Here’s a good rule: any time you find yourself copying a document to reuse over and over again or find yourself filling out blanks in a document, it’s time you can save with automation. Zapier lets you automatically fill out Google Docs templates based on triggers from other apps.

My team at Slack used Google Docs to prepare all our art briefs for our blog. They were designed to be seen and used by dozens of people, and creating a new one was a five-to-ten-minute process—which added up when we did it a dozen times a week. That process now takes the team about a minute. Here’s how we did it with Zapier.

Step 1: Design your Google Docs template and create a Google Form to build it

The best place to begin is at the end—figure out what you want your final document to look like, and then build a template based on it. Use images, formatting, and whatever else needed to make it scannable and useful for everyone that uses it.

Next, create a new questionnaire with a field for each blank you need filled in the final document, using Google Forms. Give each question a descriptive title you can use later in the results. Each title needs to be one word or multiple words separated by a character (like Writer_Name).

Be sure to put instructions in your form that blank fields will require an answer (like N/A or none) and set every field to required.

Go into your new Google Form’s Settings, and set Collect email addresses to Verified. You’ll use this later to alert users when the finished product is ready.

Preview your Google Form, and fill it out with sample data to capture your first submission. You’ll use your sample data from the Google Form to properly set up this Zap.

Step 2: Create a Zap to trigger when new rows are added to your Google Sheets results

Create a new Zap from scratch. Select Google Forms as your app and New Form Response as the event. Then, connect your Google Forms account and select the form you just built by name.

Run a test to make sure Zapier can find your sample form responses, and then it’s Google Docs time.

Step 3: Create a Google Docs template and wire it up in Zapier

Make a copy of the Google Doc you designed in the first step. Give this template doc a descriptive title you can easily find in Zapier.

Wherever you’d like the answers from your original Google Form to appear in this Google Doc, type each question’s title in the doc surrounded by curly brackets (two on each side of the title). These will be replaced with real data in the next step.

Go to Zapier and add another step to your Zap. Select Create Document from Template in Google Docs.

Then, fill out your Google account details just like the previous section. Choose the template you just built as the Template Document.

Customize your new document by giving it a New Document Name (use the title from your first question in the form), and change your Sharing Preference to something fairly open so others outside your organization don’t need to request access to read it. Then you’ll need to match each template field found in the doc with a field from your Google Form. It’s a little tedious if your form has lots of questions, but you only need to set this up once.

Run a test to make sure everything looks good. We’re almost done!

The last step is to let someone know whenever they submit your form that their new Google Doc is ready, which you can do in a variety of ways (email, Slack, etc.).

Step 4: Notify the user that submitted the form by DM in Slack

When we generate a new Google Doc from our template, we need to let the person who filled out the form know it’s ready, and for that we’ll use Slack.

Add another step to your Zap to Find User by Email in Slack. This works if your Google email login matches the email you use in Slack (something a lot of companies automate with Google Apps and Slack SSO).

Go through the next step to associate your Slack workspace with your account. Then, in the Action step, find the email column in your Google Form that was saved automatically upon form submission (using the Collect email addresses option).

Test it all out and proceed when it’s working.

Add a fourth step to your Zap to Send a Direct Message in Slack.

Next, customize the To Username field so it sends the message to the username found in the previous email-lookup step, then add the title from the Google Doc template and a link to view it in the Message Text. Customize any other aspects of the DM as you wish, then test it out to make sure it all works.

You’re done!

If everything is working, any time someone fills out answers in your newly created Google Form, moments later they’ll get a DM in Slack with a link to their Google document pre-filled out from their form responses. From there, they can share it out wherever needed.

The doc linked in the DM will contain all the formatting and display settings you used in your template. It will be automatically viewable and readable by anyone with the URL, so it can be passed along to anyone who needs it—in Slack’s case, that included art directors, illustrators, or contract artists.

Customize this Zap for your use case

This Zap can be easily modified to send the completed template into a Slack channel instead of a DM. Or you could add another step that adds it to a new Asana task or another project management tool as a supporting document for project managers to follow.

However you use them, automating templates can help you replace repetitive processes in your company with something faster and easier.

Read more:

This article was originally published in April 2020 and was most recently updated in April 2024.

