Summer months are usually a good time for estimating what we have achieved since January, setting new targets—if necessary—and clarifying the goals that need to be accomplished over the next six months. Then comes the moment when, frankly speaking, we wish we could improve our productivity to remain sure that our targets and goals are still feasible.

When it comes to productivity, we know things have changed with all the new technology at our hands. Technology has helped businesses, entrepreneurs and freelancers become successful with less hassle. Today, with tons of mobile applications and online services seamlessly integrated into everyday life, the importance of productivity apps is undeniable. Such apps have rapidly become indispensable, with task management tools which allow us to stay on top of our everyday operations and coordinate our lives with a bit more ease topping the rankings.

So, if you have realized by the middle of the year that the demands concerning your time feel insurmountable, don’t fall into despair; there are thousands of productivity apps out there and you don’t have to go through an infinite list trying to identify the best.

Though the ultimate selection is a matter of personal choice, we have picked 25 well-tried options which have gained credibility among thousands and thousands of users across the globe. These apps might not be as commonly used and popular as Google Drive, Dropbox or Skype, but they still deserve your attention. These user-friendly and effective apps are multiplatform and designed in a way that incorporating a few of them into your daily life won’t take long.

Since the term “maximum productivity” is somewhat of a vague notion, we can simplify the concept of the potential of modern productivity tools and introduce it as an easy-to-understand idea: all productivity tools should do more, so you can do less and have more time on your hands. Whatever tasks you need to accomplish—keeping an impeccable to-do-list, assigning tasks to employees, automatic file synchronization, handling the payroll, improving on sleep or taking a mental break—all these software packages are aimed to help you stop procrastinating and to manage your time in the best possible way.

Since there are so many different apps designed for different purposes within the ambit of everyday life, we have provided a listing with different tools as broken down by category, so it will be much easier for you to navigate through our list and discover the apps which might be just what you need.

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Best Document Management and Security Apps

Another useful app for medium to small-business owners, sole proprietors, independent contractors, freelance workers and those who want to save a significant amount of time and enjoy the freedom of workplace mobility is DottedSign. DottedSign lets you add secure, legally operative e-signatures to documents across different platforms and devices, anywhere and anytime. You can even invite the other party/contractor/whomever you’re doing business with to add their signature when needed or assign various fields to multiple signees and monitor the project status with a visual progress bar. Additionally, legally binding audit trails register all the changes made to the document, so you can be sure that the signing process is secured and everything goes seamlessly and conveniently for all signatories.

Price: Free basic version. DottedSign Pro: 9.99 USD/month.

Zoho Docs mobile app could easily become your favorite tool to create, collaborate and get your work done while on the go. Simply designed and powerful, it allows you to create and edit documents, add files from other storage sources, keep everything synchronized, deliver amazing presentations right from your mobile device, and share files and folders with your colleagues. You can set permission to view, comment or edit on shared documents and make sure that everything is under control. Definitely a must-have 5-star application for individuals and businesses.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of passwords we use on a daily basis to safeguard our accounts. In order to keep the accounts safe, each password must be unique and sophisticated, which makes it quite problematic to memorize and not to forget them all.

With LastPass, you don’t really have to. This smart tool has a built-in password generator and creates strong hack-proof combinations which are stored in a vault along with other valuable digital records for autofill online forms and other purposes, so now you just have to remember one master password for hassle-free password management across all your devices. LastPass is designed to make your life easier. With a plethora of useful features and benefits, this powerful password manager app is definitely worth giving a shot.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

A highly functional tool with lots of powerful features, Zoho Forms allows you to create all kinds of forms with the help of the form builder. Whatever form you need for your company, your organization or your personal purposes, Forms has got you covered. With a wide range of templates: Business, Construction, Medical, and Educational, you can create a beautiful form in minutes while on the go. A real timesaver and productivity booster.

Price: Basic plan starts at 8.00 USD/month.

