Category: Uncategorised

For our money, Shopify is the best ecommere solution out of the two, as its website and sales features scored better than Woocommerce’s in our research. In our tests, Shopify scored an amazing 4.7/5 against Woocommerce’s 3.8/5 total score.

We’ll admit that the playing field is not entirely level here. Woocommerce is a standalone ecommerce software, unlike Shopify, which is a full ecommerce/builder platform. To put it simply: Woocommerce will render your online shop operational, whereas, with Shopify, you’ll be able to build your webstore from the ground up.

While looking into ecommerce solutions may be daunting, we’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to. With 10+ years of experience, we tested both platforms. Here are the results.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: Head-to-head

Woocommerce allows for deeper customisation and offers more hands-on support than Shopify. These qualities make it great for small businesses, self-starters and design-centred shops.

For medium and large businesses, Shopify’s scale and advanced reporting makes it a better option than Woocommerce. Shopify’s sales features trump what Woocommerce offers, despite Woocommerce’s support being more comprehensive than Shopify’s. Overall, we think Shopify’s the best between the two.

The difference between the tools can bring strategic advantages. For instance, Woocommerce is based on the popular content management system WordPress. If you already have a site there and want to develop it into a store, we’d be hard-pressed to give you an easier way to do so.

That said, for someone starting fresh without a site, Shopify offers an all-in-one platform allowing you to create and host a website with sales features.

Woocommerce overview

Woocommerce is a free ecommerce software which enables you to turn a WordPress site into an online shop. For the cost-conscious, it’s a cheap way of getting into ecommerce.

Shopify overview

Shopify is a full ecommerce web builder platform with which you can build and host your online shop. Shopify is not as customisable as Woocommerce but its set-up is more intuitive.

Woocommerce pricing vs Shopify pricing

Woocommerce offers the best value, plus you don’t have to pay if you already own a WordPress site. In our research, Woocommerce scored 4.3/5 against Shopify’s 3/5 on value for money – a result influenced by Shopify’s lack of free plan and high price on its Advanced plan.

As we’ve already mentioned, Woocommerce has no price plans because it’s free to download and use. However, there may be some costs that arise if you’re using Woocommerce that you wouldn’t face with Shopify.

Extra costs associated with Woocommerce:

• Hosting, average $21 per month.
• Extensions, average $79 per year.
• Theme, average $38 per year.
• Domain (eg .com), $21.99 per year.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: Which one has the best free plan?

Woocommerce is free by its nature – while Shopify doesn’t have a free plan at all. That said, despite its nominal $0 cost, Woocommerce usually entails payments for extensions, as well as hosting and perhaps a template to render your online shop operational. While lacking a free plan, Shopify does offer a 14-day free trial.

Best for website features: Shopify

Shopify has better web features because, unlike Woocommerce, you can build and host a website there. Being a plugin, Woocommerce websites are actually WordPress ones and their hosting is handled by third-party companies. For its ability to set up shop with less faff, Shopify’s a clear winner.

Best for sales features: Shopify

While Woocommerce does have more payment options (it offers or integrates with five major payment platforms: Amazon, Stripe, Square, PayPal and Apple Pay), Shopify’s ability to set up shop pretty much anywhere more than compensates for the three payment platforms it currently works with (Stripe, Square and PayPal). With Shopify, you can also sell directly through social media, so it wins this one too.

Best for design functionaties: Shopify

Design-wise, Shopify’s greatest asset is the fact that it allows you to have a slick website even if you’re the most code-averse of business owners. The templates look pristine and highly customisable. Woocommerce’s customisation, while extensive, will require more time and effort. As far as we can tell, it’s third time lucky for Shopify.

Best for value for money: Woocommerce

Compared to Shopify’s set price tiers, Woocommerce allows you to build a set-up which works for you while allowing for the spending to be very compartmentalised – and therefore more manageable. Also, it’s worth noting that Shopify charges payment fees of its own while Woocommerce doesn’t, which ended up hurting the former’s cost-benefit assessment. Therefore, Woocommerce wins in this category.

Best for help and support: Woocommerce

Woocommerce’s 24/7 live chat is a key pro of the platform, plus the knowledge centre is very thorough and provides a lot of answers – this comes in handy if you don’t feel like speaking to someone. Shopify also offers 24/7 support but not for all plans – Starter users don’t have access to it – and its knowledge centre doesn’t cover as much ground, so Woocommerce comes out triumphant here.

Best in customer score: Shopify

Beyond our own testing, we also reach out to fellow users of the platforms with a survey so we can compare our findings to that of an outside audience. Our research into this topic shows that users side with Shopify. Users highlighted that  Woocommerce was an intricate platform, with many customers saying they either required help from a dedicated professional to run it, or needed to set time aside to learn it for themselves. In the end, Shopify’s intuitive layout won over the clientele.

Best for ease of use: Tie

Both platforms score 3.5/5 in this category. Shopify allows for a relatively hassle-free start and you can make it work without coding knowledge. However, the design bit can be a bit clunky and overwhelming at times, which isn’t ideal.

Woocommerce’s set-up is not easy, requiring considerable time and effort. While usage gets progressively smoother, even fans of the platform note these growing pains.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: How do they compare to the competition?

According to our research, Shopify is top among the best ecommerce platforms. Big Commerce, due to its focus on large scale orders and ultra detailed inventory features, is still the best choice for large businesses but, apart from these, Shopify covers you.

Wix and Squarespace are other massively popular alternatives that get high praise for their design and, like Woocommerce, it also appeals to self-starters. It’s Shopify’s inventory features that trump them all. It’s also worth mentioning Squarespace’s cheaper price tag beats Shopify and puts it close to Woocommerce in value for money.

Woocommerce and Shopify are two ecommerce tools which allow you to open an online shop – but which is a best fit for your business? For our money, Shopify is definitely the one you should go for, as its website and sales features scored better than Woocommerce’s in our research. Shopify was also rated higher than Woocommerce by customers we surveyed.

We’ll admit that the playing field is not entirely level here. Woocommerce is an ecommerce software, unlike Shopify, which is a full ecommerce/builder platform. To put it simply: Woocommerce will render your online shop operational, whereas, with Shopify, you’ll be able to build your webstore from the ground up.

Woocommerce’s plentiful plugins will appeal to the cyber-savvy and customisation aficionados, but Shopify’s design features and ease of use are out to please even the most code-averse business owners. In our research – which included both in-house testing and customer-sourced feedback – Shopify scored an amazing 4.7/5 against Woocommerce’s 3.8/5.

While looking into which ecommerce solution is best for you may be daunting, we’ve done the hard work so you don’t have to. With 10+ years of experience, we tested both platforms and you can find the takeaways of our research below. Just read on.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: Head-to-Head

Woocommerce allows room for deeper customisation and offers more hands-on support than Shopify. These qualities make it great for small businesses, self-starters and design-centred shops.

For medium and large businesses, Shopify’s scale and advanced reporting makes it a better option than Woocommerce. Shopify’s sales features trump what Woocommerce offers, despite Woocommerce’s support being more comprehensive than Shopify’s. Overall, we think Shopify’s the best between the two.

The difference between the tools can bring strategic advantages. For instance, Woocommerce is based on the popular content management system WordPress. If you already have a site there and want to develop it into a store, we’d be hard-pressed to give you an easier way to do so.

That said, for someone starting fresh, and without a site, Shopify offers an overall service which allows you not only to create one but also host it and integrate it with ecommerce.

Woocommerce Overview

Woocommerce is an ecommerce software which enables you to turn a WordPress site into an online shop. It’s free – so if you already have a WordPress site, that’s a cheap way of getting into ecommerce. Extensions allow for deep customisation, but require a tech-savvy person to set them up. It’s best for small businesses owners, who can rely on its excellent customer support. Unlike Shopify, it doesn’t offer website building or hosting of its own but it provides better value for money.

Shopify Overview

Shopify is a full ecommerce/builder platform with which you can build and host your website as well as equip it for ecommerce. It’s offered in five priced tiers, with no free option. For business owners who haven’t got a site yet, it’s a neat solution to get started despite the need of initial investment. It suits medium to large businesses owners, which will appreciate the detailed stock and reporting capabilities of the platform. It’s not as customisable as Woocommerce but its set-up is more intuitive.

Woocommerce Pricing vs Shopify Pricing

Packing various features for a small initial investment – or none if you already own a WordPress site – Woocommerce offers the best value. In our research, Woocommerce scored 4.3/5 against Shopify’s 3/5 on value for money – a result influenced by Shopify’s lack of a free version and high price on its Advanced plan. As Woocommmerce’s pricing varies, it’s difficult to compare it to the competitors’. Shopify’s pricing, however, puts it on par with BigCommerce but is more expensive than Wix and Squarespace.

Woocommerce Pricing

Potential Woocommerce users are wooed by its price tag: the platform is free. But, unlike Shopify, Woocommerce doesn’t host the websites using it, so you’d have to pay for hosting, which averages $21 per month if you’re aiming for an ecommerce-tailored one, and likely for extensions, which average $79 per year. There’s also a high chance of you needing a paid theme for your shop, which averages at $38 per year.

With all of the above taken into account, Woocommerce would only be free if you’re already paying to host a WordPress website, and you don’t require any paid extensions or themes.

This structure means that, on one hand, since Woocommerce doesn’t work with set prices, it can be difficult to budget for your requirements. On the other hand, because every feature is provided separately, you can buy only what works for your business and get more for your investment.

Shopify Pricing

Shopify’s pricing is more streamlined than that of Woocommerce – and it includes web hosting. Shopify comes in five packages: Starter, which is $7 per month; Basic, which is $38 per month; the medium-tier (titled simply Shopify), which costs $103 per month; Advanced, which costs $387 per month; and Plus, its bespoke plan aimed at larger companies, which starts at $2,627/month.

These costs are based on the monthly costs of an annual plan – if you decide to pay monthly, the bill could go up 50% depending on the plan you choose, which is worth bearing in mind.

Considering its all-encompassing nature (which helped it become one of the best overall ecommerce platforms in Canada), Shopify packs a punch, especially for medium to large businesses, which can benefit from the features available on its top tiers, despite their sizable price tags.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: Which One Has the Best Free Plan?

Woocommerce has the best free plan – if only for the fact it has one while Shopify doesn’t. That said, despite its nominal $0 cost, Woocommerce’s regular usage likely entails payments for extensions, as well as hosting and templates to render your online shop operational. While lacking a free plan, Shopify does offer a 14-day free trial.

Best for Website Features: Shopify

Shopify takes this one mainly because, unlike Woocommerce, you can build and host a website there. Being a plugin, Woocommerce websites are actually WordPress ones and their hosting is handled by third-party companies (BlueHost is their recommended choice), which is a technicality worth mentioning. For its ability to set up shop wholesale with less faff, Shopify’s a clear winner.

Best for Sales Features: Shopify

While Woocommerce does have more payment options (it offers or integrates with five major payment platforms: Amazon, Stripe, Square, PayPal and Apple Pay), Shopify’s ability to set up shop pretty much anywhere more than compensates for the three payment platforms it currently works with (Stripe, Square and PayPal). With Shopify, you can also sell directly through social media, so it wins this one too.

Best for Design Functionalities: Shopify

Design-wise, Shopify’s greatest asset is the fact that it allows you to have a slick website even if you’re the most code-averse of business owners. The templates look pristine and highly customisable. Woocommerce’s customisation, while extensive, will require more time and effort. As far as we can tell, it’s third time lucky for Shopify.

Best for Value for Money: Woocommerce

Compared to Shopify’s set price tiers, Woocommerce allows you to build a set-up which works for you while allowing for the spending to be very compartmentalised – and therefore more manageable. Also, it’s worth noting that Shopify charges payment fees of its own while Woocommerce doesn’t, which ended up hurting the former’s cost-benefit assessment. Therefore, Woocommerce wins in this category.

Best for Help and Support: Woocommerce

Woocommerce’s 24/7 live chat is a key pro of the platform, plus the knowledge centre is very thorough and provides a lot of answers – this comes in handy if you don’t feel like speaking to someone. Shopify also offers 24/7 support but not for all plans – Starter users don’t have access to it – and its knowledge centre doesn’t cover as much ground, so Woocommerce comes out triumphant here.

Best in Customer Score: Shopify

Beyond our own testing, we also reach out to fellow users of the platforms with a survey so we can compare our findings to that of an outside audience. Our research into this topic shows that users side with Shopify. Users highlighted that  Woocommerce was an intricate platform, with many customers saying they either required help from a dedicated professional to run it, or needed to set time aside to learn it for themselves. In the end, Shopify’s intuitive layout won over the clientele.

Best for Ease of Use: Tie

Both platforms score 3.5/5 in this category. Shopify allows for a relatively hassle-free start and you can make it work without coding knowledge. However, the design bit can be a bit clunky and overwhelming at times, which isn’t ideal.

Woocommerce’s set-up is not easy, requiring considerable time and effort. While usage gets progressively smoother, even fans of the platform note these growing pains.

Woocommerce vs Shopify: How Do They Compare to the Competition?

According to our research, Shopify is the best overall among the platforms we looked into. Big Commerce, due to its focus on large scale orders and ultra detailed inventory features, is still the best choice for large businesses but, apart from these, Shopify covers you.

Wix and Squarespace are other massively popular alternatives that get high praise for their design and, like Woocommerce, it also appeals to self-starters. It’s Shopify’s inventory features that trump them all. It’s also worth mentioning Squarespace’s cheaper price tag beats Shopify and puts it close to Woocommerce in value for money.

Pick and pack services refer to the warehouse process of selecting items from inventory and packaging them up for delivery.

When a customer places an order online, warehouse operatives receive a notification and then physically select the items from different parts of the warehouse. This “pick and pack” phase of order fulfilment is the last step before parcels are collected by courier services. To get an idea of the costs associated with each stage of order fulfilment, read our article.

This quick guide covers the need-to-know information on pick and pack services, with top tips on how to choose a supplier.

What are pick and pack services?

Pick and pack services ensure products are accurately and efficiently selected, ready for safe delivery to the customer. Warehouse staff usually have a tablet (or sometimes a printed list) with the type and quantity of items to collect from the shelves.

There are several methods of picking and packing, and the strategy depends on the warehouse manager. Items may be picked for one customer at a time, for a batch of customers, or in warehouse zones. The first strategy is best suited to smaller warehouses, while the latter two are more efficient for larger order fulfilment centres.

Right now, the pick and pack services in the UK are almost exclusively reliant on human workers. Some European warehouses are using drones in parts of their inventory management. It is not yet common for robots to pick and pack inventory items in general as humans are much more accurate at selecting items. However, the main inefficiency of pick and pack services is the time it takes to walk across the warehouse floor – comprising up to 50% of the picking process.

Do I need to use pick and pack services?

Pick and pack services are essential for growing ecommerce businesses that can no longer operate out of your back room. If you’re no longer able to physically locate, collect and box up products your customers have ordered online, then you need pick and pack services.

Here are some types of businesses that need pick and pack services:

• Homeware retailers
• Sports ecommerce
• Cosmetics companies
• Food shopping services
• Supplements ecommerce
• Pet food suppliers
• Clothing retailers
• Electronics (machines or parts) businesses

Any small or medium-sized business that needs a warehouse or order fulfilment centre to handle their inventory needs pick and pack services.

Who are the best pick and pack services in the UK?

For the best efficiency in turnaround time between order placement and package delivery, ecommerce merchants need speedy pick and pack services. UK business leaders can expect improved customer satisfaction and better review scores of their ecommerce services when pick and pack is running smoothly.

But who should you choose to pick and pack your products?

You can use our quick form to request a match with a top order fulfilment supplier in the UK. We’ll go through our trusted pick and pack service providers and hand-pick a few to get in touch with you.

Below we share some of our recommendations for top pick and pack service providers:

Next Steps

Now you’ve got a solid understanding of how pick and pack services work in the UK, you’re ready to find your ideal supplier. Simply answer a couple of questions about what exactly you’re looking for and we’ll ask trustworthy ecommerce fulfilment providers to give you a call.

Or, if you need more information about pricing, why not take a look at our ecommerce fulfilment cost guide? It explains the kind of price points you can expect for different kinds of services, including picking and packing.

Franking machines that are not Mailmark ready can no longer be used for sending post via Royal Mail. This change came into effect on 1 January 2023, when non-Mailmark franking machines became decertified.

If your current franking machine isn’t compatible with Mailmark technology (which means it prints a barcode in blue ink), then you’ll need to upgrade it.

Royal Mail has also introduced a new deadline for swapping out your old stamps for the new ones, so read on to find out about that.

Decertification of standard franking machines

Some older franking machine models will be no good in 2023. Royal Mail has rolled out Mailmark franking as the only acceptable form of franking. That means you can only frank and send post with a Mailmark machine as of 1 January 2023.

Royal Mail is phasing out non-Mailmark franking to increase accuracy and efficiency of mail processing across the board. After all, it’s quicker to let robots read barcodes rather than to ask humans to interpret numbers and sort mail by hand.

Mailmark technology was invented in 2013, so any franking machine made before that date became obsolete in 2023. If your machine prints standard franking marks with red ink and a round insignia, these are two of the signs that you’ll need an upgrade.

What do I need to do?

You’ll need to ensure your franking license is updated to a Mailmark franking license. You’ll also need to upgrade machines to a Mailmark-ready model. If your machine is due an upgrade, then it’s time for a conversation with your expenses department. Low-volume machine rental starts from £20 per month, and mid-volume is around £50 monthly.