Llama 3 is Meta’s latest family of open source large language models (LLM). It’s basically the Facebook parent company’s response to OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini—but with one key difference: it’s freely available for almost anyone to use for research and commercial purposes. 

That’s a pretty big deal, and over the past year, Llama 2, the previous model family, has become a staple of open source AI developments. Llama 3 continues that promise. Let me explain. 

What is Llama 3?

Llama 3 is a family of LLMs like GPT-4 and Google Gemini. It’s the successor to Llama 2, Meta’s previous generation of AI models. While there are some technical differences between Llama and other LLMs, you would really need to be deep into AI for them to mean much. All these LLMs were developed and work in essentially the exact same way; they all use the same transformer architecture and development ideas like pretraining and fine-tuning.

When you enter a text prompt or provide Llama 3 with text input in some other way, it attempts to predict the most plausible follow-on text using its neural network—a cascading algorithm with billions of variables (called “parameters”) that’s modeled after the human brain. By assigning different weights to all the different parameters, and throwing in a small bit of randomness, Llama 3 can generate incredibly human-like responses. 

Meta has released four versions of Llama 3 so far:

• Llama 3 8B

• Llama 3 8B-Instruct

• Llama 3 70B

• Llama 3 70B-Instruct

The 8B models have 8 billion parameters, while the two 70B models have 70 billion parameters. Both instruct models were fine-tuned to better follow human directions, so they’re more suited to use as a chatbot than the raw Llama models. 

Meta is training a 400 billion parameter version of Llama 3 (and presumably a 400 billion parameter instruct version, too) that it hopes to make available later this year. Given the size and complexity of the model, though, it just isn’t ready yet.

Like the latest models from OpenAI and Google, Meta is also developing a multimodal version of Llama 3. This will allow it to work with other modalities, like images, handwritten text, video footage, and audio clips. It’s not available yet but should be released in the coming months. Similarly, Meta is training multilingual versions of Llama 3, but they aren’t available yet.

How to try Llama 3

Meta AI, the AI assistant built into Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp, now uses Llama 3. You can also check it out using a newly released dedicated web app.

If you aren’t in one of the handful of countries where Meta has launched Meta AI, you can demo the 70B-Instruct model using HuggingChat, AI repository HuggingSpace’s example chatbot.

How does Llama 3 work?

To create its neural network, Llama 3 was trained with over 15 trillion “tokens”—the overall dataset was seven times larger than that used to train Llama 2. Some of the data comes from publicly available sources like Common Crawl (an archive of billions of webpages), Wikipedia, and public domain books from Project Gutenberg, while some of it was also reportedly generated by AI. (None of it is Meta user data.)

Each token is a word or semantic fragment that allows the model to assign meaning to text and plausibly predict follow-on text. If the words “Apple” and “iPhone” consistently appear together, it’s able to understand that the two concepts are related—and are distinct from “apple,” “banana,” and “fruit.” According to Meta, Llama 3’s tokenizer has a larger vocabulary than Llama 2’s, so it’s significantly more efficient.

Of course, training an AI model on the open internet is a recipe for racism and other horrendous content, so the developers also employed other training strategies, including reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF), to optimize the model for safe and helpful responses. With RLHF, human testers rank different responses from the AI model to steer it toward generating more appropriate outputs. The instruct versions were also fine-tuned with specific data to make them better at responding to human instructions in a natural way.

Meta has also developed Llama Guard and Llamma Code Shield, two safety models designed to prevent Llama 3 from running harmful prompts or generating insecure computer code.

But all these Llama models are just intended to be a base for developers to build from. If you want to create an LLM to generate article summaries in your company’s particular brand style or voice, you can train Llama 3 with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of examples and create one that does just that. Similarly, you can further fine-tune one of the instruct models to respond to your customer support requests by providing it with your FAQs and other relevant information like chat logs. Or you can just take Llama 3 and retrain it to create your own completely independent LLM.

Llama vs. GPT, Gemini, and other AI models: How do they compare?

In the blog post announcing Llama 3 (the research paper is still forthcoming), Meta’s researchers compare the 8B and 70B Instruct models’ performance on various benchmarks (like the multi-task language understanding and ARC-challenge common sense logic test) to a handful of equivalent open source and closed source models. The 8B model is compared to Mistral 7B and Gemma 7B, while the 70B model is compared to Gemini Pro 1.0 and Mixtral 8x22B. In what can only be called cherry-picked examples, the Llama 3 models are all the top performers.

