracks
Accountability disappears

This leads to Work Sprawl. Your team is forced to juggle multiple apps that don’t talk to each other…just to complete a single project.

📌 For a five-person team, that’s 20+ hours weekly spent on coordination overhead. That’s like losing half an employee to administrative chaos.

This is why you need a dedicated collaboration system beyond email and Slack that bridges the gap between talking and doing.

Factor	Email	Slack	Dedicated collaboration tools
Searchability	Limited and buried in threads	Conversations disappear over time	Organized, persistent, and searchable
Task tracking	No built-in tracking	Requires manual workarounds	Native tasks with assignees and deadlines
File organization	Scattered as attachments	Basic file sharing without context	Centralized with direct links to projects
Accountability	Unclear ownership and follow-up	No formal task assignment	Clear assignees, statuses, and priorities

📮ClickUp Insight: Nearly half of survey respondents say the biggest extra step chat adds is manually moving tasks into another tool. Another 20% spend time re-reading threads just to find the real action item. Those tiny interruptions compound because each handoff is a small leak of time, energy, and clarity.

ClickUp replaces the relay race with a single motion. Within ClickUp Chat, your conversation threads can be instantly turned into trackable Tasks. You don’t lose momentum transferring context because ClickUp’s Converged AI Workspace keeps it intact for you.

Try ClickUp for free

Benefits of Using Collaboration Tools Beyond Email and Slack

Moving beyond email isn’t just a “nice-to-have” upgrade—it makes work feel lighter. Projects move faster, everyone’s on the same page, and you spend way less time untangling crossed wires.

And the best part? You don’t need an IT team to pull it off. The right collaboration tool can give you structure without adding complexity.

Here are the core benefits you can expect ✨

Centralized information: Stop digging through endless email chains and chat logs. A dedicated tool gives you one place to find every project update, file, and decision, creating a single source of truth for your team
Clear task ownership: You can finally retire the classic “Wait… I thought you were doing that” problem for good. Every action item gets a clear assignee, due date, and status, creating clear task ownership so everyone knows who is responsible for what
Transparent progress: Instead of chasing updates all day (or sitting through yet another status meeting), you can quickly see what’s moving, what’s stuck, and what needs attention
Async-friendly workflows: Async updates make it easy to stay aligned across time zones, flexible schedules, or just… busy days. When your team across different time zones isn’t online together, collaboration shouldn’t fall apart
Reduced meeting load: Cut your weekly meeting load in half. When project status is visible in real-time, those ‘quick sync’ meetings become unnecessary.

👀 Did You Know? 92% of knowledge workers risk losing important decisions scattered across chat, email, and spreadsheets! 😱

Best Remote Collaboration Tools for Small Teams

In an ideal world, you’d have one app that could fix your team collaboration for good. But in reality, you probably need a handful to be at your most productive: messaging, project tracking, docs, maybe even a whiteboard for planning.

You’d think finding good tools would be challenging. But what’s even harder is avoiding the “tool fatigue” that comes from having too many disconnected apps.

To help you choose better (and avoid app overload), we’ll break down the main categories of virtual team collaboration tools below.

👉🏼 And if you’re trying to simplify long-term, it’s worth looking at platforms built for tool consolidation—like ClickUp—which can cover multiple categories in one connected workspace (with integrations when you still need them).

Get the playbook that thousands of SMBs are using to consolidate their tech stack, reclaim countless hours of precious time, and eliminate Work Sprawl. ⬇️

Download the FREE SMB playbook now!

Communication and messaging platforms

Communication tools are where remote work lives day-to-day. They’re built for quick alignment: “Can you review this?” “What’s the status?” “Are we meeting today?”

Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord are popular because they make it easy to keep conversations moving—especially with specific project channels, threads, and quick calls built right in.

But here’s the catch: messages don’t come with built-in structure. A chat thread can feel productive while the actual work remains fuzzy, without ownership or deadlines mapped to it.

You need a communication tool that keeps conversations organized and connected to your projects.

Pick a comms tool after looking for these features:

Threaded conversations to keep discussions focused and easy to follow
Channels for organizing conversations by topic, project, or team
Direct messaging for one-on-one or small group chats
Fast, accurate, reliable search to quickly find past messages and files
Video conferencing and screen sharing for real-time collaboration
Notifications, mentions, and presence indicators so nothing important gets missed
Chat history and message search so decisions don’t disappear
Easy links to work (tasks, docs, files) so conversations lead somewhere useful

And if you want our recommendation of a tool that does all of this (and more!), try ClickUp Chat! It’s one of the strongest alternatives for teams that want communication right inside their project workspace.

