We are all looking for new alternatives and upgrades to the tools we use everyday. In the age of startups, mobile platforms and social media, there are constantly new, more convenient, cheaper (free) or altogether better tools for performing our everyday tasks. Here is the list of ten commercial and business tools that you can consider.

1. Simplenote – Simpler, light and free note-taking

From starting as a fun and learning experience for its founders to being featured in MacLife, books about lifehacking and making your life easier and better and tech media – Simplenote has come far and is present on all platforms as well as easily accessed over the website. Several things are different from its contenders OneNote, Google Keep and Evernote. It boasts simplistic approach, speed and decluttered UI. As a light, clean and free solution, it’s a great stripped-down choice for everyone in search of basic note-taking with special sharing features as well as cross-platform syncing.

2. Hiri – Outlook on steroids

Hiri is another solution meant to speed up your productivity and make your everyday life easier, especially in the workplace. It’s an email client looking to replace your outdated and sometimes messy Outlook client. Featured in a Techcrunch article as a client looking to fix email in the workplace, it essentially does two great things. It gives you an option to rate each mail you receive, and it also provides you with your own personal dashboard and analytics with your workplace scores. The aim being to improve your email writing. Its second function that really makes a difference is that every email must be marked as requiring further action or just being FYI. It’s your millennial generation email client.

3. Puffin for Facebook – Data saving client for Facebook

From CloudMosa, the maker of Puffin Web Browser, comes an application that solves a problem for many. Puffin for Facebook is an application for your iOS and Android smartphone which replaces Facebook’s native app, one of the most data and battery demanding apps. It significantly reduces data usage while at the same time increases page load speed. Most users report that it’s superfast, and thanks to its cloud rendering and data compression, it consumes 80% – 90% less data. So, although it comes at the cost of picture and video quality, its speed is undisputable.

4. Signal – More private messaging and calls

If you haven’t already heard about this application, you will definitely consider it. Signal is an alternative messaging app, recommended by whistleblower Edward Snowden as the only one to use in this era of privacy intrusion. All other apps don’t come even close to Signal’s level of encryption. The aim of the developer Open Whisper Systems is to keep the communication as simple as possible, providing incredible security in return. They even got strong reputation in whistleblower and cryptography circles for providing trustworthy end-to-end encryption with ease of use. To keep it simple, every single message and call in the app is encrypted and cannot be intercepted.

5. AdEspresso – Boosted Facebook Power Editor

If you are a marketer, you have probably already heard about this one, but in case you haven’t, you should really give it a try. Simply put, “AdEspresso is the fastest growing SaaS Solution for Facebook Advertising Optimization”, as written on Facebook Partners page. Start using it now and all your A/B Testing troubles will be gone. It will take a brief time to understand that it’s your Boosted Facebook Power Editor with all the necessary analytics data, simple dashboards and easy campaign optimization. You get all the necessary info and also suggestions which of yours PPC you should reconsider. Oh, and great customer support is also included.

6. WPS Office – Fully functional and free Office alternative

Although commercially available for businesses, WPS Office is absolutely free for personal use and is recommended by most tech portals as one of the finest free office clients for all your Writing, Presentation and Spreadsheet needs, as the acronym suggests. It’s a great, simple, feature-packed alternative to Microsoft’s perhaps costly products. Moreover, it covers everything you need from an office client – format compatibility with nice templates and, most importantly, it’s available for Windows, iOS, Android and Linux.

7. Hyper – YouTube scrolling

Hyper is an amazing app. It crunches the best videos on the web for you from that day. You get one hand-picked video for every hour with superb quality. The content that you are given is always intriguing, mind-boggling and covers a wide range of topics such as comedy and short, stunning documentaries. You will learn new things and watch something you probably wouldn’t on YouTube and just be amazed. What’s interesting is that these videos are picked by experts. It’s also super slim and simple – you just watch what you want, swipe to save for later or send it to junk and that’s it. Although it’s available only for iOS, it was on the 2015 and 2016 Best of list by Apple and received appraisal from the likes of The Next Web, Techcrunch, WIRED, Gizmodo, WSJ, Adweek and Variety among others…Be intrigued.

8. Pocket – Reading list and News application

Although around for a while, not putting Pocket on the list would be just plain wrong because it makes you life easier and simpler. Pocket is the rockstar app for all the avid readers, people who go over a ton of content not being able to read it all at once. With so much good, interesting content on the web, everyday life doesn’t really give you the opportunity to read it all. Bookmarks have been a thing of the past for some time now. So, what does Pocket do? It cross-platforms your web browser and devices. When you find something on the web and can’t find time to read it, just click the button and put it in Pocket. Besides the ‘saving for later’ option, Pocket introduces amazing articles for the topics of your choice. It’s an altogether beautiful reading experience.

9. Storm It – Your tweetstorm game upgrade

Storm It is your Twitter booster application. It’s very simple to really upgrade your Twitter game or, as the name says, to upgrade your Tweetstorm game. We all know what a tweetstorm is, and this neatly designed app makes it very easy for you to collect all your thoughts and ideas and storm your series of tweets from place and with a click of a button. It’s a very interesting solution for this new trend that really caught on last year.

10. Flychat – All messengers from one place

Having an iOS-only application without one for Android would be reckless, so one really great solution for everyday messaging troubles comes only for the second platform. Flychat is a super-convenient app, and as its makers boast, a “revolutionary way” to read your messages. It overlays all your other messaging apps and gives you a simple and easy way to respond to any of them from a small bubble without leaving your current app. At a time when we all have several messaging accounts, this is a great time-saver. It supports pretty much all main applications, the only downside being the lack of support for Viber. Oh, and Signal. ;)

If we missed any useful Tool or an App, do let us know in the comments bellow!

This post is part of our contributor series. It is written and published independently of TNW.

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