If you have an older non-Mailmark machine, Royal Mail would have notified you that the last date you can add credit was 31 October 2022.

To upgrade, you can take out a new contract with the same supplier or you can switch to a new one – it’s completely up to you. We can help you find the best deal, if you register your interest in our franking machine deals engine. We’ll promptly arrange a callback.

If your machine already prints barcodes in blue ink then, good news, you don’t need to do anything. That means your machine is already good to go this year.

Will my franking machine still work this year?

Your machine needs to be able to run Mailmark franking for it to continue functioning.

If you aren’t sure if your franking machine prints the new or old marks, you’ll need to check your lease or purchase paperwork to see what model you’ve currently got. If you spot your franking machine in the list below, then it will not be valid for use anymore.

Tip: Try Pressing Ctl+F and typing in your model name, then scroll down to see if it is highlighted below.

Pitney Bowes non-Mailmark franking machines

• DM50, DM55 & K700
• P720
• DM100i, DM125i, DM150i & DM200i
• DM300c (Pre 2013)
• DM400c (Pre 2013)
• DM475 (Pre 2013)
• DM400, DM500, DM550 & DM575
• Paragon Series
• DM800, DM900 & DM1000
• DM200, DM225, DM250 & DM300
• Post Perfect & B700
• E700 & personal Post

Frama non-Mailmark franking machines

• Accessmail (Pre 2013)
• Ecomail (Pre 2013)
• Officemail (Pre 2013)
• Mailmax (Pre 2013)
• Mailspirit (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F2 (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F2L (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F4 (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F4L (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F6 (Pre 2013)
• Matrix F6L (Pre 2013)

FP non-Mailmark franking machines

• Mymail, Mymail 3
• Optimail, Optimail 25, Optimail 30, & Optimail 35
• Optimail 60, Optimail 65
• Optimail 90, Optimail 95
• T1000
• Jetmail

Quadient non-Mailmark franking machines

Quadient is formerly known as ‘Neopost’

• Autostamp, Autostamp 2
• IJ25, IJ25E
• IJ30, IJ35, IJ40, & IJ45
• IJ50, IJ65, IJ70, & IJ75
• IJ80, IJ85, & IJ90
• IJ110
• IS240 (Pre 2013)
• IS280 (Pre 2013)
• IS330, IS350 (Pre 2013)
• IS420, IS440, IS460, & IS480 (Pre 2013)

Changes to stamps

Following suit with the rest of the Royal Mail upgrades, regular stamps are being upgraded to have a barcode attached.

The old deadline for exchanging old postage stamps for new ones was 31 January 2023. But that turned out to be way too soon for everyone to catch up with the news. So the deadline was extended to 31 July 2023.

If you had too many stamps to use before the deadline, you can exchange your old stamps for new ones under the Royal Mail Stamp Swap Out scheme. You fill out a form and post it along with your stamps, then Royal Mail will send you back new ones within seven working days. You cannot swap your stamps at a Post Office.

If you have stamps with special pictures on them (such as Christmas stamps) these will continue to be valid after the deadline, and you don’t need to swap them out.

But for regular stamps with the Queen on them, you needed to swap them for barcoded stamps before 31st July 2023.

Changes to Special Delivery and Signed For franking

As of 31 October 2022, you should not attach a sticker onto franked Special Delivery Guaranteed or Signed For post. This is part of the franking machines decertification process. So your franking machine will print a long barcode on these types of mail instead.

You should use black or blue ink. Buying new ink cartridges should be factored into your franking machine costs, as different colour inks retail for various prices.

Fortunately, this change will make your mailroom workflows more efficient, particularly if your business processes lots of Special Delivery and Signed For mail. For professionals such as legal advisors, estate agents, consultants and creatives, the change will add much-needed automation to save staff time.

Your machine software will update to include the new, longer barcode. However, the longer barcode may take up the space where your company logo and return address normally goes. You may want to check your machine settings to see how you can include these alongside the long barcode. Ask your manufacturer if you need help with this.

Unfortunately if you still have the sticky labels for Special Delivery Guaranteed or Signed For you’ll have to throw these away. If you use the sticky labels now you may be surcharged.

The best UK 3PL logistics companies are Bezos, Fulfillable and Fulfilment by Amazon. But we’re also excited about the up-and-coming Huboo, which is opening another fulfilment centre in Germany and expanding into the rest of Europe.

If you’re looking to compare bespoke quotes from a range of 3PL suppliers, fill out our quick questionnaire and we’ll match you with trusted suppliers. Once we’ve assessed your needs, we’ll ask a select few to give you a call to discuss the details of your fulfilment preferences.

Or read on. In this quick guide, we’ll take you through the best third-party logistics (3PL) companies that UK businesses should get on board with for supply chain management. We’ll go over the definition of 3PL firms, outline how we chose these suppliers as the best in the business, and tell you how you can get started with them.

What are 3PL companies?

You may be secretly wondering, “What are 3PL companies?” Don’t worry, we’ll go over the definition quickly now. 3PL stands for “third-party logistics” and refers to outsourcing inventory management. That means you hire a company to store, pack, and send your products for delivery as soon as orders are placed.

Most 3PL companies own and operate warehouses, managing teams of operatives that use forklifts and RFID scanners. Depending on the size of their facilities, the 3PL handles larger goods on pallets (like Fulfilment By Amazon) or only on shelves (like Huboo). 3PL companies will usually process returns (known as reverse logistics), and dispose of unwanted stock as well.

Entrepreneurs hire 3PL companies to handle their stock. Small business fulfilment frees up time for business development, and creates space where inventory used to be stored. (Usually that means you get your living room back).

Best 3PL companies for UK businesses

Here are our top recommendations for fulfilment companies, side by side for comparison:

1. Bezos: Best 3PL company for bulky goods

2. Fulfillable: Best 3PL company for order accuracy

3. Fulfilment by Amazon (FBA): Best for multichannel fulfilment

4. Huboo: Best 3PL company for smaller packages

How we chose the best UK 3PL companies

With the explosion of ecommerce during the lockdowns between 2020 and 2021, a yawning gap of fulfilment providers emerged in the UK. Several dozen 3PL companies scaled up, expanded, and gained more customers as online merchants took advantage of the nation’s thirst for internet shopping.

So how do we know who’s the best of these rapidly multiplying 3PL companies?

We’ve compared UK 3PL companies on a range of metrics: size of the company, average review score across multiple platforms, range of services and industry specialisms. We’re confident in our thorough research, so you can be sure any of these suppliers will manage your order fulfilment with professionalism.

The best software for inventory management is Zoho Inventory, according to our exclusive rating system.

From our industry research, we know inventory management software is an incredibly competitive space. This is great news for merchants, retailers, manufacturers and distributors because there’s a range of excellent software choices currently on the market. The downside is that lots of them are really similar, so it’s hard to pick out the differences between them.

In this guide to the best inventory management software, we’ll consider customer reviews as well as industry specialisms so you can find out exactly which company suits you best.

Remember, you can always use an order fulfilment supplier who’ll take care of inventory management for you. That means you can fully outsource inventory tracking to a third party, also known as a 3PL company. If you’re ready to invest in serious growth for your business, consider those costs.

Best software for inventory management: ranking

As seasoned experts in small business fulfilment companies, we know what it takes to run a warehouse. After extensive research, we’ve finalised the strongest options for inventory management software UK businesses could choose. And here they are:

1. Zoho Inventory: Best easy-to-use inventory tracking 4.7/5
2. Fishbowl Inventory: Best ecommerce inventory management software 4.5/5
3. inFlow: Best for product variations 4.4/5
4. Cin7: Best inventory management software for marketing 4.2/5
5. Katana: Best for manufacturing oversight tools 4.1/5

Now we’ll look at each product in some more detail: summarising who they are best suited to, their strengths and weaknesses plus their pricing options. When you’re considering fulfilment costs you should bear in mind some software is priced in USD rather than GBP. For the purposes of this article, we’ve converted American pricing to English money to make it easier to plan your budgets.

1. Zoho Inventory: Best easy-to-use inventory tracking software

2. Fishbowl: Best ecommerce inventory management software

3. inFlow: Best for product variations

4. Cin7: Best inventory management software for marketing

5. Katana Manufacturing ERP: Best inventory management software for manufacturing oversight tools

How do I know if I need inventory management software?

Good question. Inventory management software is for warehouse managers and floor managers of large stockrooms or storage facilities. For instance, you may be managing stock for a sizeable retail or rental operation and finding it hard to stay organised using printed notes and spreadsheets.

Inventory management software is a much more sophisticated system of controlling stock, so you can easily keep track of what goes where, for how long, and how much of it’s left. You can also set reorder points according to your stocking strategy, so you’ll never find yourself unable to fulfil incoming orders. If you’re regularly stocking out because you’ve forgotten to reorder at critical moments, then chances are you could benefit from software to automate this process.

Usually inventory management software links up with your sales systems, so that floor staff are immediately alerted when a customer places an order. This keeps your fulfilment process efficient, because warehouse workers can begin picking and packing without wasting time walking over to an office or taking phone calls from the sales team. If you’ve noticed you and your team are wasting time trying to locate or identify stock, consider whether inventory management stock could solve these issues. Such technology is essential for 3PL companies.

How did we rank the best software for inventory management?

To make our ranked list, we weighed up the range of features on offer, combined with customer review scores and value for money. We scored each software product out of 19 for its range of features, then added this to the average customer review rating across five trusted platforms.

Finally, we awarded additional points for inventory tracking software that had a free version, a free trial or was exceptionally good value for money. The final tally was converted into a five star rating, and this is what you see on each of the scorecards below.

The best software for inventory management handles a number of tasks including:

• Retail inventory management
• Multi-channel tracking (eg. Amazon, eBay, Shopify, Etsy)
• Reporting/analytics
• Supplier management
• Kitting
• Mobile capability

All of the best inventory management software suppliers have the above features as standard. What differentiates them is their specialist features designed for particular users. So when you’re deciding which of the below companies is best for your particular business needs, you should consider the software’s target user, specific features and add-ons – not just the pricing.

Ebooks are the most successful lead magnet according to our survey of business leaders. In this guide, we’ll explain what lead magnets are and give you ideas to create your own.

A lead magnet pulls in potential customers or clients and gives them a taste of your business expertise. It’s a useful tool for gaining better leads and converting more sales. Moreover, they’re pretty simple to set up, and the long-term benefits strengthen your brand. You can also invest in social media management for your business so that they can handle it for you.

What Is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a gift, such as a discount or piece of bonus content, which is given to a potential customer in exchange for something, often their contact information. Lead magnets can be used to achieve many desirable conversions, like subscribing to a newsletter, following your business on social media or an “opt-in” to email marketing.

Top 5 Lead Magnet Ideas

1. eBook: Demonstrate your thought leadership with informative content
2. Checklist: Provide an actionable tool that helps your audience
3. Guide: Share your expertise with a how-to or resource guide 
4. Webinar: Grow your community with an engaging educational tool
5. Course: Become a resource for skills and development

What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?

The ‘magnet’ symbolizes attracting more leads, which is vital when you’re growing your small business. That means what you’re offering has got to be truly appealing.

How can you do this? If your company offers something valuable for free, such as a calculator tool, a PDF download or a discount, web visitors are more likely to hand over contact details in exchange.

These are the main features of a high quality lead magnet:

1. Relevance: your audience really wants what you’re offering
2. Trust: it doesn’t seem like a scam
3. Reward: there’s a tangible benefit to downloading your material
4. Design: the content is aesthetically pleasing

Therefore you should create a high-quality bonus or free gift that will convince readers you can be trusted with their personal data. That’s your lead magnet.

B2B tech, B2B services, agency, and travel see more conversions from customers entering their data in a form versus a phone call than other industries. So pay close attention if you operate in any of these markets.

Hubspot offers a download of their free report in exchange for contact details and company information.

What Are the Best Lead Magnets?

The best lead magnet is an eBook, according to our independent research. It’s a meaty text guide to a particular topic that your business specializes in. Web visitors are happy to hand over contact details if they get a free eBook for their trouble, according to almost one in five business leaders.

If you like the graphics on our page, please feel free to use them. You’ll find them in this Google Drive folder. Our only request is that you credit us as your image source with a link back to this page.

It’s good to know that the resource-intensive digital assets such as eBooks are well worth the pay-off according to nearly one in five (19%) of respondents. These lead magnets are particularly suited to industries with complex offerings and longer sales cycles such as software, business services and consultancy.

On the other hand, businesses centered on retail and lower-value products may benefit from discounts. However, ecommerce companies need to be cautious with discounts, as customers may hold off on buying without a discount available. This can quickly eat into profit margins per product.

Let’s look at some lead magnets in detail now.

Lead Magnet Examples

1. eBook

What: A thorough explanation of a particular topic, usually in the form of a downloadable text file that the reader can easily navigate to find relevant chapters.

Why: Attracts users who have a genuine interest in your niche. Businesses can show off their expertise in a particular field.

Example:

monday.com offers eBook and report downloads to share expertise and build brand awareness as well as generate leads.

An eBook lead magnet is a form of a content upgrade. This refers to any kind of bonus digital asset which goes into more detail about a topic the viewer is already interested in. Importantly, it is only accessible in exchange for something, so ensure you’ve set up a website journey that offers the download only after contact details have been correctly submitted. Alternatively, you can send the eBook via email.

2. Checklist

What: A visually appealing summary of a long article or guide that serves as reference material to the reader.

Why: A useful resource for the reader that they will want to refer back to more than once or share with peers in their industry. This spreads brand awareness and builds trust in your business.

Example:

WinSavvy offers a content upgrade of a startups’ mistakes checklist at the end of an article on the topic.

A pain point companies can successfully draw on is “common mistakes”, such as the example of WinSavvy above. This type of lead magnet draws on the positive psychological aspects of a gift – an item given to a friend or community member to strengthen their relationship and delight the receiver. Try to directly address your audience’s pain points and deliver a handy list of recommendations to demonstrate your expertise in resolving them.

3. Guide

What: A comprehensive explanatory booklet (usually PDF) of a product, process, trend or phenomenon.

Why: One of the best customer touchpoints because it convinces the reader your business has specialist knowledge in this particular niche. Builds trust in your authority, as well as improving brand awareness and appreciation.

Example:

At the end of an article about infographics, Venngage offers a content upgrade in the form of a guide to designing them. The reader has to register with their details to access it.

As you’ll see from the above example, a guide does not have to be heavily text-based and could be mainly visual, taking the form of graphics templates in this case. The guide is a consolidation of specialist know-how delivered to the reader in an easily digestible form.

A training institution, for instance, could offer an introductory guide to certain paid classes. For example, a quick guide to treating burn patients for a relatively unknown physiotherapy school. This type of lead magnet can be hosted online and advertised via QR code on leaflets, banners or posters at jobs fairs or on public transport.

4. Discount

What: A money-off voucher emailed directly to the user, usually as a precursor to further direct marketing emails.

Why: Creating a discount either with a code, a click-through link or another kind of limitation creates a sense of urgency and exclusivity, encouraging purchase conversion.

Example:

Discount offers are popular with ecommerce brands who face relentless competition. Maeleys offers users the chance to choose a “body goal” as they sign up with email to receive a 10% discount.

On a webpage, lead magnets may take the form of a banner or pop-up window, inviting web visitors to submit their email address in exchange for a free gift, like a discount. This sign-up form will usually include a short text explanation, a space to enter an email address and a “Send/Submit” button. Completing this form triggers an email to the user which contains a discount code.

Best practice dictates you should include a sentence about the email address’ use for follow-up marketing. Though most web users will already understand the implications of giving an ecommerce website their email address, you should strive for transparency about how you’ll use this personal data.

5. Webinar

What: A livestream or recording of an online broadcast for the purposes of education or insight that can include interactive elements.

Why: Creating a positive learning experience for the user who gains brand awareness and should hunger for more of the same good quality content thereafter.

Example:

General Assembly regularly hosts webinars on a range of professional skills in exchange for email subscription sign-up.

Similar in function to the free guide, a webinar is a chance for experts to share knowledge in the hopes of sustaining long-term interest in paid services. Consultants can position themselves as thought leaders in a certain industry by presenting a lecture, giving a demonstration or hosting a discussion via webcam online. Of course, this is a huge benefit to companies hoping to reach a broader market than those who walk past their brick-and-mortar store.

Not many people want to be “sold to”, but you’ll hold the attention of a much wider audience if you’re offering truly useful insight – for free. Not everyone has a lust for education, however, B2B brands can see success with this tool as professionals are motivated by improved career prospects.

6. Course

What: An online educational series of articles or videos that teaches the user about a specific topic.

Why: Create buy-in by teaching the user how your product works. Demonstrate your company’s authority on a certain set of topics.

Example:

Amazon Web Services offers free digital courses on how to use its software products in exchange for creating an online account.

A wide range of industries offer free courses to generate interest in their business and foster brand loyalty. Some well-known religions, fitness companies and social media broadcasters use this tactic to entice new sign-ups. Courses are an ideal lead magnet for service-based industries, Saas and software providers as well as educational groups, skills coaches and counselors. The reason being you’re offering exclusive insider knowledge to an audience hungry for that information.

An introductory course is a great way to pique curiosity. As the saying goes, “knowledge is power,” and you can draw in new subscribers, followers and business prospects with an educational video, email chain or set of articles. If your new students like the basic free version of your course, they’re more likely to sign up for further paid training or hire you as a consultant.