In ClickUp Chat, you can:

Create channels by projects (Spaces, Folders, or Lists)
Convert any message into a trackable ClickUp Task and assign it right from Chat
Pull the right Doc or project into the thread without hunting for links, and keep updates tied to the work they’re actually about

Create ClickUp Tasks from Chat threads in one click

So instead of copying action items into a separate tool, your chat becomes a clean, searchable layer of context—right where your team already plans, builds, and ships

💡 Pro Tip: When a conversation starts getting too messy for chat (or you’re about to spend 20 minutes typing “so just to confirm…”), spin up a ClickUp SyncUp right inside the channel. It’s a fast face-to-face call without leaving your workspace.

You can also invite your ClickUp AI Notetaker to automatically record the SyncUp, generate notes, and save them as a private ClickUp Doc—so action items don’t vanish the second the call ends. For Channel SyncUps, ClickUp even posts the meeting notes Doc back into the SyncUp thread when you’re done.

Learn how to use it, with this video:

Bonus: Your team can later find recordings + transcripts in ClickUp’s Clips Hub, share them publicly, and even comment directly on the recording.

Project management and task tracking tools

Project management tools are what turn “we should do this” into “here’s the plan, here’s the owner, here’s the deadline.” They help teams keep track of tasks, assignments, dependencies, timelines, and workflows without relying on memory.

You can pick from purpose-built options like ClickUp for Project Teams, Asana, Trello, and Monday.com, among others. They’re especially useful for small teams that need clarity without overcomplicating things.

The downside? Outside of ClickUp, many of them still rely on a separate communication app—so you end up planning work in one place and discussing it somewhere else. That’s how fragmentation creeps back in.

ClickUp Tasks solve this by combining strong project tracking with built-in collaboration. Your team can plan work across different views while threaded comments on tasks keep the conversation tied to the work itself.

You get 15+ ClickUp Views to manage projects depending on how your team thinks, such as:

List View for structured task tracking
Board (Kanban) View for mapping different workflow stages
Gantt Charts for identifying dependencies and timelines

Progress-tracking is simple with ClickUp Dashboards. Add customizable cards to track KPIs such as tasks completed vs. overdue, team workload, and sprint burndown.

Use ClickUp Brain to instantly surface key insights and actions right where you work — Use AI Cards in ClickUp Dashboards to instantly surface key insights and actions in natural language

And with ClickUp Automations, you can take the busywork out of project updates. Set up an automation once using the if-then builder, and watch as tasks assign themselves on status changes and owners are pinged when risks are flagged.

Key features to evaluate in project management tools:

Task creation and assignments with clear owners
Due dates, priorities, and recurring tasks
Subtasks and milestones for breaking down bigger projects
Custom fields to track what matters (budget, effort, client, status, etc.)
Task dependencies so work happens in the right order
Kanban boards for visual workflow tracking
Gantt charts for timeline planning
Sprint planning support (if you run agile workflows)
Workload management to avoid overloading one person
Workflow automation to cut down on busywork
Comments and collaboration inside tasks (so context stays attached)

Small businesses love ClickUp for project management:

With ClickUp, everything is in one place, my clients can be users and create tasks, deadlines and input copy and elements for the jobs – with deadlines automatically added and synced to my calendar when they input a date. Job tracking was done all on email and paper trails were a mess previously, now everything is with its task. ClickUp has been LIFE CHANGING for my small business as someone who is self employed.

G2 review

And the numbers speak for themselves:

Is your company’s knowledge scattered across Google Docs, Dropbox, and local hard drives? When your project briefs, SOPs, and meeting notes live in different systems, your team ends up bouncing between tools, trying to remember where the “final final version” is.

By doing this, you’re not only creating information silos, but also impacting key business processes. Onboarding new hires becomes a nightmare, and people may end up working off outdated information.

There’s no doubt that tools such as Google Workspace, Notion, Dropbox Paper, and Confluence are great for content creation, knowledge sharing, and building an internal wiki or knowledge base.

But all this info should live where your work happens. ClickUp Docs keep documentation connected to execution. Docs can live right alongside your tasks and projects, making it easier to move from planning → writing → doing without switching tools constantly.

Connect your docs with the rest of your work with ClickUp Docs

And for teams that want a little help getting content out of their heads and onto the page, ClickUp Brain, ClickUp’s built-in, context-aware AI, lends all the support you need. Use it for writing, summarizing, and pulling answers faster—especially when you need to search across docs, tasks, and conversations in one go.