In a head-to-head human evaluation challenge, Llama 3 70B-Instruct apparently compares favorably to Claude Sonnet, GPT-3.5, and Mistral Medium.

While Meta doesn’t compare Llama to the current state-of-the-art models, like GPT-4, Claude Opus, and Gemini 2, the company presumably is waiting until its 400B model is ready for prime time. 

In my testing, I found Llama 3 was a big step up from Llama 2. I couldn’t get it to “hallucinate” or just make things up anywhere near as easily. While it isn’t yet replacing ChatGPT, Meta probably isn’t wrong to call it “the most capable openly available LLM to date.”

Why Llama matters

Most of the LLMs you’ve heard of—OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT 4, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude—are all proprietary and closed source. Researchers and businesses can use the official APIs to access them and even fine-tune versions of their models so they give tailored responses, but they can’t really get their hands dirty or understand what’s going on inside.

With Llama 3, though, you can download the model right now, and as long as you have the technical chops, get it running on your computer or even dig into its code. (Though be warned: even small LLMs are measured in GBs.) Meta also plans to publish a full research paper detailing how all three models were trained once the 400B model is ready, and there’s plenty of interesting information about what the Meta AI team is doing in the blog post…if you’re the kind of person who finds these things interesting.

And much more usefully, you can also get it running on Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and other cloud infrastructures through platforms like Hugging Face, where you can train it on your own data to generate the kind of text you need. Just be sure to check out Meta’s guide to responsibly using Llama.

By continuing to be so open with Llama, Meta is making it significantly easier for other companies to develop AI-powered applications that they have more control over—as long as they stick to the acceptable use policy. The only big limits to the license are that companies with more than 700 million monthly users have to ask for special permission to use Llama, so the likes of Apple, Google, and Amazon have to develop their own LLMs.

And really, that’s quite exciting. So many of the big developments in computing over the past 70 years have been built on top of open research and experimentation, and now AI looks set to be one of them. While Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are always going to be players in the space, they won’t be able to build the kind of commercial moat or consumer lock-in that Google has in search and advertising. 

By letting Llama out into the world, there will likely always be a credible alternative to closed source AIs.

Related reading:

This article was originally published in August 2023. The most recent update was in April 2024.

Scheduling apps are awesome. You don’t have to worry about the back-and-forth emails or phone calls to set a meeting time… And you feel like a genius!

Then you realize you didn’t share the call information. In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to use Zapier to automatically add Zoom information to your Calendly invites. So you can keep being a genius.

How to create Zoom meetings for new Calendly events

Zapier lets you create automated workflows called Zaps, which send your information from one app to another. You can create your own Zap from scratch without any coding knowledge, but we also offer quick templates to get you started. 

If you’d like to start with a template, click on it to go to the Zap editor. You’ll need to create a Zapier account if you don’t already have one. Then, follow the directions below to set up your Zap.

Set up your Calendly trigger

First, set up your trigger—the event that starts your Zap. If you’re using the Zap template, the trigger app and event will already be selected for you. Otherwise, search for and select Calendly as the trigger app and Invitee Created as the trigger event. Click Continue.

Next, connect your Calendly account, if you haven’t already, then click Continue. 

Now, it’s time to customize your trigger. In the Webhook subscription scope field, select User. Calendly also has an Organization subscription scope field, but that only applies if you’re an admin or an organization owner for a Calendly account. As an individual user, the User setting will work best.

Then, click Continue. 

Next, test your trigger step. You’ll need at least one Calendly appointment in your account—this will be used to set up the rest of your Zap. If you don’t have any appointments, add one now.

Then, click Test trigger. Zapier will pull in the most recent Calendly appointments. Choose one of the appointments for this test, then click Continue with selected record.

Set up your Zoom action

Now it’s time to set up the action—the event your Zap will perform once it’s triggered. If you’re using the Zap template, these will already be selected for you. Otherwise, search for and select Zoom as your action app and Create Meeting as your action event. Click Continue.

Next, connect your Zoom account, if you haven’t already, then click Continue.