7. Infographics

What: A creative visualization of research findings, processes or complicated information.

Why: Infographics can quickly communicate important information and influence beliefs and priorities. These can be extremely useful for business leaders encouraging staff to adopt cultural changes because of the authority statistics can hold. This valuable communication tool must be high quality in order to positively influence potential leads.

Example:

Databox created an infographic to display the results of their research into ecommerce business challenges during 2021.

Infographics can be tricky to exchange for contact details, as many blogs publish them in freely available articles. However, long-form infographics can entice email address submission if the web visitor believes they’ll really benefit.

High-quality infographics are designed by professional graphic designers and are integrated in full research reports where they truly add value by illustrating complicated data. Infographics are easily shared, so you should include a company branded logo somewhere within the design. This ensures recognition of your brand if the infographic is reproduced more widely.

Companies that carry out quality research and illustrate it with infographics can inspire trust and confidence in potential customers looking for informational services.

8. Video

What: Popular with coaches, mentors and educational institutions, video content in exchange for email and other contact data is a tantalizing lead magnet. The video might play in browser or be sent by email.

Why: Many web users prefer to watch and hear information rather than read it, making video an excellent format for conveying tutorials and testimonials.

Example:

Coursera offers a selection of their videos at no cost when the user registers for an online account with personal data including name, email and other contact details.

Video continues to be an increasingly important form of digital marketing. Platforms such as YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Vimeo, Reddit plus your own website offer video hosting which can easily be gated for subscriber-only access. It’s an extremely versatile medium which replaces in-person contact and hugely expands the capacity of outreach for small businesses with few staff. Instead of having the same cold-contact conversation with four hundred visitors to a county fair, why not create some short videos to show off your products, services, skills and premises instead?

A lead magnet video will differ from a standard paid ad in a few important ways: it should be longer, more in-depth and somewhat interactive if possible. Your video needs to be so informative, exciting or otherwise essential that it’s really worth handing over personal contact details for.

9. Free trial

What: A time-limited opportunity to use proprietary software or another product at no cost to the user.

Why: Allows the user to sample – and enjoy – the product without financial risk. Some companies may take payment automatically once the trial period expires and others offer the option to upgrade for a fee.

Example:

Hootsuite offers a free trial in a pop-up window which is twice the length of its free trial offer on its homepage. This can be the difference between a user selecting Hootsuite vs Buffer, which only offers a 14-day free trial.

We’re all familiar with the concept of free trials: give ‘em a taste and leave them wanting more. While many larger companies offer a free version of their product or free tools to use, the free trial can be more successful at encouraging conversions due to its short-lived nature.

A free trial is particularly easy to facilitate with a software product but is also possible with almost any kind of physical product too. Cosmetics companies have been giving out perfume and moisturizer samples for decades, with the idea being once the customer runs out of it, they’ll want to go and buy more.

10. Other gated content: free tool, free consultation, free shipping, quiz, printable/PDF version files

What: Gated content refers to any written, audio or visual media that can only be accessed after submitting some personal details. There’s a very wide range of digital products – or even services – that you can offer in exchange. For instance, a free tool, free consultation, free shipping on products, a quiz (recommendation engine) or a printable/PDF version of the article.

Why: Convincing the web user of your authority and credibility or making customers feel they are saving money.

Example:

Scott Reid CPAs attracts leads with free consultations for anyone who fills in their web form with their personal information and a request.

A free consultation can be particularly effective because it’s an opportunity to showcase your professional expertise “in-the-flesh”. Plus it requires quite a lot of commitment from the web user to make time to meet and speak with you, increasing your chances of conversion compared with generic marketing.

JC Penney has a seven-question quiz for parents to take with their children based on Back to School clothing. The results are sent by email.

A fun quiz plays the dual role of entertainment plus super-specific lead generation – now JC Penney knows exactly what kind of school clothing to market to the user.

Now we’ve covered how different types of lead magnets work, here’s a guide on how to create a truly effective lead magnet for your audience.

How to Create a Lead Magnet: Checklist

Firstly, you should realistically assess what capacity you have for creating a stand-alone content upgrade for your web visitors. It takes time and resources to create a new web app and custom imagery for an appealing lead magnet.

But lead magnets needn’t drain digital marketing costs too much; research shows SMBs can save up to 80% on brand asset creation costs with a centralized digital asset management platform. The reason is such technology helps streamline and automate processes as well as reducing duplicate work and eliminating unnecessary purchases.

With your budget in mind, decide what kind of lead magnet will best suit your audience (read on for examples below). Next, you can get to designing and creating the lead magnet.

What makes a good lead magnet? There are four main features of an excellent lead magnet, and you’ll want to make sure you’re hitting all of them in order to optimize conversion rate:

1. Relevance
2. Trust
3. Reward
4. Design

1. Relevance

The most important function of your lead magnet is to attract the right kind of user. We’re not talking about “lead shovels” here, where we pick up every single human with a smartphone and an internet connection. No, a quality magnet picks up steel, leaving copper and brass unmoved. That means your lead magnet is built to draw in leads that need or want your services. And no one else.

A targeted lead magnet only attracts a specific audience segment: web visitors who actually desire your services.

So you’ve got to match the wording, imagery and placement of your lead magnet to the exact service or product you are advertising. An effective way to do this is to ask a question and make your unique value proposition clear. The example above is from the homepage of Neil Patel’s digital marketing agency. A clear question, “Do you want more [web] traffic?” produces a clear next step: “Yes [I do want more web traffic]” leads to typing in your website URL. Conversely, “No [I’m not interested]” leads to scrolling down to browse the other offerings on the website.

This website happens to use a location identification script to insert the web browser’s geographical whereabouts into the value proposition. That’s a nice touch of personalization which engages the reader even more directly. Good to know, considering website personalization increased conversion for 94% of companies.

2. Trust

Secondly, your lead magnet must instantly communicate your brand’s authority, credibility and expertise. The web visitor will only choose to hand over personal contact information to a reliable entity. This is your chance to prove your business will treat this sensitive data carefully. There are several ways to achieve this, including “trust signals” such as a collection of logos from brands (clients) that already work with your business. This works as a form of social proof, meaning your users will approve of you because brands they already trust endorse your services.

Sprout Social displays “trust signals” from recognized tech brands which endorse their credibility through social proof.

A similar technique is to establish brand partnerships with social media companies such as Meta (Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram), Google and Microsoft. Once your business becomes an official partner of such companies, you can display an icon next to your call-to-action within your lead magnet. That’s another subconscious signal to the web user that you’re endorsed by recognized authorities.

In the above example, Sprout Social are offering a free trial of their product, as indicated in the green CTA button in the top right of their homepage. Users who are not yet convinced they trust this company scroll down and spot the three icons of popular tech review brands that vouch for Sprout. That free trial icon is frozen along the top of the screen, so it’s always in view should the web user change their mind and opt in at any point while reading the homepage.

3. Reward

Humans are highly reward-motivated. That means a lead magnet will convert better if it can provide instant gratification plus a sense of urgency. The experience you want to create looks like this:

Customer: “Yes, I’m getting a free thing! I want to get it right now while I have the chance!”

Psychological research has found we would rather complete an urgent and unimportant task (such as signing up to a newsletter) compared with a more important task (such as completing a work presentation) because “urgent tasks involve more immediate and certain payoffs. It’s known as the mere urgency effect, and you’d do well to include urgency-inspiring techniques in your lead magnet to create maximum appeal.

Let’s take a look at this pop-up discount offer from Sears, specifically focusing on how the language is used to create urgency.

This online discount offer from Sears seems irresistible because of tempting language creating a sense of urgency and immediate gratification.

The Sears pop-up offers a very clear call-to-action: all you have to do is enter an email address “to receive your discount”. This phrasing makes the reward appear instantly available, just one small step away. It’s therefore an easily achievable goal – no need to fill in five pages of a questionnaire or think hard.

The CTA button “Unlock $35 Off now” creates urgency because of the word “now”. It’s not an aggressive push. It doesn’t create hysterical panic. It’s a simple, attractive and effective offer. The bright orange button contrasts with the dark blue surroundings, drawing the eye instantly to the intended action. Plus “Unlock” makes the experience feel like a game, a fun challenge or a type of online puzzle.

Sears places this pop-up at the very beginning of the ecommerce journey – the window appears before the user has clicked on anything at all once landing on the website. There’s also no expiry date on the offer. Both of these factors combine to create a sense of a “quick win”, that the user is already “in profit” having the opportunity to “unlock” a monetary discount even if they do not intend to buy immediately.

4. Design

A good user experience (UX) is a must for any online business – with proper design underpinning all of the above three points. Professional design such as a clear call-to-action (CTA) button, well-written copy, branded imagery and colors all encourage the user to take part in the value exchange. Considered design elements convey to the user that they can trust the business with their data, understanding the valuable benefit they will receive in return and symbolize their active partaking (the “opt-in”) in starting a relationship with this entity.

Walmart’s clear graphic imagery helps users quickly navigate to various paid service offerings. 

A well-designed lead magnet is understood at first glance. If you’re unsure whether your particular lead magnet achieves this, engage a specialist firm to carry out user testing to determine if your design makes sense to the average Joe and Jane. Interacting with your lead generation tool should be so easy that even a child understands what to do next.

That means keeping design simple, text to a minimum, and ‘click me’ buttons large. Consider this example from Walmart home delivery services. Their web technology pulls in location data from the user’s IP address, indicating with green ticks that their local Dallas Supercenter is ready to offer two types of service. Simple, appealing icons denote choice of service, with an image in a circle for Shipping, Pickup or Delivery.

It should take literally two seconds for your web user to identify what the offer is, decide whether they want it, and proactively engage with it. If your design doesn’t facilitate these three things, it’s a waste of money and will only serve to frustrate users.

Lead Magnets Lead to More Prospects and Better Marketing

Lead magnets sit within your wider business strategy: within your sales pipeline to entice prospects and give a flavor of your services or products. But lead magnets also offer opportunities in broader content marketing too; building brand awareness and highlighting your industry expertise.

Remember, a lead magnet is a piece of bonus content that your audience finds desirable enough to exchange their contact details for. Lead magnets must be high quality and specific to your business’ particular industry in order to generate relevant leads. Your prospects should encounter the lead magnet at a lukewarm stage in their journey with your business: they’ve heard a little about you but aren’t willing to invest their money yet.

There are a number of psychological tactics you can test out to increase your conversion rate, including creating a sense of exclusivity, personalization, urgency and instant gratification.

Now you’ve got some excellent ideas to generate plenty of leads, you should ensure you’ve got a way to keep your customer records properly organized. Fortunately our guide to the best CRMs for email marketing automation can help you stay on track.

With over 5 billion people using the internet and 4.8 billion active users on social media worldwide, content marketing has become a goldmine for business growth. Whether it’s social media, blogs, or webinars, content marketing is a tool that, if used wisely, can help you expand your reach, multiply leads, and establish a base of loyal clients.

Despite the value that meticulously designed content marketing represents, 63% of businesses don’t have a documented gameplan when it comes to marketing. We get that planning how to sell yourself online is daunting, especially when there’s so many ways of doing it, tools to use, costs to account for, and online impressions of your brand to keep up with.

So, to help you put your content marketing cards right on the money, we’ve spoken to businesses to learn how they nailed down their strategies, and have also gathered key statistics to equip you with all the insights you need to help your business thrive.

Key B2B Content Marketing Statistics

The specific goals you want to pursue as a business through content marketing will need to be tailored to what you’re looking to achieve specifically. Regardless of the goal you’re racing towards, here are eight statistics that you need to know about B2B content marketing:

• 72% of marketers say content marketing increases engagement
• 72% of business leaders also said content marketing has increased their number of leads
• 91% of B2B marketers use content marketing to reach customers
• 73% of B2B marketers use content marketing as part of their overall marketing strategy, according to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI)
• 69% of companies plan to increase their content marketing budget in 2023
• 90% of respondents used short articles or posts for content marketing purposes in the last 12 months
• 97% of businesses claimed content was a tactic that formed an important part of their overall marketing strategy in 2021
• 79% of very successful content marketers spent more than 10% of their total marketing budget on content

If you like the graphics on this page, please feel free to use them! We also have an infographic version compiling them together too. You can access them all on this Google Drive – all we ask is that you credit us with a link back to this page if you do use any. Thanks!

Is B2B Content Marketing Worth It?

You may think creating nice graphics and blog posts is just for B2C marketing. But research is increasingly proving that content marketing is critical in the B2B sector, too.

Across all industries, organic search or links from other websites are the top source of website traffic. Paid content just doesn’t bring in the readers like fresh blog posts and useful industry guides.

The focus on non-paid marketing is only set to continue; 71% of B2B marketers confirmed content marketing became more important in their organization between 2021 and 2022.

This reflects changing buyer habits too, with 55% of B2B buyers relying more on content to make purchasing decisions in 2022 than they did in 2021.

Attracting new business is the lifeblood of your enterprise, meaning content marketing is a must-do in 2023. A strategy to keep the customers rolling in will smooth relations within your organization, too. Indeed, more than one in ten (13%) of B2B marketers believed a steady supply of leads was the best way to keep up relations with their sales team.

To find out how businesses are using content marketing right now, we asked business owners about their content marketing strategies. Here’s what one told us:

Different Types of B2B Content Marketing

Content marketing is so much more than just throwing content out into the internet and hoping it lands on its feet, and generates leads for your business. There certainly are horror stories out there of employees giving the wrong impression of companies for posting the wrong kind of stuff online.

Key to making your content marketing strategy a success is knowing which channels are best for reaching your target audience. Here are some stats to give you a feel of what’s popular and tends to perform well:

Also, according to Semrush, the top five most successful content types are blog posts, videos, webinars, case studies, and success stories.

B2B Social Media Content Marketing Statistics

When it comes to taking the first steps in improving or developing your content marketing strategy, social media is probably one of the first channels that pops up. According to analysis from Kepsios, there were about 4.8 billion social media users globally in April 2023, which amounts to almost 60% of the total global population.

Social media has undoubtedly made itself a key channel for marketing, as 75% of B2B buyers use social media to make purchase decisions.

It will come as no surprise then, that 89% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to generate leads.

While you need to be careful to select the right platforms for your audience, you shouldn’t rule out investing in newer and smaller social media channels, too. A rather remarkable 15% of B2B leaders used TikTok to market their businesses in 2022.

It’s never smart to stretch yourself too thin, and neglect your business profiles over time. If your resources are limited, you can just focus on one or two of the larger platforms. Pair that with an efficient management platform for monitoring your social media or a top social media marketing agency, and you have yourself a robust content marketing strategy.

Blogging Statistics

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of B2B marketers struggle with creating engaging content, yet it’s crucially important to get your blogging right as 71% of B2B buyers read at least one blog post during their research.

What does this tell us? Essentially, blogs are a great way to expand the reach and visibility of your business, but most importantly, they’re a piece of content that you definitely shouldn’t miss when assembling your content marketing strategy.

B2B Video Marketing Content Statistics

Video marketing can be a tricky one to get right for B2B marketers. While production costs have dropped since with the advent of so many free editing tools, you still need a talented videographer to create professional results.

Research shows marketers are curious about using video, but are not yet confident in fully incorporating it into overall strategies. For instance, just one in five (21%) of B2B companies used video marketing in 2022, according to Sagefrog Marketing Group.

Yet the same report found 32% are looking to explore video marketing more in 2023. The only other avenue of greater interest to B2B marketers was AI and automation. So if your interest is piqued, you’re in good company.

There are some incredibly useful benefits to video marketing. A Hubspot survey found:

• 86% of marketers found video improved customers’ understanding of their products or services
• 85% of marketing specialists found video content was effective in engaging audiences with their brands
• 78% of marketing professionals found video generated leads for their brands

Video content marketing doesn’t have to be scary; it works in the same way as blog posts and white-papers. Your goal is to provide a clear, compelling overview of your products or services. Sure, it will take a little planning to decide what to include, how to film it, and where to publicize it.

Still, the B2B buying journey is becoming increasingly digitized, therefore video is essential to stay competitive. In fact, around 27% of B2B buyers’ time is spent researching online. So grab their attention with your excellent videos.

Webinar And Event Content Statistics

As the pandemic pushed events online, webinars have become an indispensable part of content marketing, particularly because they provide excellent value for users. Here’s a few figures to show why:

• Average webinar conversion rate is 55%
• 85% of marketers who use webinars as a marketing tool say that webinars are crucial for their marketing efforts
• Over 70% of webinar marketers say that webinars are either highly effective or most effective
• 67% of marketers in 2021 were increasing their investment in webinars

If you decide to build your website on Squarespace, its pricing could set you back anything between £12 per month (if you want to keep it simple) and £35 per month (if you’re keen on making it fancy). We know this is quite a big gap – and with the platform’s features making sure that the sky’s the limit for your ecommerce business, you may wonder if any of these options are worth your investment.

Lucky for you, here at Expert Market, we’re all about deep research and first-hand experience, so our analysis will help you find out where to start and which way to go from there. With Squarespace, not only have we decided to set up our own website with it to see what it does, we’ve also asked regular users to give it a go and report to us what did (or didn’t) tickle their fancy.

We then compiled and graded their findings on everything from features and user-friendliness to sales features and support. On value for money, Squarespace scored a solid 4.2 – one of the best grades in this category. This also puts Squarespace on par with one of its biggest competitors, Wix.