Ideate, write, and refine output with ClickUp Brain inside ClickUp Docs: best claude model for work — Ideate, write, and refine output with ClickUp Brain inside ClickUp Docs

Start using ClickUp Brain

Remember that a good document collaboration tool should offer:

Real-time co-editing so multiple people can work on a document at once
Commenting and feedback tools to streamline the review process
Version history to track changes and revert if needed
Templates to ensure consistency across all your documents
Document linking so docs connect to tasks and projects cleanly
Wikis/knowledge base support for long-term documentation
Permissions to control access for teams and clients

Visual collaboration and whiteboarding

Sometimes the fastest way to collaborate isn’t writing more messages—it’s getting ideas out visually.

That’s where whiteboarding tools shine. They’re perfect for brainstorming, mapping workflows, planning launches, sketching wireframes, or turning messy thoughts into something the whole team can see.

Tools like Miro, FigJam, and Lucidchart are great for:

Mind maps
Flowcharts
Diagrams and process maps
Product wireframes
Collaborative planning sessions

The issue is what happens after the whiteboard session.

Too often, the board becomes a “great ideas museum” and the real work still has to be recreated somewhere else.

You need a tool that bridges the gap between ideation and action. That’s exactly what ClickUp Whiteboards are for. Your team can brainstorm on an infinite canvas, then convert shapes into tasks—complete with assignees and due dates—without redoing the work in another system.

This video shows you how:

A powerful visual collaboration tool—like ClickUp Whiteboards—includes:

An infinite canvas for flexible brainstorming and planning
A library of shapes, connectors, and sticky notes
Templates for common diagrams like flowcharts and mind maps
The ability to convert visual elements into actionable items

✅ If that felt like a lot of information, don’t worry. The key takeaway remains really simple: The best collaboration tools for remote teams aren’t just “good” in their category; they actually work well together.

How to Choose the Right Collaboration Software for Your Team

So you’re ready to move beyond email and Slack. Love that for you. 😄

But now you’re staring at a million tools that all promise to “streamline collaboration” and “boost productivity.”

To choose well (and avoid another shiny-tool regret), use this quick framework:

Integration capabilities

Your team already runs on a handful of essentials—maybe Google Calendar, QuickBooks, GitHub, Zoom, Google Drive, Figma, you name it. Your collaboration tool shouldn’t force you to abandon those. It should connect them.

If it can’t integrate, you’ll end up with the same problem in a new outfit: files in one place, tasks in another, conversations somewhere else… and nobody knows what’s “the source of truth.”

🧠 Fun Fact: ClickUp’s Integration Ecosystem connects to 1000+ tools you use every day, including Slack, Google Drive, and Figma, using ClickUp. Plus, you can find information across all your connected apps from a single command bar using ClickUp’s Enterprise Search.

Ease of use and adoption

We know small businesses like yours don’t have time for a complicated rollout—or a 47-minute onboarding video. 🤷🏻‍♀️

You want something your team can pick up quickly, and grow into over time. A clean, intuitive UI plus a simple setup for core workflows (projects, tasks, docs) go a long way. Even better are out-of-the-box templates that let you get started without reinventing the wheel for every process.

The most powerful software in the world is useless if your team finds it too complicated to use. Small businesses can’t afford to spend weeks on training and implementation. You need a tool that’s intuitive from day one and allows your team to increase business productivity immediately.

✅ ClickUp works well here because you can adopt it gradually: start with Tasks + Docs, then add Custom Fields and Automations once your team is comfortable. And the built-in library of 1000+ Templates makes it easy to spin up repeatable workflows in minutes.

ClickUp customers agree:

ClickUp has a lot of unique features and add ons that you might not see in other PM options, like time tracking, built in chat, and extensive resource management capabilities. If you’re a scrappy small business or startup, ClickUp has a lot of templates and easy ways to get started without spending hours investing in a custom setup. You get that custom big box feel in a more approachable product.

G2 review

The intuitive interface makes it easy to start using from the get-go, yet it remains incredibly powerful as you learn and utilize more features. Additionally, its integration capabilities with my email, calendars, and CRM software are seamless, enhancing my workflow. I also find the available templates extremely helpful, simplifying the setup process and saving me time.

G2 review

Scalability and pricing

Your small business isn’t going to stay small forever. The collaboration tool you choose today should be able to support you as you grow. The last thing you want is to finally get organized… then hit a wall because your tool can’t handle new teams, new workflows, or more complex projects.