Knowing how easily we can get frustrated while trying to manage documents efficiently on the go, the first productivity app we recommend is PDF Reader. Perfect for viewing, editing and annotating files, this app makes the hassle of dealing with documents an accessory of the past. It allows you to type on your PDFs, merge pages and sign them digitally, attach voice notes, convert documents from one format to another, store your files in the cloud of your choice for an easy access and synchronization, plus you can password protect the files and set up the team-managed account for seamless collaboration with your coworkers.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Best Finance and Accounting Apps

QuickBooks Mobile, which is integrated with QuickBooks Online, has the potential of becoming the primary app for managing your accounting activities. The app lets you create professional invoices and sales receipts, record expenses for tax purposes, transact in multiple currencies and pay bills automatically. All your data is absolutely secure in the cloud, so all you need is a smartphone to handle your finances while on the go. An invaluable productivity tool which has become a real game-changer for small-business owners.

Price: Simple Start Plan with basic features: 7.50 USD/month.

Another cloud-based accounting software for small businesses. It’s easy to use and it’s mostly free, besides the payroll and payment processing functions. So, if your business accounting needs are not big and you are looking for a simple accounting solution to manage invoices, estimates, receipts, reports, and statements, this app has got you covered. Invoicing with Wave is a fast and flexible process. You can download a PDF and attach it to an email or send it to a client directly through the app. On top of that, the invoicing function allows for automatically reminding clients when the due date is close and when it is overdue.

Overall, this tool may become quite useful to the owners of small-sized firms or freelancers, helping with their book-keeping activities in the most practical and affordable way.

Price: Free.

If you choose QuickBooks Mobile as accounting software, another great app to use will be QuickBooks GoPayment POS—one of the best apps for mobile credit card transactions. Due to Bluetooth-enabled mobile card readers, the app allows you to accept debit and credit cards, along with Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay. It features a built-in fraud protection function and lets you take all payment types and track sale transactions easily.

You may start using this convenient tool right away. GoPayment is a free app, although the rates can vary. You can choose the “pay-as-you-go” plan with a swipe rate of 2.4% plus $0.25 per card transaction. If you have more sales, you can pay a monthly premium and get the rate down to 1.6%.

Price: 2.4% plus $0.25 per card transaction; if more sales—1.6%.

Xero is a neat mobile application for iOS and Android which helps with invoices, expense approval and taking care of employee payrolls and purchase orders. It allows you to save your accounting data in the cloud and access it from anywhere. With a feature to reconcile your bank transactions anytime you need, you can you keep track of your cash flow quickly and easily. With Xero trial subscription, you receive one month of free service.

Advanced plans offer an impressive number of powerful features like accounting online dashboard where you can find all your key information, and we have to admit that Xero is rated as the best accounting tool for small and medium-sized organizations. If you are looking for an extensive and comprehensive mobile accounting app, Xero might be the right option for you.

Price: starting at 9.00 USD/month.

This beautiful and intuitive mobile app with ready-to-use templates lets you impress your clients with professional-looking invoices and quotes. Zoho Invoice can help you categorize and monitor expenses, remind you of and accept online payments, send thank-you notes, track invoices and estimate statuses, while tracking time for projects in order to stay productive. The app has some analytical tools as well. Insightful business reports will help you evaluate how your business is performing.

One of the features of this app that we love is international invoicing. This neat program features multi-lingual and multi-currency options to invoice global customers. Being one of the best invoicing applications out there, it may become the right solution for any business owner or freelancer.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Best Project Management and Communication Apps

A startup company currently valued at over seven billion dollars, Slack is widely seen as a marvelous productivity booster that takes collaboration to the next level. Being a “communication server” for your organization, this powerful software does a great job as an advanced messaging platform. Slack’s structure makes it possible to create private or public channels for different groups, projects, teams, etc. as well as direct messaging for private conversations. It may be considered as a replacement for meetings, which is especially important when participants do not share the same office and while on the go. You can also video chat, share documents and images inside the app and make life brighter by using a wide range of funny emojis, gifs, etc.

Instead of sending and receiving multiple emails, Slack allows you to get quick and instant communication and notify the involved parties with a simple tag. Another feature lets you integrate your other tools like Google Drive and Dropbox, which makes project discussion even more productive.

Price: Plans range from 0 to 12.50 USD per user/month.

Freedcamp is an awesome lightweight tool ideal for small projects and users of any age, from teenagers to seniors. It’s easy to use, intuitive, with an attractive interface that has lots of great features like Kanban board, task lists, item priority levels, an ability to assign tasks to clients or keep them just for yourself, due dates and reminders for upcoming deadlines. It’s worth mentioning that Freedcamp provides its paid features free to nonprofits, teachers, and students.