Whether you’re courting Squarespace already or have just started browsing for a website builder, this is a good place to delve into what your money will buy if you go for it – plus some pros and cons for good measure. Scroll down and find it all out.

Squarespace Pricing Plans: Each Plan Explained

If you want to enter the ecommerce game, a natural concern would be how much a website would cost you. For that reason, we went ahead and created this breakdown of the Squarespace pricing plans so you can easily reach a decision on whether any of them work for you or not. You’ll find the hard cost numbers on the table below – and if you want to know more about what these numbers will get you, just read ahead.

Overall, Squarespace offers plenty of features for business owners who really want to take care of their processes end-to-end in a full sweep. It combines great website design with solid marketing tools and multichannel integration. No wonder it’s one of the top scorers on both website features – 4.2 – and design functionalities – 3.9 – in our research into the best ecommerce platforms in the UK.

Squarespace Personal – £12 per month or £16 per month

Squarespace (Up Close and) Personal is, as the name suggests, very much tailored to personal websites. The platform’s cheapest tier offers a somewhat limited range of services when compared to the others, but if your goal is to showcase your work and publicise your contacts, it does the job.

• Paying monthly: £16 per month
• Paying annually: £12 per month

Like all Squarespace’s plans, this one comes with unlimited bandwidth, SEO features, mobile optimisation, a free custom domain (for the first year) and an array of gorgeous templates to choose from. Overall, blogs, portfolios, showreels, and all sorts of personal projects fit this pricing tier like a glove.

But beware: Squarespace Personal does not support any fully-integrated ecommerce – nor does it allow you to accept donations, for that matter – so it’s definitely not the option if you plan on generating direct income from what’s on display on the website.

With that and the price tag in mind, we don’t think Squarespace’s Personal plan cuts it. Small projects will benefit from cheaper options, like Weebly (whose basic plan, Connect, starts at £7 per month in a yearly contract) and GoDaddy (whose cheapest plan costs £16 per month in the first year, and £19 afterwards). And if ecommerce is (or will be) the name of your game, then Squarespace’s other plans are better equipped to serve you. Of course, if you’d like to try this plan just to see how it looks like, head over to Squarespace and get cracking.

Squarespace Business – £17 per month or £24 per month

Squarespace’s second tier provides great value for money and the best of both worlds in the sense that, even without shelling out for a full-on ecommerce plan, you get many of the perks that would come with one.

• Paying monthly: £24 per month
• Paying annually: £17 per month (for us, a bargain)

Along with all the features of the Personal plan, Squarespace’s Business plan also includes a free Gmail and Google Workspace account (for the first year), complete customisation with CSS and JavaScript (in English: you can add elements to make your website look super slick), and ecommerce integration. Plus, it works alongside various payment platforms: Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. If reading that makes you hear those cha-chings already, you can go ahead and fetch this plan on Squarespace‘s website.

However, depending on the size of your business, you should watch out for a very important detail: this plan comes with a 3% transaction fee on every online sale you make. If your sales are or will be occasional, that won’t pose a problem, but if you deal (or plan on dealing) with a high volume of sales, this isn’t the option for you. Instead, one of Squarespace’s Commerce tiers will suit you better.

Squarespace Basic Commerce – £23 per month or £28 per month

Big league time. Moving into the platform’s ecommerce arena, Squarespace Basic Commerce is geared towards online sales, and includes many features that should suit most businesses out there.

• Paying monthly: £28 per month
• Paying annually: £23 per month

For starters, Squarespace Basic Commerce does away with the transaction fee. Besides the ecommerce integration included in the Business plan, the Basic Commerce packs a punch when it comes to making your website look primed for sales. It allows your customers to create their own accounts, and to check out while still on your domain. They also get to see stock availability, other customers’ reviews, and related products.

On that note, on this plan, Squarespace gives you several tools through which you can monitor your best-selling items and sales trends, and bulk-manage inventory. You also get to check your visit-to-sale conversion rate and, through an in-built Facebook link, you’re able to sell your products directly on Instagram as well.

Considering the amount of features on this tier, it’s excellent for existing businesses that are keen on making the jump into online sales, or new businesses that have been based in the digital realm from the get-go. If your business ticks any of those boxes, just head to Squarespace and get started.

Squarespace Basic Commerce misses a few of the tools in the platform’s full arsenal – such as the ability to sell subscriptions – but these features are designed for more established online merchants anyway (we’ll get to them in a second, when we analyse Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan). If you’re just entering this arena, however, Basic Commerce should be your weapon of choice.

Squarespace Advanced Commerce – £35 per month or £43 per month

This one does what it says on the tin, really: Squarespace Advanced Commerce is the platform’s top tier, and comes with all the perks mentioned so far, plus some extras to really make your business zing.

• Paying monthly: £43 per month
• Paying annually: £35 per month

Among the specialised tools at your disposal, this plan allows you to sell subscriptions, set up email reminders for customers who left your website without purchasing, and automate discount offers at checkout.

For all its features, Squarespace Advanced Commerce is very much aimed at businesses that already have an online presence and are looking to expand. If yours is one of them, by all means visit Squarespace and sign up. Considering the cost, however, if you’re starting out in digital sales, you’re better off with the lower tiers, which will give you a good taste of the action but involve less bank-breaking.

Does Squarespace Have a Free Plan?

Speaking of bank-breaking, let’s tackle one hard money-related truth straight on: Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, so you will need to shell out to get your hands on it. That said, you can trial any of its plans for free for 14 days. After that time expires, you can even request a one-time seven-day extension if you contact Squarespace’s customer service team.

The trial is a good opportunity for you to try the plan that looks like the best fit for your business, and then grow or scale down accordingly when it comes to actually buying. Because of this, and the fact that it allows you to sample most of Squarespace’s features without having to commit, we recommend doing a trial.

Squarespace Fees and Costs: Billing Cycles, Ongoing Costs, and Hidden Fees

Squarespace is pretty clear about what it charges, so for the most part, you’re not in for any surprises. You can choose between paying monthly or yearly, and the discounts if you choose the latter are quite substantial, as costs get hefty on a month-to-month basis. Your subscription will renew automatically.

You should, however, watch out for the fees charged by the payment platform you choose to integrate, whether that’s Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, or Stripe. Squarespace nabs 3% of your sale on its Business plan, but otherwise, it either doesn’t allow for payments (as on the Personal plan) or doesn’t charge a transaction fee (as on the Commerce plans).

However, in any plan in which ecommerce integration is possible, the payment platform you use will take a bite – usually a percentage of the sale, plus a fixed fee. It varies from platform to platform – hence us not going into further detail here – but in any case, it’s worth checking out your payment platform’s fees so you don’t buy a specific Squarespace plan (especially the Commerce ones) thinking absolutely no fees are due.

Squarespace Scheduling Pricing: Is It Worth It?

Squarespace Scheduling is an extra service provided by the platform. It’s tailor-made for businesses that work with appointments. Clinical consultations, space rental, classes of any kind – it doesn’t matter: if a date and time needs to be booked, Squarespace Scheduling does the trick.

The thing to pay attention to is that this handy tool doesn’t come within Squarespace’s main pricing plans, so you would have to shell out a bit more to get it. Like those plans, however, you do get a discount (albeit not as big) if you bite the bullet and go with a yearly plan.

With Scheduling, you can choose between three tiers: Emerging, Growing and Powerhouse.

Emerging is perfect for small, personal businesses that don’t have various calendars or several team members inputting data. It allows calendar syncing with selected email providers, has ecommerce integration, and automates email reminders. It costs £12 month-to-month or £11 per month in a yearly plan.

Growing is geared towards businesses with more employees and locations. You can create and sync six calendars, handle bundled and recurring bookings, and send reminders via SMS as well as email. This one comes at £22 month-to-month or £20 per month in a yearly plan.

Finally, Powerhouse ups the ante when it comes to sheer volume of calendars: you can create a maximum of 36 (and sync them)! Plus, you have more room to personalise the scheduler with custom CSS. For this, you would pay £40 month-to-month or £37 per month if you go annually.

As far as value for money goes, Growing is the best plan. You get access to almost all of the tool’s features for about half the price of the costliest version. Powerhouse only makes sense if your business is a multi-location megachain, with all your locations taking appointments – in which case, congratulations!

Squarespace vs the Competition: Which Stands Out?

If you want to build a simple yet functional website without the need for it to look fresh off the runway, there are better options than Squarespace considering the investment involved. Its lowest price tag of £12 per month puts it at a disadvantage against cheaper competitors like Weebly or GoDaddy, which allow you to become a website owner without spending as much.

However, when ecommerce integration is thrown into the mix, Squarespace’s pricing really shines. It occupies a solid middle ground, which means it’s all out to satisfy most business-owners without costing a fortune – the 4.2 score it received on value for money from our customer surveys sums it up nicely.

Its pricing range of £12 to £35 offers a plethora of features that are aimed primarily at online growth. Because of this, and Squarespace’s limited stock monitoring functions, large online retailers will be better served by the highest pricing tiers of platforms such as BigCommerce or Shopify, as they’re designed for large retailers. However, our research shows that Squarespace is one of the best platforms for small businesses in the UK.

Shopify pricing starts at £5 per month going up to £1,500+ per month with two other price points in between. In this costs guide we’ll break down the pricing and plans Shopify currently offers to online sellers.

Shopify regularly updates its pricing – yet it’s still our top recommended website builder for online stores, thanks to its wide range of integrations and payment providers.

We’ve taken a deep-dive into the terms and conditions to break down all of the costs you could want to know about.

We’ll look at what you get with Shopify in each price plan, as well as explaining the hidden fees.

Shopify offers a free trial of three days so you can test out a price plan to see whether it’s the right fit. You can also take advantage of a promotion currently running where your first month of Shopify costs £1 (for new customers).

Shopify Starter pricing plan

• What: Sell products via URLs and a simple landing page
• Who: Mobile-first merchants of lower-priced goods
• Why: Easy to sell via social media channels
• How much: £5 per month – no discounts available for multi-year purchase

Note this plan is only available to new merchants or those on the free trial.

Shopify Starter features

• One user
• Unlimited products
• Customer support inbox
• Shopping cart
• Order management
• Analytics

Shopify Starter transaction fees

• Transaction fees: 5.0% (if you’re using Shopify Payments)
• Online credit card rates: 5% + 25p

Read more about how Shopify works with merchant accounts on our page.

Basic Shopify pricing plan

• What: Build an ecommerce website where customers buy your products
• Who: Small-scale merchants, independent boutiques and startups
• Why: Sell from a professional ecommerce website
• How much: £19 per month if you pay for one year up front (or £25 month-to-month)

A new bonus Shopify has added this year is to substantially increase the number of inventory locations you can manage from your account. Last year you could only coordinate up to four inventory storage spaces from your Shopify Basic account – this is now boosted to up to 1,000 across all Shopify subscription plans.

Basic Shopify features

• Up to two users
• Online shop website and blog
• Up to 1,000 inventory locations
• List unlimited products
• Order management

Basic Shopify transaction fees

• Transaction fees: 2.0%
• UK credit card rates (online): 2% + 25p
• International/Amex credit card rate (online): 3.1% + 25p
• Credit or debit card rate (in person): 1.7%
• Currency conversion fee: 2% (with Shopify Payments)

Advanced Shopify plan

• What: Ecommerce website with advanced reporting and more international options
• Who: International sellers with medium or large stores
• Why: Improved control on international selling and cost transparency for buyers
• How much: £259 per month if you pay for one year up front (or £344 month-to-month)

Advanced Shopify features

• Up to 15 users
• Automated customer segmentation
• Estimate import taxes
• Maximum 1,000 inventory locations
• Advanced sales performance reports
• Third-party calculated shipping rates

Advanced Shopify payment processing fees

• Transaction fee: 0.5%
• UK credit card rate (online): 1.5% + 25p
• International/Amex credit card rate (online): 2.5% + 25p
• Credit or debit card rates (in person): 1.5%
• Currency conversion rate: You can set this manually

Shopify fees and costs: Billing cycles, ongoing costs and hidden fees

Lots of services are included in all Shopify pricing plans including the following:

• Website builder
• Web hosting
• SSL certificate
• Unlimited products
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Unlimited contacts
• Sell in 130+ countries
• Web shop analytics
• Abandoned cart recovery
• Gift cards

NOTE: Starter does not include the website builder

Shopify billing cycles

• Shopify subscriptions are charged month to month unless you pay in advance for one, two or three years
• Cancel your Shopify subscription at any time (however, you won’t be refunded that month’s fee)
• You can downgrade or upgrade your Shopify plan at any time (however, you cannot downgrade to Shopify Starter)

Additional Shopify website costs

• Domain name that isn’t myshopify.com (approx £4-£32 per year)
• Themes (template designs) ranging from $170 (~£130) to $380 each (~£290) or choose one of 12 free ones
• Apps for additional website features (costs variable)
• Emails: First 10,000 per month are free then $1 (~76p) per 1,000 emails sent

Additional Shopify sales costs

• Transaction fees of 2%, 0.5% or 0.15% with the Basic Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus plans respectively (applies only if you don’t use Shopify Payments)
• Credit and debit card fees (these vary depending on price plan)
• Duties and import taxes rates of 1.5% (applicable for Advanced Shopify)

Shopify Payments fees

You can avoid the transaction fees by using Shopify Payments, the company’s proprietary payment gateway (powered by Stripe).

Either way you’ll still pay the following payment processing fees per transaction:

• UK card (online): 2% + 25p
  
• UnionPay: 3.1% + 25p
• Amex (online): 3.1% + 25p
• International card (online): 3.1% + 25p
• Additional cost for foreign currency: 2%
• Chargeback: £10 (may be refunded if appealed)

With Shopify Payments the duties and import taxes rates on Advanced Shopify decreases to 0.85%.

There are no charges for refunds, declined payments or rewards transactions.

It’s worth noting that the UK card fee with Shopify Payments is more expensive than the standard Stripe fee of 1.5%+ 20p available directly from the provider. Currency conversion fees are the same, however.

Why you can trust our research

We have been testing website builders with online payments features for over ten years. We know the priorities of small business leaders like you.

That’s why we rate and evaluate providers based on objective criteria including:

• How easy the platform is to use
• Whether it’s good value for money
• Design capabilities
• Customer support options

Only after putting each platform through over 50 tests do we decide on the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses. More than 30 hours of research goes into deciding the winners, with input from out expert in house research team and focus group users, too.

Wix pricing in Australia starts at $15 per month going up to $450+ per month with six other price points in between. In this costs guide we’ll break down the pricing and plans Wix currently offers.

Wix changes its pricing and plans from time to time, so we’ve taken the hard work off your plate and made it all simple to understand. In this guide, we’ll explain what you get for each of Wix‘s monthly price plans so you can compare them.

Expert Market readers can enjoy a great discount too: TAKE10 gives you 10% off a monthly or annual Wix plan. Just enter the code at the checkout when you’re upgrading your plan to enjoy some sweet savings.

Speaking of savings, you can save even more if you buy a longer subscription plan: two years compared with paying monthly or annually. Still, it’s not a pricey platform overall. In our independent testing, we scored Wix 4.2/5 for value for money.

All pricing is in Australian Dollars and includes GST.

Wix Pricing: How Much Does Wix Cost?

We’ve created this side-by-side comparison of costs for Wix plans. There are eight plans available, ranging in price and scale to match the particular needs of your business.

Click the right-hand arrow to scroll through the table and compare all the price plans.

Like most ecommerce platform providers, Wix offers a free trial of 14-days plus a 14-day money back guarantee on all premium plans so you can test out a price plan to see whether it’s the right fit.

Our independent testing found Wix has the fourth best sales features of the best ecommerce platforms. Shopify, BigCommerce and WooCommerce performed better in this regard because they’re aimed at larger online retailers. If you’re looking for a wide range of complex sales features, Wix may not be the platform for you.

However, Wix is much easier to use than these competitors, scoring 4/5 for “Ease of Use” in our research. Wix is targeted at small- and medium-sized businesspeople who don’t need a complicated inventory set-up. Instead, it’s a platform that allows for fairly wide creative freedom. So you can easily create a good-looking shop front with workable sales features.

Firstly, we’ll look at Wix’s ecommerce business website price plans.

Wix Ecommerce Price Plans

Wix has three standard ecommerce plans plus an enterprise ecommerce plan. We’ll outline each price plan in detail now.

Wix Business Basic Pricing Plan

• What: Create an online store from a template
• Who: Rookie retail entrepreneurs
• Why: Take online payments and create an online store
• How much: $32 per month – discounts available for two years’ prepayment

Wix’s Business Basic plan costs $32 per month if you pay for one year upfront, otherwise the month-to-month cost is $39. You’ll get an easy-to-use website builder along with strong sales features such as unlimited product listings and abandoned cart recovery. These are standard features also included with Basic Shopify, for instance. Abandoned cart is a good bonus at this level, however, as neither BigCommerce Standard nor Square Online Professional (the basic ecommerce plans of each) don’t include this feature.

Wix offers a narrower range of ecommerce opportunities at this price tier. For example, you can’t sell via online marketplaces, manage multi-site inventory or even print shipping labels with the Wix Business Basic plan – unlike Basic Shopify. However, Basic Shopify is much more expensive at $42 per month.

Therefore Wix’s Business Basic plan is only really suitable for beginners in the online retail game. If your online sales ambitions are modest or you’re just starting out with ecommerce then choose this plan.