Now, it’s time to customize your Zoom action. 

First, select Meeting in the Meeting Type field. In the Topic field, select Event Type Name from the data dropdown. In the When field, select Scheduled Event Start Time.

In the Time Zone field, select your local time zone. Zoom requires a password, so add one to the Password field. We suggest using something easy that’s related to your meeting.

Finally, select Event Type Duration in the Duration field to automatically pull in the duration of the Zoom meeting from your Calendly appointment. 

When you’re happy with the setup, click Continue.

Next, click Test step to send a test meeting to Zoom. Zapier will create a new meeting for you.

To see if it worked well, open the Zoom app, and go to the Meetings tab. You should see a new meeting added to the sidebar. Open it to check if all the details are right. 

Here’s what our Zoom meeting looked like.

If everything looks right, you’re now ready to use your Zap. Now, any time you schedule a new Calendly appointment, it will automatically show up in your Zoom account, just like that!

Want to do more with your workflow? Add an additional step to your Zap to share the Zoom link. That way, you can make sure everyone can easily join your next meeting.

Or add a step in the middle to update your CRM at the same time:

This article was originally published in July 2019. It was most recently updated in April 2024.

You know you need software to help up your digital marketing game, but with thousands of apps out there promising to take your marketing strategy to the next level, how do you know which ones are right for you?

Here’s a comprehensive list of over 40 of the best digital marketing tools across various categories, along with their strengths and weaknesses, to help you build your digital marketing toolkit. 

Keep scrolling to learn more about the top digital marketing tools, or click on a category to jump ahead. 

The best digital marketing tools 

What are digital marketing tools? 

Digital marketing tools are apps that help you attract, engage, sell, and retain business online. You’ve likely heard the term thrown around a lot, and that’s because it can include apps in any category related to marketing—from social media to advertising to content optimization. You get the idea. It’s a broad-reaching term. 

Whether you’re starting your first business or you’re looking to scale an existing one, you likely need a collection of digital marketing tools—a digital marketing tech stack—to help you succeed. 

How to find the best tool for digital marketing

There’s no “best” digital marketing tool. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all starter pack. The best tool for digital marketing depends on various factors like budget, team size, and experience level. 

So instead of purporting to have the list to rule them all, my goal here is to help you find the best tools for your unique needs. I’ll suggest apps across various categories you’re likely considering—and maybe some you didn’t even know you needed. And if the suggested apps don’t check all the boxes for you, you’ll also find useful links to the best apps for each of the categories, so you can explore other promising options. 

How do we know these apps deserve to be on this list? The Zapier team and I have spent thousands of combined hours testing countless digital marketing platforms for our best apps lists, and these are the ones that came out on top.

The best digital marketing tools at a glance

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The best digital marketing tools to create website and social media graphics

Eye-catching visuals can make or break your company’s digital presence and branding. The good news is you don’t have to hire a designer or break the bank to get these scroll-stopping graphics. Here are the best tools to help you create high-quality visuals that will capture your target audience.

Unsplash for free stock photos

With over three million photos to choose from, Unsplash offers the most robust library of high-quality images across a wide range of categories, including Business & Work, Travel, and People. Unlike other free stock photo sites, Unsplash also allows you to curate photos you come across into personal collections—like “Festive” and “Mental health”—to use in future campaigns or projects. 

Unsplash also comes with an iOS app, so you can find and download images on the go. And its API is integrated into tools like Figma, WordPress, and Squarespace, which makes it easy to find stock photos without leaving your favorite platforms. 

Unsplash pricing: Free

Canva for template-based designs 

Let’s say you need to add simple text overlays to stock photos. Or perhaps you want to edit your own photos to be shared across different social media platforms. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, Canva makes this easy to do—even if you have zero background in design. 

Canva also offers pre-made design templates for every asset you could possibly need, including Instagram Reels, YouTube thumbnails, and presentations. This way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every design. And for an even faster workflow, take advantage of Canva AI—their AI-powered tools allow you to do things like generate and edit images using only text prompts.

Canva pricing: Free for limited access to most of the features you need, including design templates, stock photos, and AI-powered design tools; $10/month (billed annually) for Canva Pro, which offers unlimited access to more design templates, stock photos, and AI tools. 