This neat file system allows you to store and organize project files in the most convenient way with an option to edit documents directly from the app. You can even bill your clients from your Time tracking entries or create custom widgets for any type of information you need. We highly recommend this app to any team wishing to improve collaboration and communication.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Trello is another exciting project management app that makes managing more enjoyable than stressful for any user and is loved by dextrous software development teams, and is quite popular among marketing, sales, advertisement, and Human Resources departments. What makes it so attractive? Trello is a visual collaboration tool that offers a digital board for personal or team projects, and it seems to be a great way for presenting and organizing ideas, or even documenting systems and processes.

Trello runs seamlessly across different platforms and devices, and there is hardly a learning curve, so you can start using Trello right away. Users can subdivide big projects into smaller parts by creating “cards” for separate tasks and arrange these cards into different columns. As tasks get completed, the cards can be rearranged or replaced by new ones. A valuable addition to the program is the “Power-Ups” like Dropbox and Google Drive, which maximize its functionality by adding the advantage of cloud storage or Slack, by boosting magic of collaborative environment.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

A really neat tool preferred by millennials. KanbanFlow allows for supervising team and project tasks through visual representation. Since it’s oriented on managing large numbers of simultaneous work-in-progress tasks, it looks like an assemblage of swimlanes representing the current progress.

The customization of columns and colors works perfectly and lets you stay creative. To increase your productivity, the developers of the app recommend using the integrated Pomodoro technique which encourages you to work fully focused in 25-minute intervals, separated by short breaks. Analyzing the time report, you can find out what could cause productivity loss and adjust your work process for better results.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Best Apps for Time Management

Talking about productivity, we must not fail to mention the issue of time management. If we want to become more productive, we have to understand how we spend our time. Do we use it properly or waste it unwittingly? And if we do, how can we change it? Is there a smart tool out there to help us estimate how we spend our precious hours?

Actually, there is and it’s called RescueTime. The name speaks for itself, doesn’t it? Without wasting time on a detailed description of RescueTime features, we will just introduce it as a productivity tool in the sense that it helps you improve your time-management skills. It automatically tracks the time that you’ve spent using applications and websites, analyzes such data and generates reports based on collected information, providing you with an accurate picture of how you spent your day. Sophisticated, convenient and powerful, RescueTime is a must-have product and one of the best productivity tools out there.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Another useful time management app. We can describe it as a cloud-based time tracker for individuals and teams, which does what it’s designed to do quite well—tracking hours, minutes and seconds across platforms and devices, and providing you with powerful reports with an export option.

On top of that, Toggl allows to use different trackers for different tasks and switching between them takes just a few seconds. This simple and easy-to-use app with a friendly interface becomes irreplaceable if you work remotely and bill your clients on an hourly basis. Although, those who work a salaried position will find this tracker practical as well. After all, to become more productive, you always have to know how much time is being spent on specific tasks and specific projects.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

My Minutes is a simple, yet functional personal time tracker available for iPhones only. Ideal for those who want to become more organized and need to stay focused on important tasks. My Minutes can help you stay grounded by setting goals, such as “Do at most two hours on Netflix” or “Do at least 45 minutes of Spanish”.

By tracking your time, this ingenious tool lets you redistribute minutes and hours between less important and more important tasks and activities. Using the “at least” and “at most” goals, the app can help you cut down wasted time and dedicate that time to something more useful and productive.

Price: Free.

This useful app has been created specifically for travelers. Since we all travel from time to time, and we all have certain hassles related to our time spent traveling, tools like Tripit turn out to be very practical. For instance, Tripit allows you to incorporate your travel plans into a single itinerary that can be reached at any time and on any mobile device, regardless of the website used for buying tickets.

Tripit uses your travel emails information, and since the master itinerary is created, the app takes care of the rest. It sends you notifications and reminders, so you know exactly when you have to leave for the airport. You can also check departure times and delays, find directions to the airport and view weather reports.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

Best Notetaking Apps

With a long list of notetaking apps on the market, we may experience some kind of perplexity: which one is the best suited for my needs? Which one could be used for taking notes during lectures, while traveling, or learning a foreign language? Are we looking for something specific or something universal? And why do we ask such questions? The answer is right here. We ask these types of questions because we want to be more productive—we want to study more, learn more, experience more, remember more, create more, and eventually do our best at school, at work, at home, at the gym… the list is endless. That’s why notetaking is important—notes let us boost our creativity, jot our thoughts and ideas down, identify and record important things, keep such information at our fingertips and monitor the progress of our achievements.