Wix websites are made from templates, which are grouped into categories such as ‘Home and decor online stores’, ‘Electronics online stores’ and so on.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

We’ve calculated the savings for you if you were to purchase one or two years’ subscription to Wix Business Basic in advance:

Wix Business Unlimited Pricing Plan

What: An affordable online store with solid sales features
Who: Smaller retailers looking to scale
Why: Run a smooth-flowing ecommerce operation
How much: US$44 per month – discount available for two years’ prepayment

For just $12 more per month, Wix Business Unlimited opens up a whole range of retail opportunities compared with Wix Business Basic. While the Basic plan serves as an introductory platform for merchants finding their feet online, Business Unlimited can really kick your ecommerce business into gear. This Wix price plan is our editor’s pick because of the breadth of services you get for your money.

Crucially, this subscription gives you access to end-to-end order fulfilment management so you can build a smooth workflow. This will maintain your professionalism and build credibility for your ecommerce company as you scale. Wix Business Unlimited retains a couple of benefits over competitors, for example, sending automated emails for abandoned cart recovery. BigCommerce, on the other hand, only offers this feature at its Plus tier (costing $115 per month, 161% more expensive than Wix Business Unlimited).

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

It’s cheaper to pay upfront for one or two years of Wix Business Unlimited. Here’s a breakdown of the savings you’d make:

Wix Business VIP Pricing Plan

What: Understand your online sales with advanced analytics
Who: Online merchants with long-term goals
Why: Priority customer support
How much: $58 per month – discount available for two years’ upfront payment

The Wix Business VIP plan gives you only a handful of new features for the extra $14 a month compared with Business Unlimited. Therefore it’s not very good value for money. At this tier you’ll gain access to Wix customized reports, a feature which BigCommerce offers at its lowest priced package for $43 per month. Square Online even offers advanced analytics at their $43 tier. No surprise Wix scored lower than Square Online in Value for Money, achieving 4.2/5 compared with Square Online’s 4.7/5. Square Online also lets you sell for free, which Wix does not.

You can create standardised price quotes with custom taxes and email them directly to customers from your Wix business website.

On the plus side, you’ll be able to access priority customer care so you can resolve any business-critical website issues as soon as they arise. You can also nurture your customer base with Smile.io customer rewards such as coupons, discounts and loyalty points. This is a decent money-saving bonus because the Smile.io premium plan costs $56 per month as a standalone purchase.

With Wix Business VIP you’ll also be able to access unlimited dropshipping with Wix. That means you won’t have to worry about storing and managing inventory – saving a whole heap of stress.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

It works out cheaper to pay in advance for a Wix Business Unlimited subscription. Here are the savings you’d make:

Wix Website Plans Pricing

Now we’ll take a closer look at Wix’s main website builder plans. You can use these to build any type of website that doesn’t need ecommerce functions such as a ‘buy’ button or shopping cart.

Wix Combo Pricing Plan

• What: Create a landing page or mini website
• Who: Micro entrepreneurs
• Why: Low-budget simplicity
• How much: $15 per month – discounts available for two years’ prepayment

Wix’s Combo plan costs $15 per month if you pay for one year upfront, otherwise the month-to-month cost is $24. You don’t get bells and whistles – just 2GB of bandwidth, 3GB of storage space and 30 minutes of video streaming. So this is a plan best suited to a small-town tradesperson looking for a virtual business card. That means you can display contact details, a few customer testimonials and a couple of images of your work. But not much more.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

You can save a few dollars with paying upfront for a Wix Combo plan:

Wix Unlimited Pricing Plan

• What: Build an attractive, reliable website
• Who: Small business marketers, community leaders, creatives and campaign managers
• Why: Unlimited bandwidth plus ad vouchers
• How much: $23 per month – discounts available for two years’ prepayment

The Wix Unlimited plan costs $23 per month for a year’s prepaid subscription. Wix does a lot to try and attract users to this plan, so wise up that free perks only last one year: namely, search engine boosting and visitor analytics. You’ll also get 100% extra free when you spend $600 on Google Ads. Use these to get a feel for using paid search marketing to advertise your website to search engine users.

The 10GB of storage space you get makes this plan highly suitable for small business leaders and entrepreneurs who need to showcase their work through lots of images and text. Software startups, designers and all kinds of consultants will benefit from the hour of available video storage space. Video marketing is key to attracting and holding the attention of would-be clients, so it’s worth setting yourself up with a website that can handle streaming.

Wix premium plans come with a handy SEO setup checklist, so you’ll remember to make the technical fixes your website needs to be seen by search engine users.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

Thinking long-term is always the best way to plan your investments. Here are the savings you’d make with a longer Wix Unlimited subscription:

Wix Pro Pricing Plan

• What: Create an image-rich website
• Who: SMB owners, video and photography enthusiasts
• Why: More multimedia storage
• How much: $30 per month – discounts available for two years’ prepayment

Wix’s Pro plan provides extra space for more multimedia (images, videos and documents) on your new website. For just $7 extra per month you get double the storage which is pretty decent value for money. This option is ideal for videographers, design creatives and any other SMB professional who wants to showcase images and footage online.

There’s a logo-maker you get access to but that’s nothing to write home about, particularly. Though you’ll gain some fresh insights into your website fans with a free visitor analytics app for one year. That’s useful for seeing what kind of people are logging onto your site, but you’d better learn fast because you’ll have to pay to get it back again once the year is up.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

Paying in advance saves you hard-earned cash. Let’s look at those savings in detail:

Wix VIP Pricing Plan

• What: Make a multimedia-rich website
• Who: Design agencies, multimedia creatives, business leaders
• Why: Priority customer support
• How much: $39 per month – discounts available for two years’ prepayment

The Wix VIP plan costs more than double the Wix Unlimited price plan. The main benefit you get in return for your hard-earned dollars is priority customer support. This will really benefit website makers who are likely to face time-critical website issues such as video streaming woes, marketing management troubles or complications around automations. So if you are using your website as a central platform for your email marketing, for instance, you may well benefit from the speedier support. However, if you’re simply looking for a holding pen for some photography and text then this tier wouldn’t be worth the extra cash.

Another extra feature of this tier is a logo maker, but don’t get too excited about that. Free logo makers are easy to come across nowadays with Canva, Adobe, Looka and Hatchful from Shopify all readily available too.

Wix Prepayment Discount Savings

Thinking long-term is always the best way to plan your investments. Here are the savings you’d make with a longer Wix Unlimited subscription:

Does Wix Charge Transaction fees?

Wix’s major value advantage is not charging any transaction fees.

However, you’ll need to pay for processing fees to third-party payment gateways, as is usual throughout retail. Wix will invoice you for these at the end of the month. Wix Payments, the platform’s own payment gateway is currently not available in Australia.

You can accept payments through PayPal if you have a business account. PayPal’s merchant fees vary depending on the currency your customer is paying in. However, the standard rate for domestic commercial transactions is 2.6%+AUD$0.30.

Does Wix Have a Free Plan?

Yes, Wix has a free plan plus a 14-day free trial so you can test its web builder free of charge. The free plan has 500MB of storage and no set duration. That’s convenient for busy people who aren’t sure when they’ll have time to come back to work on their website.

Using the Wix free plan will reveal to you whether you can get along with its design interface. While most of the features are pretty self-explanatory, there are some users who find the web designer too clunky. That said, Wix achieved a 4/5 in our Ease of Use category of testing, well above Shopify (3.5/5) and BigCommerce (3.3/5).

However, you won’t be able to sell products or take payments using the Wix free plan. It’s technically possible to monetize the Wix free plan if you manage to drive enough traffic (website visitors) and add adverts or affiliate links. Yet that approach will take so much effort and dedication, you may as well invest some capital in a premium Wix plan. The benefits of upgrading include no Wix adverts, your own custom domain plus access to analytics and marketing tools.

Wix Fees and Costs: Billing Cycles, Ongoing Costs and Hidden Fees

Wix Billing Cycles

You can choose to pay one of three ways:

• Month-to-month (more expensive, but flexible)
• Once per year
• Once per two years (for the best discount)

Be aware that subscriptions are on auto-renew, so you should set a reminder for when your billing period is coming to an end. Annual plans are renewed 14 days prior to the plan’s expiry date.

Additional Wix website Costs:

The following additional charges may appear on your invoice from Wix:

• Custom domain name (.com domain around $24 per year)
• Business email ($9.30 monthly per user)
• Paid apps (integrations)
• Third-party payment processing fees
• Mandatory taxes

Bear in mind that if you bought a subscription while it was discounted, it will renew at the regular (higher) rate.

Wix Pricing Versus Competitors’ Pricing

Wix was joint third-best in the Value for Money category of our recent round of rigorous website builder testing. Scoring an impressive 4.2/5, Wix is equally as good investment compared with Squarespace. Square came top because it’s the only ecommerce platform that doesn’t charge a monthly subscription fee to use their online sales platform.

Here’s the Value for Money rankings:

1. Square: 4.7/5
2. Woocommerce: 4.3/5
3. Wix and Squarespace: 4.2/5
4. Shopify, Americommerce, PinnacleCart and Bigcommerce: 3.0/5

Even in light of this list, it’s worth giving Wix a second look given the website builder scored 4.6/5 overall, ranking second place among all its competitors. We compare competitors in more detail in our guide to the best ecommerce platforms for small businesses.

If you’re looking to sell cheaply online, you’re probably wondering whether or not to choose Wix. To help solve this riddle, we’ve put together a comparison chart of Wix and its competitors’ lowest price ecommerce plans without adverts.

You can directly compare their features by clicking the left and right arrows:

Prices correct as of last update.

If you decide to build your website on Squarespace, its pricing could set you back anything between $16 per month (if you want to keep it simple) and $61 per month (if you’re keen on making it fancy). Like the Capertee Valley, this is quite a big gap – and with the platform’s features making sure that the sky’s the limit for your ecommerce business, you may wonder if any of these options are worth your investment.

Lucky for you, here at Expert Market, we’re all about deep research and first-hand experience, so our analysis will help you find out where to start and which way to go from there. With Squarespace, not only have we decided to set up our own website with it to see what it does, we’ve also asked regular users to give it a go and report to us what did (or didn’t) tickle their fancy.

We then compiled and graded their findings on everything from features and user-friendliness to sales features and support. On value for money, Squarespace scored a solid 4.2 – one the best grades on this category in our research. This also puts Squarespace on par with one of its biggest competitors, Wix.

Whether you’re courting Squarespace already or have just started browsing for a website builder, this is a good place to delve into what your money will buy if you go for it – plus some pros and cons for good measure. Scroll down and find it all out.

Squarespace Pricing Plans: Each Plan Explained

If you want to enter the ecommerce game, a natural concern would be how much a website would cost you. For that reason, we went ahead and created this breakdown of the Squarespace pricing plans so you can easily reach a decision on whether any of them work for you or not. You’ll find the hard cost numbers on the table below – and if you want to know more about what these numbers will get you, just read ahead.

Overall, Squarespace offers plenty of features for business owners who really want to take care of their processes end-to-end in a full sweep. It combines great website design with solid marketing tools and multichannel integration. No wonder it’s one of the top scorers on both website features – 4.2 – and design functionalities – 3.9 – in our research into the best ecommerce platforms in Australia.

Squarespace Personal – $16 per month or $22 per month

Squarespace (Up Close and) Personal is, as the name suggests, very much tailored to personal websites. The platform’s cheapest tier offers a somewhat limited range of services when compared to the others, but if your goal is to showcase your work and publicise your contacts, it does the job.

• Paying monthly: $22 per month
• Paying annually: $16 per month

Like all Squarespace’s plans, this one comes with unlimited bandwidth, SEO features, mobile optimization, a free custom domain (for the first year) and an array of gorgeous templates to choose from. Overall, blogs, portfolios, showreels, and all sorts of personal projects fit this pricing tier like a glove.

But beware: Squarespace Personal does not support any fully-integrated ecommerce – nor does it allow you to accept donations, for that matter – so it’s definitely not the option if you plan on generating direct income from what’s on display on the website.

With that and the price tag in mind, we don’t think Squarespace’s Personal plan cuts it. Small projects will benefit from cheaper options, like Weebly (whose basic plan, Connect, starts at $7 per month in a yearly contract) and GoDaddy (whose cheapest plan costs $16 per month in the first year, and $19 afterwards). And if ecommerce is (or will be) the name of your game, then Squarespace’s other plans are better equipped to serve you. Of course, if you’d like to try this plan just to see how it looks like, head over to Squarespace and get cracking.

Squarespace Business – $25 per month or $35 per month

Squarespace’s second tier provides great value for money and the best of both worlds in the sense that, even without shelling out for a full-on ecommerce plan, you get many of the perks that would come with one.

• Paying monthly: $35 per month
• Paying annually: $25 per month (for us, a bargain)

Along with all the features of the Personal plan, Squarespace’s Business plan also includes a free Gmail and Google Workspace account (for the first year), complete customization with CSS and JavaScript (in English: you can add elements to make your website look super slick), and ecommerce integration. Plus, it works alongside various payment platforms: Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, and Stripe. If reading that makes you hear those cha-chings already, you can go ahead and fetch this plan on Squarespace‘s website.

However, depending on the size of your business, you should watch out for a very important detail: this plan comes with a 3% transaction fee on every online sale you make. If your sales are or will be occasional, that won’t pose a problem, but if you deal (or plan on dealing) with a high volume of sales, this isn’t the option for you. Instead, one of Squarespace’s Commerce tiers will suit you better.

Squarespace Basic Commerce – $34 per month or $40 per month

Big league time. Moving into the platform’s ecommerce arena, Squarespace Basic Commerce is geared towards online sales, and includes many features that should suit most businesses out there.

• Paying monthly: $34 per month
• Paying annually: $40 per month

For starters, Squarespace Basic Commerce does away with the transaction fee. Besides the ecommerce integration included in the Business plan, the Basic Commerce packs a punch when it comes to making your website look primed for sales. It allows your customers to create their own accounts, and to check out while still on your domain. They also get to see stock availability, other customers’ reviews, and related products.

On that note, on this plan, Squarespace gives you several tools through which you can monitor your best-selling items and sales trends, and bulk-manage inventory. You also get to check your visit-to-sale conversion rate and, through an in-built Facebook link, you’re able to sell your products directly on Instagram as well.

Considering the amount of features on this tier, it’s excellent for existing businesses that are keen on making the jump into online sales, or new businesses that have been based in the digital realm from the get-go. If your business ticks any of those boxes, just head to Squarespace and get started.

Squarespace Basic Commerce misses a few of the tools in the platform’s full arsenal – such as the ability to sell subscriptions – but these features are designed for more established online merchants anyway (we’ll get to them in a second, when we analyse Squarespace’s Advanced Commerce plan). If you’re just entering this arena, however, Basic Commerce should be your weapon of choice.

Squarespace Advanced Commerce – $52 per month or $61 per month

This one does what it says on the tin, really: Squarespace Advanced Commerce is the platform’s top tier, and comes with all the perks mentioned so far, plus some extras to really make your business zing.

• Paying monthly: $61 per month
• Paying annually: $52 per month

Among the specialised tools at your disposal, this plan allows you to sell subscriptions, set up email reminders for customers who left your website without purchasing, and automate discount offers at checkout.

For all its features, Squarespace Advanced Commerce is very much aimed at businesses that already have an online presence and are looking to expand. If yours is one of them, by all means visit Squarespace and sign up. Considering the cost, however, if you’re starting out in digital sales, you’re better off with the lower tiers, which will give you a good taste of the action but involve less bank-breaking.

Does Squarespace Have a Free Plan?

Speaking of bank-breaking, let’s tackle one hard money-related truth straight on: Squarespace doesn’t have a free plan, so you will need to shell out to get your hands on it. That said, you can trial any of its plans for free for 14 days. After that time expires, you can even request a one-time seven-day extension if you contact Squarespace’s customer service team.

The trial is a good opportunity for you to try the plan that looks like the best fit for your business, and then grow or scale down accordingly when it comes to actually buying. Because of this, and the fact that it allows you to sample most of Squarespace’s features without having to commit, we recommend doing a trial.

Squarespace Fees and Costs: Billing Cycles, Ongoing Costs, and Hidden Fees

Squarespace is pretty clear about what it charges, so for the most part, you’re not in for any surprises. You can choose between paying monthly or yearly, and the discounts if you choose the latter are quite substantial, as costs get hefty on a month-to-month basis. Your subscription will renew automatically.

You should, however, watch out for the fees charged by the payment platform you choose to integrate, whether that’s Amazon, Apple Pay, PayPal, Square, or Stripe. Squarespace nabs 3% of your sale on its Business plan, but otherwise, it either doesn’t allow for payments (as on the Personal plan) or doesn’t charge a transaction fee (as on the Commerce plans).

However, in any plan in which ecommerce integration is possible, the payment platform you use will take a bite – usually a percentage of the sale, plus a fixed fee. It varies from platform to platform – hence us not going into further detail here – but in any case, it’s worth checking out your payment platform’s fees so you don’t buy a specific Squarespace plan (especially the Commerce ones) thinking absolutely no fees are due.

Squarespace Scheduling Pricing: Should You Go For It?

Squarespace Scheduling is an extra service provided by the platform. It’s tailor-made for businesses that work with appointments. Clinical consultations, space rental, classes of any kind – it doesn’t matter: if a date and time needs to be booked, Squarespace Scheduling does the trick.