DALL·E 3 for an easy-to-use AI image generator 

DALL·E 3—the latest version of OpenAI’s AI image generator—has a lot going for it. But what makes it stand out is that it’s ridiculously simple to use, especially now that it’s integrated with ChatGPT. Enter your prompt (what you want DALL·E to create), click Generate, and within a few seconds, you’ll have two AI-generated images to choose from. You can use DALL·E to create app mockups, ideate physical products, generate custom art pieces—the list goes on. You can even make light edits using natural language prompts.

And if you connect DALL·E to Zapier, you can automate your AI image generation to create images straight from the other apps you use most. Learn more about how to automate art inspiration with DALL·E and Zapier, or get started with one of these workflows.

DALL·E pricing: DALL·E 3 is included as part of ChatGPT Plus at $20/month and available for free through Microsoft Copilot

Read more:  How to automate AI image generation

The best digital marketing tools for editing photos 

While AI image generators are fun to play with, more often than not, what you really need is an app to make your photos shine. Here are the best digital marketing tools for manually editing photos or with an assist from AI. 

Adobe Photoshop for a powerful photo editing and design app

When it comes to image-editing tools, Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for a reason: it’s the most powerful full-featured image-editing and design app around—and that extends to its AI features.

Photoshop includes the advanced tools professional designers need, like layers, masking, blending modes, and RAW support. In terms of what photo editing tasks Photoshop can’t do…that’s still to be seen. To take the app’s capabilities even further, you can integrate it with a wealth of third-party plug-ins and extensions. The only downside? There’s a steep learning curve. 

You can also use Adobe Photoshop in tandem with Lightroom—another Adobe image editor that’s geared more toward managing and processing photos. Lightroom also integrates with Zapier, so you can automate your photo editing workflows. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Adobe Photoshop pricing: From $19.99/month for the Photography Plan, which includes Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. 

Pixlr E and X for an easy-to-use AI editor 

To clarify, Pixlr E and Pixlr X are two different apps: Pixlr E is the “advanced editor,” while Pixlr X is the beginner-friendly option. But honestly, both apps are easy to use. 

Pixlr E (pictured above) is a convincing replica of the industry leader, Photoshop. From tool selection to layers and even features like blending modes and opacity settings, every Pixlr E feature works just like you’d expect it to in Photoshop. Pixlr X is the equivalent of Adobe Express—it’s a great alternative for power users and graphic newbies alike to perform quick and easy edits. 

Both Pixlr E and X are featured here because of how they save you time when used together. For example, since Pixlr saves projects in a combined library, you can pop a photo into Pixlr X for a quick retouch, then switch back to Pixlr E for more advanced editing. 

Pixlr pricing: Free for limited AI use and 3 image saves per day; from $1.99/month for Plus, with 80 monthly AI credits, unlimited saves, and no ads.

The best digital marketing tools for social media management 

Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use to find new clients, drive traffic to your website, and engage with customers. But doing all of this is next to impossible using regular consumer apps. To do it effectively, you need a social media management app. Here are the best social media management tools that allow you to automate, analyze, and manage your social media presence all in one place. 

Buffer for tailoring posts to each channel

When you have to be on multiple channels and want to tailor your posts to all of them, Buffer is the tool for the job.

When you create a new post, the AI Assistant detects which social media channel you’re writing for and adapts the output accordingly. After it generates the first option, you can cycle through more, ask to rewrite, or use the expand/shorten options as needed. 

The AI assistant is impressive, but the rest of the supporting cast is also strong. You can run multichannel campaigns—they work like email marketing drip campaigns—so you can reach the perfect balance between recurring and fresh content.

And now that you’re turning each idea into 10 tailor-made posts, you’ll want to connect Buffer to Zapier, so you can move data and trigger automations while you sleep. Learn how to automate Buffer with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Buffer pricing: Free plan includes 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, and 100 ideas; $5/month/channel (billed annually) for the Essentials plan, which includes 2,000 scheduled posts, engagement tools, detailed analytics, and storage for 2,000 ideas.

FeedHive for content recycling and conditional posting 

It’s not a crime to repurpose content. Quite the opposite. As your follower count grows, your new audience deserves to get the full picture of what you stand for, and your long-time fans could use a refresher.