Pay close attention to pricing tiers and what they include. Many “free” plans have hidden limits on users, storage, or features that will force you to upgrade sooner than you think. Choose a platform that offers a clear and fair upgrade path.

Security and compliance

Security isn’t just an enterprise problem. If you work with clients, contractors, employee info, invoices, or internal IP, you already have sensitive data worth protecting.

Remote work adds extra risk, too—files being shared across devices, logins happening from everywhere, and “quickly send it on WhatsApp” becoming a habit.

Look for:

Role-based access controls (so people only see what they need)
SSO options for cleaner, safer logins
Strong permission settings for guests and contractors
Centralized communication so info isn’t scattered across tools

Build Your Small Business Remote Collaboration Stack with ClickUp

Small teams end up spending more time reconstructing context than moving projects forward.

ClickUp solves this by acting as a converged workspace—one secure platform where your team can plan projects, collaborate in real time, document decisions, and track progress. And with AI built into the flow of work, you can move faster without the costs and security risks of AI Sprawl.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Collaboration need	ClickUp feature	Key benefit
Communication	ClickUp Chat, Comments, recorded Clips	Keep conversations organized and linked directly to your work
Project Management	ClickUp Tasks, Automations, Dependencies	Get a clear view of all your projects and automate routine updates
Documentation	ClickUp Docs, Whiteboards	Centralize your team’s knowledge and connect ideas to action
Search	Enterprise Search, ClickUp Brain	Find anything across your entire workspace and connected apps instantly

When to Use Chat vs. Comments vs. Docs

Even with an all-in-one tool like ClickUp, your team might be confused about where to put information. Should a quick update be a chat message or a task comment? Where do you document a final decision?

Here’s a simple guide to help your team use the right channel every time 🛠️

Channel	Best for	Persistence	Context
ClickUp Chat	Quick, informal, or time-sensitive questions and announcements	Temporary	General or channel-specific
ClickUp Comments	Task-specific feedback, decisions, and status updates	Permanent	Attached directly to a task
ClickUp Docs	Permanent reference material, processes, and project briefs	Permanent	Searchable knowledge base

The guiding principle is simple: the more permanent or important the information, the closer it should live to the work it references. Because all these channels exist within ClickUp, your team can move between them effortlessly.

Async Collaboration Best Practices for Small Teams

Remote work (and flexible schedules) change how communication has to work, especially when nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones. You can’t just tap someone on the shoulder for a quick answer anymore. Asynchronous—or “async”—collaboration keeps your team aligned and productive, no matter where or when they work.

Adopting an async-first mindset means building habits around clear, documented communication.

Over-communicate context: Include links to relevant ClickUp Docs or ClickUp Tasks in your messages and use ClickUp Clips to provide visual walkthroughs
Set clear expectations: Use due dates or priority flags on tasks to signal when something is needed, so your team can prioritize effectively
Document your decisions: Capture the “why” behind every decision in a task’s Comments or a dedicated ClickUp Doc, so it’s searchable for future reference
Use status updates: A quick comment or a change in a task’s status is often all that’s needed to keep everyone in the loop

Great remote collaboration doesn’t happen just because you picked the right tools. It happens because your team builds the right habits around them. With a few intentional async practices, your small business can stay aligned as you grow—without turning every update into another meeting.

ClickUp powers work for both small teams and big-name companies like Siemens, Chick-fil-A, and Wayfair. With 25,000+ reviews and an average 4.6-star rating, it’s a go-to choice for businesses that want to stay lean, move fast, and get more done without adding more tools.

Ready to consolidate your team’s communication, tasks, and docs in one workspace? Sign up for a free ClickUp account!

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

What’s the difference between a team collaboration tool and project management software?

Project management software is focused on organizing tasks and workflows, while team collaboration tools cover broader communication. Modern platforms like ClickUp combine both so you don’t have to choose.

Can a single platform replace Slack, email, and project management tools?

Yes, a converged workspace like ClickUp is designed to consolidate your internal chat, documentation, and task management. You may still use email for external communication, but all your internal work can live in one place.

How do small teams get started with collaboration software without disrupting current workflows?

Start with a single pain point, like task tracking, instead of trying to migrate everything at once. Run the new tool alongside your old systems for a short period as your team builds comfort and sees the benefits.

Is basic collaboration software enough for growing small businesses?

Basic plans are great for getting started, but growing businesses often need advanced features like unlimited integrations or enhanced security. Look for a platform with a clear upgrade path that allows you to scale without hitting a wall.