The thing to pay attention to is that this handy tool doesn’t come within Squarespace’s main pricing plans, so you would have to shell out a bit more to get it. Like those plans, however, you do get a discount (albeit not as big) if you bite the bullet and go with a yearly plan.

With Scheduling, you can choose between three tiers: Emerging, Growing and Powerhouse.

Emerging is perfect for small, personal businesses that don’t have various calendars or several team members inputting data. It allows calendar syncing with selected email providers, has ecommerce integration, and automates email reminders. It costs $22 month-to-month or $20 per month in a yearly plan.

Growing is geared towards businesses with more employees and locations. You can create and sync six calendars, handle bundled and recurring bookings, and send reminders via SMS as well as email. This one comes at $40 month-to-month or $37 per month in a yearly plan.

Finally, Powerhouse ups the ante when it comes to sheer volume of calendars: you can create a maximum of 36 (and sync them)! Plus, you have more room to personalise the scheduler with custom CSS. For this, you would pay $68 month-to-month or $74 per month if you go annually.

As far as value for money goes, Growing is the best plan. You get access to almost all of the tool’s features for about half the price of the costliest version. Powerhouse only makes sense if your business is a multi-location megachain, with all your locations taking appointments – in which case, congratulations!

Squarespace vs the Competition: Which Stands Out?

If you want to build a simple yet functional website without the need for it to look fresh off the runway, there are better options than Squarespace considering the investment involved. Its lowest price tag of $16 per month puts it at a disadvantage against cheaper competitors like Weebly or GoDaddy, which allow you to become a website owner without spending as much.

However, when ecommerce integration is thrown into the mix, Squarespace’s pricing really shines. It occupies a solid middle ground, which means it’s all out to satisfy most business-owners without costing a fortune – the 4.2 score it received on value for money from our customer surveys sums it up nicely.

Its pricing range of $16 to $61 offers a plethora of features that are aimed primarily at online growth. Because of this, and Squarespace’s limited stock monitoring functions, large online retailers will be better served by the highest pricing tiers of platforms such as BigCommerce or Shopify, as they’re designed for large retailers. However, our research shows that Squarespace is one of the one of the best platforms for small businesses in Australia.

The best way to find an accountant is to get recommendations from other business owners, search online, or put a request out on social media to get genuine suggestions.

To make it even easier, you can use our free comparison tool to get quotes from trusted accounting firms in the UK. We just need a few brief details about your business, and the firms we match you up with will contact you with no-obligation quotes.

A guide to finding an accountant

There a few ways to find an accountant for your business, here are the methods we recommend:

Reach out to business owners

What better way to find a good accountant than by asking other businesses about their accountant? Reach out to family, friends, or even acquaintances that own businesses, and ask about their experience with their accountant and if they would recommend them.

Even if they wouldn’t, they’ll probably have some advice for you on your search and be able to give you some helpful pointers.

Get searching

As well as customer reviews, you’ll also find expert comparisons of top accounting firms, which can give you an idea of the accountants you should know about. Our comparison of the best accountants for businesses is a great place to start.

Get social networking

Posting on social media sites such as LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook can help connect you to a larger audience of businesses who use an accountant. Reaching out for some recommendations can make your search much shorter, and more fruitful.

You can narrow the search by using hashtags to indicate your local area and the industry you’re in, so similar businesses will be more likely to offer their suggestions.

Use our free quote service

Our quote comparison tool is completely free – all we need from you is a few brief details about your business. We then match you up with trusted accounting firms that can provide what you need, and they’ll contact you with no-obligation quotes that are tailored to you. It’s an easy, quick, and efficient way to connect with your next potential accountant.

What to look for in an accountant

When looking for an accountant, it’s a good idea to meet them in person, especially as you’ll be working closely with them. It’s definitely not mandatory to do this, especially if you want to vet a few at the same time. But if you’re close to choosing a firm, an in-person meeting can help you figure out if they’re the right accountant for you.

You should check to see if they’re qualified through one of the recognised UK bodies such as ICAS, ICAEW, or ACCA. If you want a chartered accountant, check that they’re qualified. A chartered accountant is more heavily qualified than a regular accountant.

You can check an accountant’s qualifications online on their firm’s website, or by checking with the relevant body.

You should also check the size of the firm, as this is important when it comes to your business’s needs. If you run a start-up or small business, a small accountancy firm will work well. But if you’re looking to rapidly expand or you’re already a fairly established growing business, then you want a larger firm. If the firm can’t keep up with your needs, it won’t be able to service you properly and may even cause issues.

Importantly, you should find someone who’s dedicated to saving your business money. Some accountants will simply manage your accounts and ensure your tax returns are complete. A really good accountant will be committed to saving your business money.

Saving money is one of the reasons businesses choose to outsource accounting. Outsourcing also means you’re much less likely to face any penalties or fines for misfiling or missing a deadline.

Check reviews and testimonials from clients. You can usually find these on Trustpilot or Google reviews. If it’s difficult to find these online, for whatever reason, ask the firm directly for testimonials.

Getting genuine reviews is one of the easiest ways to find the best firms and accountants, as you can be sure that you’re choosing a firm with a good reputation and a track record of good service.

Finally, consider location, location, location. The location of your accountant depends entirely on your preference. If you want to be able to see your accountant face-to-face on a regular basis, you want to choose an accountant where this is possible. It’s definitely not a necessity to do so, as lots of the work can easily be done remotely, but this is down to your personal choice.

Questions to ask an accountant

1. What are your fees?

This is a key question to start with, so you can easily filter out which accountants will fit into your budget. Lots of accounting firms offer custom prices, so asking around is the best way to determine which firms are suited to your business.

2. What services will be available to me?

It’s important that you have a clear idea of what services will be included for your fees. This way, you can properly compare between firms, if needed. It also means that you know exactly what services your business is paying for.

You may even want to keep some accounting in-house and outsource the more complex areas, such as tax.

3. What will our communication look like?

Communication is important for a successful accountant-client relationship. A good firm will have standard communication practices in place. Discussing this beforehand means both parties are aware of each others’ expectations. You want to be able to reach out to your accountant whenever necessary – if this doesn’t seem likely, you’ll be better off with a different accountant.

4. What will we discuss regularly?

It’s important that you have a clear idea of what your potential accountant thinks are important issues to discuss on a regular basis. This could include anything from tax planning to cash flow management. Asking these questions helps you to see whether they have understood your business and any challenges it may present.

5. What are common mistakes clients make?

Your accountant should have lots of experience working with clients. Asking this means you can avoid any mistakes from the outset. If they aren’t able to give you a concrete answer, this could be a sign that they don’t have the level of experience you’re looking for.

6. Do you provide any extra services?

Some accounting firms will offer more than your standard tax and accounting services. They sometimes offer financial planning, marketing services, or funding assistance, too. Knowing what extra services the firm provides can help you make your decision, as you may want to use these services in the future.

If they don’t offer any, and you expect that you’ll want these services, it’s a better idea to choose a different firm who does offer this, so you don’t need to switch further down the line.

What will an accountant do for your business?

Here are some of the key services an accountant can provide for your business:

• Bookkeeping
• Tax accounting
• Account auditing
• Payroll
• Bank reconciliation
• Accounts receivable
• Payable accounts
• Regular advice

Outsourcing your accounting services means you can be confident that a professional is taking care of the more complex aspects of your business. Missing a deadline or misfiling can mean facing a penalty or fine, whereas outsourcing gives you peace of mind that these things won’t happen.

Keeping accurate accounts is also important to running your business, as incorrect books make it much harder to make informed decisions.

How to find a chartered accountant

A chartered accountant is an accountant who is specifically accredited with a ‘chartered status’. This means that they have studied to a higher level, and passed rigorous exams.

If you want to find a chartered accountant, you can search via regulating bodies such as CIMA or ICAEW.

You can also search on Google or on social media for chartered accountants in your area. If you want to then check that they are chartered accountants, you can confirm with the regulating body they claim to have been accredited by.

Finding a chartered accountant isn’t too different to finding a regular accountant. You can follow the same steps – however, for extra confirmation, you can double check online via the relevant regulatory body’s website.

Need a quote?

To kickstart your search, use our free quote comparison tool to get bespoke quotes from accounting firms. Give us a few details about your business, and we’ll do the hard bit, matching you up with the accountancy firms that can best cater to your needs.

They’ll then contact you with tailored, no-obligation quotes, so you can compare and save.

The best free project management platform is monday.com. After extensive research, we found that it’s the most user-friendly platform, and it scores very well when looking at customer reviews. If you’re a small team looking to run a project or two, the features and limits should more than suffice.

It’s not a landslide victory, however. ClickUp and Wrike both fair quite well, as do the other four contenders on our list. Read on to see how the top project management platforms approach their free plans, and which would work the best for you and your team.

You can also check out our guide for top Gantt chart templates to further understand which platform will meet your needs.

monday.com

What Are monday.com’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for monday.com’s free plan are:

• Most of monday’s paid tiers’ collaboration features (embedded documents and whiteboard collaboration)
• Over 200 templates for projects and items
• Accessible and usable iOS and Android apps

Is monday.com’s Free Plan Enough for You?

For a smaller team, monday.com’s free plan should be a great starting point, if not a suitable plan for a long-term investment. Five team members is pretty standard for a smaller project team, and having unlimited docs on three boards is pretty generous from a free plan. And monday’s best offering, its usability, is a constant across all of its tiers, even the free one.

How Is monday.com‘s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

In our research, we found that monday.com scored highest out of every every provider on this list for usability, with a 4.1/5. Meaning its interface is super user-friendly and its learning curve is not that steep, making it an accessible option. Wrike and ClickUp are both close behind (each scoring a 4.0/5), but Monday’s interface is just too clean to give it anything other than first place.

This may also be why its users love it. Monday.com scores the highest when it comes to customer sentiment, raking in 4.5/5 points, trumping ClickUp’s 4.3 points. Whether it’s the free plan, or a paid plan, monday is overall the best choice.

Read more about monday.com here.

ClickUp

What Are ClickUp’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for ClickUp’s free plan are:

• Unlimited tasks, users, and custom views
• One of the best Gantt charts on the market
• Generous customisation options (including 100 monthly automations)

Is ClickUp’s Free Plan Enough for You?

With unlimited users, and, particularly generously, unlimited tasks, this is a great choice for any-sized team with any-sized projects. The storage limit of 100MB is a bit low, but it’s not uncommon in free plans. If this sounds like it would facilitate what you’re looking to do, then there’s no hidden problems here, this would likely suit your team well.

How Is ClickUp’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

While ClickUp follows close behind monday.com in almost every way, it does out perform monday.com when it comes to customer support, as it provides 24/7 live support. However, in features overall, like tools and customisation, monday.com comes out on top, which is where the points really matter.

ClickUp definitely fares better than every other competitor though, being far more usable than Jira and Zoho, and having more features than Teamwork.

Wrike

What Are Wrike’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for Wrike’s free plan are:

• Unlimited users
• 2GB of storage
• Account-wide work schedules

Is Wrike’s Free Plan Enough for You?

Strangely enough, Wrike’s free plan is a better deal than its lowest paid plan (the Team plan). For example, both offer 2GB of storage, but where the free plan offers unlimited users, the Team plan only allows up to 25 users. So, to answer the question, yes, Wrike’s free plan will likely be enough for a team who isn’t looking to supercharge their subscription with loads of features.

How Is Wrike’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

Wrike comes in a close third, right behind ClickUp and monday.com. Honestly, as far as features and limits go, it might trump them both, but its scores in both customer support and satisfaction are too low to ignore. Wrike’s customer support score is a 1.8/5, which is one of the lowest out of any project management software. With only a knowledge base, forum and email support available, Wrike has a little way to go to catch up in this department. While its a hit with its users, scoring a customer satisfaction score of 4.1/5, it can’t outpace ClickUp or monday.com’s scores of 4.3 and 4.5, respectively.

Teamwork

What Are Teamwork’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for Teamwork’s free plan are:

• Milestones and dependencies
• Gantt charts
• Phone, live chat, and email support

Is Teamwork’s Free Plan Enough for You?

As far as limits go, Teamwork is quite restrictive. However, there are some features that your team might absolutely need, like dependencies. If this is the case, and you’re not willing to shell out for a paid tier of another product, then Teamwork is really your only choice!

How Is Teamwork’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

Teamwork is the definition of “middle of the pack.” Its more user-friendly and accessible than the tech-orientated Jira but not quite as stunning on the interface side as ClickUp or monday.com, so it came out with a rather average, 3.9/5. In the customer service race, Teamwork outperforms Jira again, but falls short of monday.com’s solid fanbase, scoring a decent 4.1/5. Basically, it’s not taking home any gold medals, but it’s not offensively bad by any stretch of the imagination.

Zoho Projects

What Are Zoho’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for Zoho Projects’ free plan are:

• Integration with other Zoho products
• A Gantt chart (read only)
• Mobile app (iOS and Android)

Is Zoho’s Free Plan Enough for You?

You’d need a very small team for Zoho Projects’ free plan to be worth an extended period of your time. With only three team members and two projects, it’s the smallest plan on our list, and acts more like an extended trial than a full-on plan. However, if your team is used to using Zoho products, then it’s a great call, as it’ll all seem familiar, and possibly support integrations.

How Is Zoho’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

There are two categories where Zoho Projects trumps its opponents. One of them is price – scoring a lovely 4.7/5 when it comes to price, which is the highest of any providers we looked at (their first paid plan is only £4 per user per month.)

We normally wouldn’t factor that in on a page about free plans, but when Zoho’s free plan feels so much like a trial for a paid plan, it’s worth mentioning. The other good point is the customer score – 4.2/5. This comes in second only to monday.com and ClickUp, which means users just like you enjoy using it.

Jira

What Are Jira’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for Jira’s free plan are:

• Apps and integrations
• Automations (for a single project)
• Agile reporting

Is Jira’s Free Plan Enough for You?

With a member limit of ten, Jira’s free plan will likely be able to accommodate any small team or business. You can only run a single project at a time, and there’s actually no accessible data on how many tasks you can have, but if you’re only tackling one project at a time, it probably won’t be too small.

How Is Jira’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

Jira falls short when comparing it to its contemporaries. Its feature score is particularly low (3.3/5) as it lacks many collaboration features that other platforms provide. And its usability isn’t much better (3.5/5), meaning it’s got a particularly steep learning curve and its interface is not the most intuitive. Luckily it does provide decent customer service score (4.0/5), which beats monday.com, ClickUp, Wrike, and every other platform on this list. Although, we aren’t sure how successful it has been in actually helping its users as it only scored an average of 3.6/5 on consumer review sites.

Asana

What Are Asana’s Free Project Management Key Features?

The key draws for Asana’s free plan are:

• Unlimited users, projects, and tasks
• 100+ integrations
• Unlimited file storage

Is Asana’s Free Plan Enough for You?

There’s really no world where the answer to this question is “no,” at least when it comes to limits and the capacity for a large team or business. The fact that there’s no limit on projects, tasks, team members, or storage means that the only reason this might not be enough for you is due to missing a specific feature you’d need.

How Is Asana’s Free Plan Doing Compared to its Competitors?

If Asana put just a bit more into their interface and features, they’d be one of the all time greats. For example, Asana is just slightly less easy to use than monday, Wrike, and ClickUp, and their customer satisfaction score follows that same trend. Their customer support score is low, but monday and Wrike are also pretty poor at customer service, so if Asana put some investment into that, they’d be able to overtake some of the project management titans.

Is Free Project Management Software Enough for You?

The answer to this question all depends on what you need from the project management software. Firstly, as you may have noticed, almost all of these free plans have very tight limits when it comes to members, so the main thing you’ll need to ensure is that your team isn’t too big to outgrow a free plan. Sole traders, startups, and very small businesses may find that a free plan fits them quite nicely.

The good news is, even if the answer to this question is “no,” project management software is usually extremely affordable. The cost for lowest paid plan from any provider will typically be in the single digits per user per month, so if you need to boost your software’s power, it won’t break the bank.

If you’re looking to improve your project management, but didn’t find what you need from a free plan, check out our page of the best project management platforms. This page compares 11 of the most popular providers on various criteria.

How Did We Choose the 7 Best Free Project Management Software?

Our team of independent researchers scoured the industry, looking for every project management software platform that included a free plan (not just a free trial). After finding all of the platforms with free plans, as well as what those plans include, the researchers then compare each software against its competitors, allowing us to find the cream of the crop. The criteria we look at include:

• Features: Fairly easy to assess. Whichever platforms offer the best variety of features are given a better placement than those that have a more skint collection of tools.
• Usability: Our researchers have a collection of tasks they need to accomplish. The ease and time through which they can accomplish these tasks is tallied up in order to see which platform is the most usable.
• Customer Support: Again, easy enough – look at the options available and see how monday.com compares against its competitors when it comes to customer support options
• Customer Score: After looking across various review aggregate sites (eg. Trustpilot), our researchers compile a general customer score, summarizing the overall satisfaction of the public

After factoring in all this information, alongside the scores they received, we were able to calculate a final overall score for each project management platform’s free plan.

It’d be hard to find a viable project management software platform that doesn’t come with a Gantt chart in its most basic offerings. Gantt charts are a crucial element for almost any project management process, so it’s important to get the right one for your team.

For those unaware, a Gantt chart is a calendar-based chart through which users can easily assess the amount of work done, as well as the amount of work left to do. This is hugely useful in more long-term projects, where deadlines and budgets can slip away from you if you’re not careful.