FeedHive is a great tool for this. It uses AI to take posts you already published and reuse them in a new post for the same or different channel. It also leverages AI to help you fine-tune your posts for maximum engagement. 

You can also create post categories in FeedHive, allowing you to build a system out of your content schedule. For example, if you post how-tos on Monday, inspirational content on Wednesday, and a short-form video on Friday, you can lock in these categories on a weekly calendar. After that, you can create posts and assign them to these categories. They’ll be queued and will go out at the right time, in the right slot.

FeedHive pricing: Creator plan starts at $19/month for 4 social accounts with AI Writing Assistant included. AI hashtag suggestions and AI performance prediction available only on higher paid plans.

Read more: How to create social media posts with AI for free

The best digital marketing tools for making presentations 

Creating polished presentations is a tedious and time-consuming task—and that’s after you’ve outlined your slides. If you’re delivering a basic presentation, the classics like Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides will do the trick. But if you want to quickly create professional-looking slideshows that actually keep your audiences engaged, here are the best apps for making presentations. 

Gamma for generative AI features 

With Gamma, you can leverage the power of AI to generate a fully fleshed-out deck in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document—pick a presentation theme, and watch as your slides come to life. 

The results will likely need some fine-tuning—Gamma’s much more geared toward the iterative chatbot experience (à la ChatGPT)—but it still provides a useful jumping-off point. Gamma also offers a couple of practical features that help you keep your audience focused on the topic at hand: 

• Content blocks: group your content into collapsible blocks directly on your slide, expanding them only when you’re ready to present. 

• Spotlight: highlight one talking point at a time, while Gamma automatically fades out the rest. 

Gamma pricing: Free Starter plan includes unlimited users, 400 AI deck credits, and basic analytics; $8/user/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan that includes unlimited AI credits up to 15 cards and no “Made with Gamma” badge.

Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design

If you need help making your data and ideas look as good as they should, then Beautiful.ai is for you. As the name suggests, Beautiful.ai uses AI to automatically modify your presentations—from layouts to alignment to granular spacing issues. Need to edit your slides further? The platform is a little different from most presentation software, but it’s still intuitive to use. For example, to resize an image, simply drag a handle to make it bigger or smaller. 

And if you use Google Drive, you can connect it with Beautiful.ai to quickly save all your presentations in your go-to cloud storage app, making it more convenient for sharing and team collaboration.  

Beautiful.ai pricing: $12/month (billed annually) for the Pro plan that includes unlimited slides, AI content generation, and PowerPoint import/export; $40/user/month for the Team plan that includes extra collaboration and workspace features, like a shared asset library, and custom brand controls.

The best digital marketing tools for webinar hosting 

Webinars are a great way to increase your brand awareness, move leads through the sales funnel, and amplify your brand’s authority. But there’s more to hosting a webinar than simply creating compelling content—you also need to invite and manage attendees, interact with your audience, and actually run the webinar. This is where webinar software comes in. Here are the best webinar hosting platforms to help you streamline and automate all the logistics related to running a successful webinar. 

Zoom for a familiar user experience 

Chances are you’re already familiar with Zoom for video conferencing. But the same features that make it great for connecting with your teammates also make it ideal for hosting webinars, especially if you’re presenting a lot of videos or featuring multiple panelists. 

Since Zoom is such a popular tool, it’s safe to assume that everyone already has it installed on their computer and configured to work. This means that joining your webinar is as simple as clicking a link. 

Once your webinar’s live, Zoom offers additional features to create a dynamic webinar, including side-by-side views and engagement-boosting tools like Q&A, polling, and reactions. You can even connect Zoom with Facebook and YouTube, so you can extend your reach, or connect Zoom to Zapier to automate your webinar workflows. Learn more about how to automate Zoom, or get started with one of these premade templates.

Zoom Webinars pricing: Starts at $79/month (or $690/year), which includes up to 500 attendees and limited event analytics and reporting.

Livestorm for managing multiple webinars 

If you host webinars on a regular basis, you need an app that automatically tracks your event schedule, so you don’t have to. Enter: Livestorm. In addition to webinar schedule management and an easy-to-use interface, Livestorm comes fully loaded with all the features you need to host a webinar and keep your audience coming back for more: 

• Customizable registration forms that you can send via email, share via link, or embed right on your website. 