What tool would we recommend for such a challenging task? The first place is taken by the world-renowned Evernote—the honorable granddaddy of all notetaking apps. We may even call it an “old-school app” that perfectly coheres with the needs of prolific notetakers. Yet, for novice users, the remarkable range of features offered by Evernote may feel a bit overwhelming. Taking this into consideration, we suggest proceeding to the next app on our list.

Not very well-known yet, but proficiently designed NoteLedge can become a real gem for anyone with a creative mind who cherishes the importance of imagination. The app is extensive yet versatile, good for taking and organizing all sorts of notes. You can insert photos, audio or video files into your notes, which helps to create interactive content for presentations or mind-maps. You can type or hand-write your remarks and ideas and highlight parts of the text to emphasize key points.

In Noteledge, you can also group your notes easily and reorganize them in different ways. On top of that, you can back your notes up to the cloud storage of your choice and have them synced and accessible across all devices. A really good app for artists, designers, writers, scientists, journalists, bloggers and students of any kind.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

A beautiful notetaking app for all devices, Zoho Notebook is not a traditional digital notebook created for “written notes”. On the contrary, Zoho Notebook, adored by teenagers, introduces a different approach for each note type and allows you to create gorgeous and unique Note Cards with customized functions, which makes it easy to organize the notes corresponding to them. You can create several notebooks, each with notes that are designed for content writing for instance, or sketching, capturing images, recording voice memos or docs and attaching files. An ideal app for keeping memories, pinning down ideas and studying.

Price: Free.

Unlike the above-mentioned apps, Simplenote seems to be the most basic notetaking tool out there. It offers a clean and simple way of crafting and storing notes. This is the case when simplicity meets efficiency. Open the app, type something down and consider it done. All your notes will be saved in the cloud for easy access from anywhere. In order to organize your notes, you may use the tag and pin features.

Apart from its simplicity, Simplenote allows for sharing and collaborating, which makes it even more useful. Overall, the app looks like an attractive option for those notetakers who prefer to concentrate on the writing without packing it with any visual content.

Price: Completely free.

Other Favorites

There’s a beautiful irony about this truly amazing app. It’s available on your iOS and Android smartphones and tablets, yet it’s aimed to prevent you from spending too much time using your devices.

The idea is simple—you plant a tree, whenever you want to focus on your work, your hobbies, family or pets. Within the next 30 minutes, this tree will grow, while you are working, cooking, playing with your kids, drawing, or watering flowers in your garden. The tree will be killed if you leave the app within these 30 minutes. Don’t leave the app. Keep your phone aside. Grow a forest. Best of all, you can earn virtual coins by staying focused on your tasks and use these to grow real-life trees through the Forest app.

Price: Completely free.

ToDoist is a powerful productivity tool which has already helped lots of users to achieve something really valuable—the ability to focus your energy on the right things. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?! We all want to start each day feeling calm and in control. We want to learn how we can organize and prioritize our tasks and projects. We need the confidence that everything is organized and accounted for.

That’s why we should try ToDoist—the intelligent software which gives people the opportunity to get more control over their lives. How does it work? It’s quite simple. ToDoist tracks your tasks as you tick them off, interprets the data, and shows how productive you’ve been during a certain period of time. That data comes together into a personal Todoist Karma score to get you motivated and keep improving. On top of that, this wonderful app is also very helpful in planning your work and keeping your entire team on track. Plan projects and assign responsibility, discuss project details, monitor deadlines with it and never worry about forgetting things again.

Price: Free with premium upgrades.

The best free language-learning app out there and one of the best available language-learning apps. It does a great job introducing you to a new language with the help of podcast and interactive stories and works perfectly for those learners who want to improve their skills. It has a neat and clear interface and runs seamlessly on mobile devices. DuoLingo it’s fun to use when you want to study outside of school, prepare for a trip abroad or simply find a new hobby to master.

Price: Free with premium features.