Here are seven of the best Gantt chart templates offered by different project management software platforms, all backed up by our own market and product research.

The Top 7 Gantt Chart Templates

As mentioned, a Gantt chart is an incredibly useful tool for any project team with a variety of ongoing tasks. A good Gantt chart can help you with deadlines, budgets, and an overall view of how the project is progressing.

Here are seven of the best Gantt charts on the market, each coming with their own pros and cons. Unless specified otherwise, Gantt charts are available on all plans.

ClickUp – From $5 per Member per Month

ClickUp is Expert Market’s favourite project management platform. It’s affordable, has a free tier, is ranked as very usable, and is an overall well-scoring platform when it comes to user satisfaction.

Its Gantt chart is very usable. It comes in two forms, one being a standard, fully-featured Gantt chart, and the other being a simple, more watered-down chart that can help newer users get to grips with the concept.

monday.com – From £8 per Member per Month

monday.com is tied first for our favourite project management platform. Having the best customer score of all the platforms we looked at, and coming with a very modest price tag, you could do a lot worse than monday.

monday’s main perk is its versatility and customisation, and this spills over into its Gantt chart offering. Its smooth interface, enticing colours, and overall ease of use allow for a lot of playing with the software to find what works best for you and your team.

Read more about monday.com here.

Smartsheet – From £5 per Member per Month

Smartsheet, as the name might suggest, is less like a project management software, and more like a spreadsheet software (think Excel or Google Sheets). In our research, it’s the highest scoring platform when it comes to usability, which makes sense, as it’d be the most familiar platform to anyone just starting out with project management.

As such, their Gantt chart isn’t the easiest on the eyes. It’s quite utilitarian, but in both the positive and negative connotations of that word. It’s somewhat colourless, but it also gets the job done. If you’re looking for a simple platform with few frills, this is the choice for you.

Wrike – From $9.80 per Member per Month

Wrike is one of the pricier platforms on the market. It has one of our best usability scores, and customers rate it quite highly as a product. It’s not the best for collaboration or customer service, but for a small team that knows what they’re doing, Wrike serves the job well.

As for its Gantt offerings, they’re nice and snappy, auto-populating Gantt chart tasks with information entered elsewhere in the project management software. However, Gantt charts and dependencies aren’t offered on the free tier, which is a shame when considering how basic of a feature it is.

Asana – From £9.49 per Member per Month

Asana is one of the more popular project management platforms, scoring well across the board during our research. Some of its best features include a great app marketplace, and a great array of team communication functionalities.

As far as its Gantt charts are concerned, Asana has some of the best visual customisation out there. It can be easily switched to timeline views, and the interface is very nice to look at and use. Unfortunately it can be a bit rigid. A lot of the time with Gantt charts, you can reverse engineer a fix for a specific problem you’re having, but Asana isn’t too conducive to this approach.

Zoho Projects – From £4 per Member per Month

If the word “Zoho” sounds familiar, don’t worry! Zoho makes all kinds of business software, some of which you may already be familiar with or even use yourself. If this is the case, then that’s some extra incentive to use Zoho, as most of its software can integrate with other Zoho software. And it’s obviously very affordable.

As for its Gantt chart, however, it’s one of our favourites. It allows all the classic Gantt chart functionalities, like dependencies, as well as some very helpful functions, like task notes, easy resizing, and the ability to export into various formats.

Teamwork – From £10 per Member per Month

Finally, we have Teamwork, which, true to its name, has some of the smoothest collaboration features on the project management market. Not only that, but it scores well for customer service, and customer satisfaction is quite high too.

Their Gantt chart offerings are solid, don’t get us wrong, but it’s nothing amazing. This does mean, however, if you just want a basic Gantt chart (albeit with a selection of above-average collaboration features), then this is a great pick for you.

Why Do You Need a Gantt Chart Maker?

A Gantt chart is the bread and butter of project management. As such, it’s not too complicated, but still worth doing correctly. Sure, you can put together a rudimentary example on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, but it will always be a second-class product when compared to the real thing.

Project management software is a great way of formalising the process, while also making it more collaborative, customisable, and accessible. Gantt charts are only one of the formats on offer within project management software. Here are some other important project management templates.

What Kind of Templates Do I Need to Use in Project Management?

Of course, Gantt charts are one of many chart types and tools that a project management software can come with. Here are some other handy features that project management software can offer you:

• RACI chart: RACI stands for “responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.” These are a broad umbrella for the four ways someone can be involved in the project, and designating each member with one of these titles can improve communication and workflow.
• MoSCoW chart: MoSCoW generously stands for “must, should, could, and won’t.” These four designations are given to the various steps within a project. For example, if you’re making a website for a product, you must have a homepage, you should include imagery of your product, you could include customer testimonials, and you won’t play annoying music on every page.
• Task list: While a task list could just be written down on a whiteboard, having a virtual collaborative space is a lot easier and more efficient. Team members can claim certain tasks, and update their progress as they go.
• Roadmap: A broader document than a task list, the roadmap is the bird’s eye view of the entire project from day one to the finish date. It might not have each individual step, but it will address the broader segments of the project.
• Kanban chart: While Gantt charts are popular, Kanban charts are another great solution for projects with more independent stages. Team members can move projects from one stage to another, like “in progress” or “in review,” while encountering little in the form of roadblocks from other unfinished steps. An example of Asana’s Kansan chart is below.

The term “project management” might sound quite broad, but it actually refers to a very particular (and, if used properly, effective) way of organising goals and producing results for long-term projects.

Most project management principles were consciously brought into existence in a software context, but good managers and leaders would have been using these principles effectively since teamwork was a concept.

Let’s go over what these concepts are, and how to effectively employ project management across your workflow. Of course, project management is far easier with the aid of software. While there are a fair few project management software platforms on the market, we specifically recommend monday.com. monday.com has an incredibly smooth and user-friendly interface, and a great set of features, including 200+ templates like GANTT charts.

What is Agile Project Management?

Agile project management brands itself as a more hands-on approach to project management. The full manifesto for this project management method isn’t too long if you’re interested, but it boils down to experiences and interactions with the individual over a set-in-stone plan.

While Agile Project Management was originally formulated to aid software development (hence a lot of the language in the manifesto leans toward software examples), but the principles are broad enough that they could be applied to any long-term project, like graphic design or architecture.

As an example, here are a few of the core principles of Agile Project Management:

“Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.”

“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behaviour accordingly.”

“Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a preference to the shorter timescale.”

As you can see from this handful of guidelines, the soul of Agile Project Management is frequent communication. While this may slightly impede peoples’ day-to-day work, it does mean that the project’s overall flow will be far smoother, result in fewer delays, and need little to no last-minute changes.

What are Project Management’s Main Objectives?

So what is the exact purpose of project management? Well, many businesses will offer products that can’t be ordered and completed on the same day. It can be easy to let these more longterm projects spin a bit out of control and take up more time and money than originally planned. That’s where project management comes in.

When a project is looked at through a project management lens, it ensures a few key promises:

• The project will be delivered on time
• The project won’t go substantially over-budget
• There will be minimal roadblocks during the project
• The project will be delivered uncompromised and according to the specifications
• The project will be delivered at all

With all of these in mind, anyone should be able to see the value in a strong project management process.

How Does Agile Project Management Work?

The Core of the Agile Structure

“Agile” is one of the most popular spins on project management. Traditional project management focuses in on the end goal, and taking whatever steps are necessary to reach that end goal. Agile project management, however, takes a more iterative approach to the process.

Again, this approach was developed with software in mind, so let’s take a software example. If you were developing Twitter, you’d obviously want to make sure that all of the buttons on the website did the right thing. But you can’t be 100% sure that the “unfollow” button works unless you’ve already developed and perfected the “follow” button.

In this sense, the project of developing Twitter needs to be broken down into the multiple functions that rely on each other. “Perfect Follow Button” is a step that needs to be completed before “Perfect Unfollow Button” can be reliably started. This way, even in a worst case scenario where the entire project is unfinished, you’ll at least be able to present some aspects of it that work flawlessly.

The Agile Team Structure

In any decently-sized project, you’re going to have a team of multiple people, each with different skillsets. As a project leader, you’ll need to fully understand these skills and delegate as effectively as possible.

Depending on the project size and goal, you can have a vast amount of participants and roles onboard, including but not limited to: business sponsor, project manager, business analyst, workshop facilitator, solution developers and team leaders, business visionary, technical coordinator, technical advisor, business advisor, and solution testers.

Understanding the roles and abilities of these individuals is crucial. A good idea is to use an RACI chart. RACI stands for Responsible, Accountable, Consulted and Informed. This can outline the roles and responsibilities of each person involved. monday.com offers a great RACI chart, shown below in the context of an architecture project.

The Sprint Structure with Agile

A sprint is is defined period of time (usually 2 weeks) during which the team commits to taking on a certain amount of work. Sprints help with the iterative process of Agile work as you learn to prioritise the ‘musts’ against the ‘coulds’ in each sprint.

Any project with multiple moving parts is bound to hit some snags along an extended period of time. To this end, teams can create a MoSCoW chart. This stands (generously) for Must, Should, Could, and Won’t.

• Must: These are the absolute necessities of whatever project you’re making. If you’re making a website, you must have a homepage. If you’re making a building, it must have a front door. These are absolutely non-negotiable.
• Should: If all goes according to plan, these are the aspects that the project would include. In our building example, the windows should open, but it’s not the end of the world if they don’t. It’s still a high priority goal, but if the project is down to its final days and some of the “Musts” are still unfinished, these can take a back seat.
• Could: It’d be nice if the project included these things, but they’re not crucial. For example, a website could include some custom HTML elements that add personality, but no one would be furious if they were missing (unless they were specifically requested, of course).
• Won’t: These were either too difficult, not relevant, or otherwise not worth the effort to put into the project.

Which Tools are Used in Project Management?

While project management can be done with something as simple as a whiteboard and some stickie notes, the best way to take full advantage of the project management process is through project management software. Excel spreadsheets aren’t as versatile or secure, and with how affordable PM software is, there’s no reason not to at least try it out.

There are some tools that you can only use through project management software that can greatly improve efficiency, and can help ensure your project will come in on time and under budget. Here are some examples of the tools you would come across if you ventured into the realm of project management.

How to Use Project Management Software to Make RACI Charts

The aforementioned RACI Charts are a great way of establishing a hierarchy for each step of the project management process. They’re an essential element to any project team, and they’re very easy to set up. Most project management software platforms offer RACI charts, but our favourite is monday.com.

Firstly, as is tradition with monday.com, its interface and colour coordination is second to none, making it easy for even the most unfamiliar of users. Couple that with the fact that you can organise the RACI chart by person, task, or column, and it makes a somewhat basic feature into something great. Read more about monday.com here.

monday.com isn’t the absolute undisputed champion, however. Smartsheet also offers a great RACI chart, coupled with a notes column that allows users to go more in depth on the various tasks and individuals connected to them.

How to Use Project Management Software to Make Gantt Charts

A Gantt chart is the most popular way to manage a project with a long timeline or a multitude of dependencies. It displays every step and aspect of the project in one calendar, letting you see the timeline of the project from day one to the finished date.

As far as PM software Gantt charts go, while we’ve tested several platforms, we favour ClickUp (featured below). You can include info like budgets and timelines, and there is a dedicated board where you can list all the risks that could impact your project.

How to Use Project Management Software to Make RAID Charts

A RAID chart is a collection of “risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies.”

• Risks: What can go wrong during the entire project?
• Assumptions: What is a safe bet but is still not set in stone?
• Issues: What upcoming problems will we definitely need to address?
• Dependencies: What tasks can only be started once another task is completed?

These are quite basic, but getting a comprehensive RAID Chart set up at the start of a project can make things far simpler and easier to anticipate.

Again, monday.com is a great way to set up your own RAID Charts, with an example shown below.

How to Use Project Management Software to Track Your Team’s Day-to-Day Work

Project management software is obviously intended for more long-form projects, but it can still be used in a more day-to-day context. Collaborative to-do lists, message boards where users can assign tasks, deadlines, and comments, and ways to mark the progression of various tasks and objectives. It’s great for a bird’s eye view of your entire team or department, especially if your workplace is hybrid or remote.

If it’s not obvious, project management software has a tonne of versatility. If you’d like to investigate the world of project management software further, check out our list of the 11 best project management software platforms.

What is the Role of a Project Manager?

While there are dozens of roles included in the project management process, the project manager obviously gets top billing. They are obviously responsible for managing the team and workflow of the project overall, but on the whole, their role can be broken down into five elements:

• Initiating: Getting the ball rolling! Establishing what the project goal is, what needs to be done to get us there, and establishing things like budgets and timeframes.
• Planning: Possibly the most crucial step of all. While the execution of the project is obviously important, it can crumble within days if it isn’t planned out.
• Executing: The longest step, but the least involved for the project manager. They’re obviously still in control of the process and in charge of leading meetings, but this is when the team itself does the heavy lifting.
• Monitoring and Controlling: This happens alongside the execution step, and is mainly made up of checking in with the team, dealing with any speed bumps, and doing everything in their power to ensure a speedy and smooth process.
• Closing: Presenting the project to the individual or organisation that requested it. Hopefully this is the easiest step, and will end with the popping of a champagne cork!

Which Businesses Need Project Management?

As mentioned, while the term “project management” was officially brought about in a software development context, the principles and systems of project management can be used for almost any project. Project management is now being used by software developers, finance firms, legal teams, construction businesses, and even in the arts, in fields like visual effects and graphic design.

All that to say, while few businesses categorically need project management, it’s a benefit to almost all of them. This benefit is enhanced further by project management software. If a business is trying to use project management techniques, but is struggling to keep on top of it all, project management software can help teams and businesses maintain an efficient workflow.

Some of the most helpful capabilities of project management software include:

• Building a work pipeline
• Taking notes on the various steps of the process
• Create a to-do list, and assign different tasks to different users

As far as the best project management software out there, our researchers favour ClickUp, which is a great pick for anyone unfamiliar with project management. In our research, comparing 11 platforms, ClickUp came out on top with a very healthy score of 4.6/5. Not only does it have a free tier, which can allow you to dip your toes into the water without committing to anything, but it also scored our best usability score (4.0/5).

When it comes to project management, there are a lot of plates you need to keep spinning, and a lot of things you’ll need to keep in mind. These include:

• Who does what (the various roles within the project)
• What are the deliverables (what are the phases, and the tasks within)
• What are the criteria (deadlines, budget, quality of the product)
• What are the priorities (what you must, should, could, and won’t do)
• What are the risks and dependencies (what can go wrong, and what needs to be completed before the next steps)

With this much to keep in mind, it’s reassuring to know that project management software can help with each and every one of these important aspects of a project. This page includes 13 templates, from GANTT charts to RACI charts, that can help you with everything from managing your deadlines to remembering who’s in charge of what, but here are our highlights:

There are dozens of project management platforms on the market, each with many of the template types we’ll discuss here. However, all of the templates on this page are what we’ve found to be the absolute best, as well as all being included on a free plan or trial, meaning you can try them out yourself.

Without further ado, let’s look at the best project management templates on the market.

1. Product Brief Templates

What Is a Product Brief Template?

This is the most basic template on this list – so much so that you possibly wouldn’t even need a project management software platform to make one. A product brief is basically a bird’s eye view of the project as a whole.

ClickUp, one of the leading project management platforms, describes a product brief as a “short formal document that describes your entire project. Created during project planning, it:

– Gives the project sponsor, team and key stakeholders a clear overview of the project scope and its deliverables
– Outlines what work will be done in the project (i.e., the project plan)
– Defines the project budget”

Like we said, you might not need a project management platform to make a product brief, but some brief templates (like ClickUp’s below) can help you understand what needs to be included. This can be more helpful than just staring at a blank page.

ClickUp’s Product Brief Template

Looking at ClickUp’s product brief template, it includes everything you’d want in a product brief. This includes things like the project’s context and objective, guidelines on how to define the success of the project, and design considerations.

It’s a very visually pleasing document, with the ability to tag individuals within the copy. It can also be heavily customised to suit your team and project’s needs, and can be exported as a PDF for external viewing.

2. Action Plan Templates

What Is an Action Plan Template?

While a product brief is a broad look at the project as a whole, an action plan is a step-by-step breakdown of how the project will go, and what the project will need to succeed. These can include:

• Tasks
• Deadlines
• Owners
• Milestones
• Resources needed

Much like a product brief, you wouldn’t explicitly require a project management software to create one of these, but it makes it a lot easier. For example, newcomers to project management might not realise how important tracking milestones will be, but if it’s mapped out beforehand, it can help manage some stress.

monday.com’s Action Plan Template

As is the case with a lot of monday.com’s offerings, this template is visually engaging, easy to use, and a great way of getting a quick visual representation of the coming weeks ahead.

Wrike’s Action Plan Template

Wrike’s action plan template isn’t too different from monday’s, but it is a lot less visually busy. Instead of listing every piece of pertinent information, it instead gives each task a very simple card that only lists the task, its progress, its due date, and a photo of the individual responsible for its completion. If you have a lot of tasks on the go, this might be a better option, as it would look a lot less cluttered if you had dozens of cards.

3. Creative Brief Templates

What Is a Creative Brief Template?

As the name might suggest, a creative brief is a tool specifically for the more creative pursuits, like marketing or advertising campaigns. A programming team likely wouldn’t need one of these.