• Pre-built, automated email flows for every event, which you can edit or send as is. 

• Custom calls to action that can be pushed live any time during the event.

Livestorm also offers in-depth event analytics, so you can fine-tune your webinar based on what’s working for your audience—and what’s not. 

You can also connect Livestorm with the other apps in your stack via Zapier. With the Livestorm and Zapier integration, you can automate new registrant notifications and changes to your CRM data.

Livestorm pricing: Free plan includes up to 20-minute sessions and 30 live attendees per event; Pro plan starts at $79/month (billed annually), which includes up to 4 hours per session, 100 live attendees per event, and HubSpot integration. 

Read more: Automate your webinar marketing

The best digital marketing tools for video creation and hosting 

As social media platforms increasingly favor videos over still images, successful businesses need to jump on the video train if they want to get in front of their customers. While adding another medium (and all its related efforts) sounds daunting, AI video generators and video hosting platforms can help you streamline the process. Here are the best tools for the job. 

Peech for an intuitive workflow  

When it comes to content, it’s no longer enough to CO;TD (create once, tailor distribution). Peech speeds up the work of tweaking one asset to fit every channel’s technical specs and target audience.  

For example, you can highlight specific lines of a webinar transcript, and Peech’s built-in AI tools (available only on paid plans) will automatically transform them into videos with subtitles and sized to platform-specific ratios, ready to be published.

Peech pricing: Free plan includes 2 downloads and 3 video uploads per month with a Peech watermark; Creator plan for $89/seat/month (billed annually) gets you 10 uploads and downloads per month with a Peech watermark and a limited set of AI features.

Read more: How to automate your video post-production tasks

Wistia for marketing-rich features

If your primary objective for sharing videos is to generate leads and optimize your ROI, Wistia is the app for you. With Wistia, you can gate your content and use the app’s Turnstile email collector to prompt viewers to enter their email address, so they can access your video. Once a viewer enters their information, they’re automatically added to your email list using Wistia’s email integrations, including email marketing software like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp. 

If you don’t want to gate your content, Wistia offers other powerful video marketing features, including annotation links, end-of-video CTAs, and detailed video stats. And you can connect Wistia to Zapier to automate your video hosting workflows. Here are a few premade templates to get you started. 

Wistia pricing: Free plan includes ten 15-minute videos with Wistia branding, basic video analytics, and Zoom and social media integrations; $19/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan that includes 20 30-minute videos with no Wistia branding, basic CTAs, and email integrations.

YouTube for free video hosting and its existing viewership 

If you want to increase your reach, YouTube is your best bet. Thanks to the platform’s popularity and built-in audience of over 120 million active daily users already interested in video content, all you need to do is optimize your videos for search—or encourage fans to “smash that Like and Subscribe button”—and you may be able to build a native audience.

Of course, you still have the option to add the videos to your website with a simple embed code—but note that every YouTube video embedded on an external website looks like a YouTube video.

When you connect YouTube with Zapier, you can automatically handle the manual tasks that otherwise make channel-building a chore. Learn more about how to automate YouTube, or get started with one of these workflows. 

YouTube pricing: Free for uploading and hosting videos.

The best digital marketing tools for building websites 

If you want to increase your brand’s visibility, you need a website. While building a website these days isn’t particularly difficult, it’s still time-consuming. That’s where website builders come in. Here’s the best free website builder you can use to build your website. 

Wix for an all-around site builder

If you need to build a website to do things like sell products, take bookings, or run a blog, Wix is a solid choice. And since you can access a lot of the necessary features on a free plan, it’s a budget-friendly option. 

You can create a website from scratch, choose from over 800 design templates, or use Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to create a site, complete with AI-generated writing and visuals. These powerful AI features are also why Wix tops our list for the best AI website builders. From there, customizing your site is intuitive with Wix’s drag-and-drop editor. Wix also offers detailed SEO features to help you rank on search. While it won’t replace hiring an SEO expert, it’s a good leg up.

As an added bonus, Wix integrates with Zapier, which means you can automatically send form submissions wherever you need them. Learn more about how to automate Wix, or use one of these pre-made templates to get you started.