In essence, a creative brief is like a product brief, but externally facing. For example, it will map out the kind of audiences you’re looking to hit, what you know about them, the profiles of your demographics, and an overall understanding of your stakeholders.

Miro’s Creative Brief Template

Shown below, Miro’s approach to a creative brief covers everything you’d want from a creative brief. It covers the basics that any brief would need to, like goals and due dates, but also looks at the core target audience and content format. This is a great template for projects that are slightly more subjective than a software launch.

4. GANTT Chart Templates

What Is a GANTT Chart Template?

GANTT charts are up there with the most popular and iconic features within project management software. Any decently sized project is going to have multiple steps and moving parts, and a GANTT chart is a great way of tracking these steps.

A GANTT chart is, in essence, a visual representations of many aspects of a project. These aspects include:

• Tasks and their owners
• Timelines and deadlines
• Dependencies
• Milestones
• Resources needed/used

Here are our top 7 favourite GANTT charts.

ClickUp’s GANTT Chart Template

As one of the leading project management platforms, ClickUp has a great GANTT chart within its many features. It comes in two forms, one being a standard, fully-featured Gantt chart, and the other being a simple, more watered-down chart that can help newer users get to grips with the concept.

As you can see from the screenshot below, the interface is very clean and easy to read, meaning you won’t have to waste time navigating to the information you need.

5. RACI Chart Templates

What Is a RACI Chart?

RACI stands for “responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed.” This chart is a basic way of understanding the responsibilities and hierarchy associated with a certain task or phase of the project.

Project management software will usually offer a RACI chart, and due to there only being four settings (one for each letter of RACI), they’re very easy to set up and read.

monday.com’s RACI Chart

As you can see in monday.com’s RACI chart below, you’ll be able to tell at a glance when it comes to who’s attached to what task. And with the colour-coded status, it’s easy to see what still needs to be done.

The one possible problem is that, at a glance, the RACI status is shown only by a photo, not by a name, so it might take a second or two to figure out who is designated to each responsibility.

Wrike’s RACI Chart

Wrike has its own version of the RACI chart. As you can see from this chart, it offers a bit more data at first glance, but that means it’s slightly harder to get specific pieces of information out when you’re in a rush. Still, it’s easy on the eyes and includes all the names of the individuals involved.

6. User Research Sessions Templates

What Is User Research?

If your project results in a product that is going to be used by multiple customers (like a software feature), then it can be hugely beneficial to constantly be checking in with the intended audience and seeing how they’re reacting to certain features and aspects of the project.

Project management software with user research templates will allow you to store all of these reactions and sort them based on positivity or the certain feedback given (like the amount of times a certain feature is praised or requested).

Asana’s User Research Sessions Template

Asana’s user research sessions template includes a lot of structure. You can set goals, like “can the user navigate the toolbar with ease,” and then track customer responses through their own quotes. These observations can be marked with tags like “will fix” and “positive feedback” in order to sort the important comments out from other noise.

Miro’s User Research Sessions Template

Miro’s user research sessions template allows various points and questions to be placed easily on a virtual whiteboard. This is a very free-flowing system, as the sticky notes that comprise the system can be placed anywhere, and don’t have to follow any kind of structure. This means it can be very customised by your team, but if you’re after a specific structure, Asana’s probably a better pick.

7. Tasks List Templates

What Is a Task List Template?

While an action plan includes everything relevant to a project, like budget, resources, and deadlines, a task list is a lot simpler and exactly what it sounds like – a list of tasks alongside who is allocated to each task and when it has to be done by.

While everyone involved in a project will find a resource like this to be useful, this is particularly useful for the workers themselves, who can use the task list to anticipate what is coming up in their pipeline, and plan accordingly.

monday.com’s Task Lists Template

As is usually the case with monday.com’s offerings, the layout and interface here is eye-catching and engaging. The colour-coding for overdue projects and task statuses is a great visual way of showing what’s left to be done, and as the task list fills with green, it’s a great boost to morale.

Notion’s Task Lists Template

Notion’s task list template takes the form of a Kanban board, which is essentially made up of columns that signify the stage that each task is in. A basic example of these columns would just be “To Do,” “In Progress,” and “Finished,” but users can add their own steps like “In Review” or whatever else suits their team’s workflow.

8. Roadmap Templates

What Is a Roadmap?

A roadmap is an overall view of the project, but instead of being a static object like a product brief or an action plan, a roadmap is fully interactive and allows you to mark your progress as the project goes on.

Unlike the action plan, there shouldn’t be too much information on a roadmap. The goal, the owner, the progress, and the deadline are the only real pieces of info you’ll be able to get from a roadmap, so it’s a great tool to quickly asses the status of a project as a whole.

ClickUp’s Roadmap Template

As you can see below, ClickUp’s roadmap includes the exact information you’d want pertaining to each task. For example, they’re sorted by “complete,” “in progress,” and “planned,” and even have priority flags and time estimates. You can see how checking this every morning would be a great way to get up to speed on a project.

monday.com’s Roadmap Template

monday.com’s roadmap is a bit simpler than ClickUp’s, but it still comes with all the information you’d want in a quick glance. Progress bars, statuses, owners, and even subtasks that make up larger tasks (for example, if you were painting a house’s interior, the subtasks would be made up of the various rooms that needed to be painted).

Project Management Templates : Should You Use Excel or a Project Management Software?

All of the resources and templates here could, in theory, be replicated on a spreadsheet or word document, but these systems are not made expressly for these purposes. For example, recreating a GANTT chart on a spreadsheet could work fine for a bit, but the second things need to be moved around, it could get a lot trickier than it needs to be.

To this end, it’s a lot better to use a project management platform that is dedicated to making these processes as smooth and usable as possible. Not to mention, you would need various separate sheets and documents to keep all of this in order, whereas it can be done in one spot within a project management platform.

As you may have been able to tell from the frequency at which they appeared in this article, our favourite project management platforms are monday.com and ClickUp. During our research, they received some of the highest scores in usability, reasonable pricing, the amount of features on offer, and customer satisfaction.

Read more about monday.com here.

Starting from £8 per user per month, and reaching a height of £17 per user per month, monday.com is a very affordable project management platform. But don’t let the low price fool you, it’s very good at what it does, with some of its standout perks being:

• An overall visually enticing and easy-to-use user interface
• Great collaboration features
• A very generous free tier

This isn’t all that’s on the table when it comes to monday.com, however. There’s plenty to discuss, rave about, and maybe even a bit of room for monday to improve. Let’s have an in-depth look at monday.com’s pricing, features, including templates for Gantt and Kanban charts, and anything else of note.

This review isn’t written in a vacuum, either. We have a team of independent researchers who spend weeks trialling and documenting the various features, prices, and aspects of monday.com, as well as its various competitors. This research is impartial, fact-based, and intended to make your choices easier.

monday.com Need-to-Knows

monday.com Pricing Plans

The table above offers you a broad summary of what each monday.com tier will offer you, but for a more granular look at each tier, read on! If you’d like to know our most recommended plan, however, we favour the Standard plan. For only £11 a month, you’ll get access to Gantt charts, a timeline view, integrations and automations, and guest access. We find this plan to be the most suitable for teams of almost any size.

monday.com Basic Tier

Outside of the free plan (discussed below), this is monday.com’s cheapest tier. Costing £8 per user per month (paid yearly), or £11 per user per month (paid monthly), it’s a very reasonable package. It’s worth mentioning, however, that you’ll need to enrol at least three team members into this plan, meaning it will cost you a minimum of £24 per month (yearly) or £33 per month (monthly).

It already allows for unlimited users, boards, and items, and offers 5GB in file storage. It also lets unlimited free viewers into the boards, allowing people to get a broader view of your project – people who you might not want to fully pay for.

As a paid tier, it also includes everything on the free plan, the highlights being 200+ templates, iOS and Android apps, and over 20 column types.

It’s a good start for a very small team, but users might find themselves brushing up against the admittedly low storage ceiling of 5GB. Still, for the low price, it’s absolutely worth trying out, and it’s a great entry point for someone toying with the idea of a pricier plan.

monday.com Standard Tier

monday’s middle tier, the Standard tier, costs £11 per user per month (if paid yearly), or £13 per user per month (if paid monthly). And once again, you’ll need to at least enrol three team members in this plan, meaning you’ll need to spend a minimum of £33 per month, or £39 per month if you pay monthly.

monday.com itself claims that this is the most popular tier on offer, and it’s not hard to see why. While other higher tiers may offer more features, this plan is definitely where the floodgates open. You’ll unlock Gantt, timeline, and calendar views, the ability to install integrations and automate tasks (250 per month for both integrations and automations), and allow guest access (up to four guests for the price of one member seat). The storage cap is also raised to 20GB.

This is the tier we’d recommend to most teams. There’s no team member limit, so any-sized team can make the most of it. The sheer variety of options that have been unlocked here is immense. Really, the only issue one might have is again to do with the file storage limit, though even reaching 20GB on a project management software platform would be a feat for a small team.

monday.com Pro Tier

monday’s highest priced tier is the Pro tier. Coming in at £17 per user per month (if paid annually) or £21 per user per month (if paid monthly), it’s not unfair to say this is a considerable investment, at least for smaller teams and businesses.

You can see how this is a “pro” tier, as it really facilitates larger teams and businesses. It offers private documents and boards, time tracking, a dashboard made up of up to 10 boards, and a massively increased amount of integrations and automations (25,000 per month each). The data cap is also raised to 100GB.

We’d really only recommend this for businesses with many projects on the go at one time. The price isn’t horrendous, but there’s no point opting for it if you wouldn’t benefit from the automations and capacity for more team hierarchy (within the private boards and documents). Still, it’s by no means a bad option, it’s just worth considering if you really need all the additional features.

monday.com Enterprise Tier

Sadly we can’t really offer you concrete pricing information here, as the Enterprise tier is monday’s bespoke option. What we can give you, however, is a list of features that are locked behind the Enterprise plan:

• 1,000 GB of storage
• 250,000 automation and integration actions per month
• Premium integrations
• Up to 50 boards
• A dedicated customer support agent
• A wide variety of administration and analytics features

Is monday.com Free?

monday.com does indeed have a free plan. It’s nothing earth-shattering, but it’s a great place for someone to start if they don’t have the money to commit to a paid plan, or if their team is very small. The free plan includes:

• Up to three project boards
• Unlimited documents
• 200+ board templates
• Up to 5 users
• Over 20 column types
• iOS and Android apps

It also generously includes the paid tiers’ 24/7 customer support, despite being entirely free. And, as is almost industry standard by now, it includes two-factor authentication.

If you’re looking for a great free plan, we have a list of the best project management free plans here, where you can decide which suits your team the best. While free plans are typically quite restrictive, they can be a great way to get to grips with both the individual project management software providers, and the systems of project management as a whole.

What Is monday.com?

monday.com is a project management software – one of the best on the market. A lot of times, when businesses or teams have longterm projects, they can go over budget and past deadlines, especially if they don’t have any structure and mainly involve individual members doing their own thing without much communication.

Project management platforms like monday.com (or its competitors, like ClickUp) allow project managers or project leads to establish a system and order to the various tasks necessary to finish the project. By doing this, they can stay on top of the budget, deadlines, and their team through use of various project management tools.

Above is a Gantt chart from monday.com. This demonstrates how a project with dependencies would work through monday.com. As you can see from the layout and structure of the chart, the goals, requirements, and timeline of the project are easy to assess and establish from just a 10-second glance at this chart.

This is a RAID chart made on monday.com. RAID charts are how businesses and teams establish and track risks, assumptions, issues, and dependencies. Having all of these in one place is a useful way to get a bird’s eye view of not just where the project has been, but where it may be headed.

What Is monday.com Good for?

So we’ve ranted on about how great monday.com is, but can we back it up beyond the features and low pricing? Let’s have a look at how good monday.com is for specific uses.

Is monday.com Good for Ease of Use?

Absolutely. In our research, only Smartsheet scored a better usability rating (4.3) than monday.com (4.1), and that is largely because Smartsheet is heavily based on spreadsheets users will be used to (like Excel or Google Sheets). monday.com is a very smooth, accessible, and easy-to-read platform that even newcomers will be comfortable tinkering with.

Is monday.com Good for Features?

monday.com scored a 4.2/5 when it comes to their features, which is the highest score out of any of the project management platforms we looked at. It comes packed with loads of features – the best of which include preset charts and widgets, preset and custom templates and automation, task dependencies, and Kanban and Gantt charts.

monday’s biggest perks come from its collaboration features. At its best, monday can offer you resource management, a calendar, task comments, an online whiteboard, and document editing.

Is monday.com Good for Customer Support?

Unfortunately, despite how easy monday is to actually use, if you do encounter a problem with it, you won’t find much support. There’s a knowledge base, daily live webinars, and 24/7 support, all of which are available to every tier (even the free tier), but it doesn’t include phone or live chat – just an email system.

Is monday.com Good for Integrations?

monday.com has a great selection of integrations. The only finance integration you can apply is Stripe, but there are loads of CRM, marketing, and communication integrations on offer, all of which are listed here.

What Do monday.com Users Think?

monday has a phenomenal user score, coming in at 4.5/5. People absolutely live and breathe monday, with 77% of their 2,935 reviews on Trustpilot being five star reviews. Almost every aspect of monday is discussed positively in some light, but the usability and features are both some of the most popular talking points.

What Is monday.com Good for? Verdict

Outside of the somewhat meagre customer service offerings, monday.com is a good project management platform by almost every measure. Great features, usability, and integrations, and almost unanimous acclaim – monday.com definitely earns its spot as one of the more respected platforms on the market.

How to Use monday.com for Project Management

The brand of monday.com is oftentimes connected to the CRM industry, but don’t let that dissuade you – it’s a fully functional project management platform, and one of the best on the market to boot. By use of various tools and features, project managers and teams can ensure that their project is on schedule, within budget, and delivered satisfactorily.

The main problem encountered by many teams when trying to manage a larger scale project is that of communication. Without a central hub in which they can communicate, teams can often fall apart, and tasks that depend on each other can get lost in the shuffle. However, with project management software like monday.com, users can use the project dashboard to update the team or ask questions to relevant individuals.

This would be achievable with a standard shared spreadsheet, but a project management software makes it a lot easier to parse and understand. monday.com specifically offers a lot of colour coordination, and its easy drag-and-drop features allow for smooth usage. Spreadsheets are used for hundreds of things, but project management software is specifically made to manage projects.

And this accessibility stretches to every aspect of monday.com. monday.com offers RACI charts, Gantt charts, Kanban boards, and other hugely useful tools with which someone can manage a project.

Is monday.com Secure?

Even on its lowest paid tier (and the free tier), monday.com includes both SOC 2 Type II Compliance (which is a certification issued by cyber-security auditors), and two-factor authentication, which verifies sign-ins through the user’s personal phone.

Once you get to the Pro tier, the security options are bolstered by private documents and boards (so that users without clearance can’t see certain aspects of the project), as well as Google authentication.

Finally, the Enterprise tier offers HIPAA compliance, IP restrictions, a content directory, and integration permissions.

How Does monday.com Pricing Compare with Other Project Management Software?

To put it simply, monday.com has a great pricing structure – one of the best on the market. Firstly, monday.com has gone to the effort to supply a unique pricing in GBP, not just USD, like ClickUp and Wrike. If that didn’t disqualify them entirely from the pricing discussion, the fact that they’re more expensive than monday definitely should.

Smartsheet offers a lower starting price, but also a substantially lower amount of features as well, as it’s primarily focused on just being a spreadsheet. Where monday has a 4.2/5 in features, Smartsheet has a 3.8/5. Teamwork and Favro are also both more expensive and offer fewer features out the gate, both scoring a 3.2/5 for their features.

The only two real competitor’s for monday.com’s throne are Jira and Zoho Projects. Jira seems to be a cheaper option, but their paid tier demands at least 10 users, meaning it’s really a minimum of $50 (and again, this is in USD, which can be tricky to manage).

So it just comes down to Zoho Projects and monday.com, both of which are very affordable pieces of software. However, monday once again trumps its competitor by offering a far better array of features (monday scoring a 4.2/5 while Zoho Projects scored a 3.2/5). And when you couple that with its interface (Monday’s usability score is 4.1/5, while Zoho Projects score a 3.4/5), monday.com is just a nicer product overall.

If you’d like to see our overall comparison of monday and ten of its competitors, check out our article of the 11 Best Project Management Software.

How Did We Research monday.com?

Our team of independent researchers looked at a selection of the 14 best and most popular project management software. After finding all the information we need, the researchers then compare each software against its competitors, allowing us to find the cream of the crop. The criteria we look at include:

• Price: Simple enough – the platform with the lowest price tag scores the best
• Features: Again, fairly easy to assess. Whichever platforms offer the best variety of features are given a better placement than those that have a more skint collection of tools.
• Usability: Our researchers have a collection of tasks they need to accomplish. The ease and time through which they can accomplish these tasks is tallied up in order to see which platform is the most usable.
• Customer Support: Again, easy enough – look at the options available and see how monday.com compares against its competitors when it comes to customer support options
• Customer Score: After looking across various review aggregate sites (eg. Trustpilot), our researchers compile a general customer score, summarizing the overall satisfaction of the public

After factoring in all this information, alongside the scores they received, we were able to calculate a final overall score for each project management platform. monday.com tied for first (alongside ClickUp and Smartsheet) with a stellar score of 4.6/5.