Wix pricing: Free plan includes .wixsite.com domain, and basic features; $17/month (billed annually) for the Light plan, which includes no Wix branding, a custom domain, and a light marketing

The many horror stories I’ve heard over the years about running or being in a construction business are more than enough to convince me that I’m not built for that kind of work. They also make it very obvious why professionals in this field are in dire need of well-made construction management software.

The headaches of supply pipelines, project tracking, file sharing, customer management, and budgeting can be too much to handle, even for a small construction firm. And that’s what construction management software does: it provides you with the tools you need to carry your construction projects from start to finish.

Seeing as I’m not an expert in this field, I did some thorough research, spoke to the masses in the field, and did my fair share of Reddit diving to give you a list of the best construction management software as experienced by actual users.

The best construction management software platforms

What makes the best construction management software?

Construction management software can vary from compact solutions to comprehensive platforms with an abundance of features and complex processes. But bigger doesn’t always mean better, and some of these solutions outshine their more complex competitors.

Here are some construction management software features that every tool on this list absolutely had to have:

• Project planning: Setting up and managing the workflow, design, procurement, pre-construction tools, and tools to track permits and participants.

• Budget management: Managing budgets and invoices and having the tools to track them and issue them at any time.

• Document management: Tools that allow users to store and share drawings, specifications, invoices, and other documents, internally and with clients.

• Communication tools: Tools that provide instant chat, email integrations, project threads, and ways to conduct and maintain client communication.

• Mobile accessibility: An interface that’s optimized for mobile devices, be it through a mobile app or a mobile-friendly website or platform.

• Reporting and analytics: Tools that provide quick and in-depth analytics and custom reports through dedicated dashboards.

Businesses that leverage this type of software can conduct and maintain projects efficiently without the project management headache that usually ensues.

For example, a construction firm can set up a client project within their chosen software. They can then work through project planning, building the foundation, and managing financial aspects like budgeting and invoicing. Having a platform that hosts multiple projects allows them to move forward confidently, knowing all their documents and plans are organized and that their clients have the option of full visibility.

Assessing these tools based on the features above is likely not enough to base a decision on, as the majority offer features that more or less do the same thing in different ways. So to further narrow down the solutions, I was looking at the following criteria:

• User experience: I used this to assess how easy it is for a novice user to learn the software and how easy it is for veterans to navigate it. This criterion also clarifies how satisfied users generally are with the software and its features.

• Customization: Some projects require a different setup, be it to accommodate larger clients and projects or to highlight very specific items in reports. This piece assesses just how flexible and customizable the software can be, from specific project management features and tools to reports and analytics.

• Range of features: There’s a lot to be done in a construction project. This criterion helped me pinpoint which construction management software provides a feature for every step of the way.

Based on those criteria, and along with research, demos, and conversations with real users, here are my picks for the best construction management software.

The best construction management software at a glance

The industry standard construction management software

Procore (Web, iOS, Android)

Procore pros:

• Comprehensive set of features

• Best for handling multiple large projects

• Advanced user access and collaboration features

Procore cons:

Procore seems to have dominated the construction management software industry for quite some time, becoming one of the industry standards and almost everyone’s go-to solution.

And for good reason. Procore is an advanced, comprehensive app that goes above and beyond in terms of the collaboration tools it provides. That makes it an ideal solution for large construction companies managing multiple projects and clients at the same time. For example, you’re able to customize each user’s experience on each project, assigning them permissions to certain tools, pages, and documents. This makes it easier to share private documents in-house while giving third-party partners and clients access to everything they need.

One big caveat: user satisfaction with the platform isn’t at the level it should be for such a developed platform. Having said that, this seems to be mainly due to the pricing, which seems to be out of range for small and medium-sized companies. It feels as though it was designed to accommodate industry giants rather than smaller players in the field.

Many users find that a smaller solution at a more affordable price that allows them to do almost everything Procore does is a better investment. Sure, it’s rich with features, but it can be difficult to learn and set up, and it’s only valuable if you can make use of all it offers. Otherwise, it’ll be just like having more fancy toys than you can ever use—ones you keep paying for.

Procore pricing: By request

Best construction management software for all-around functionality

Contractor Foreman (Web, iOS, Android)

Contractor Foreman pros:

Contractor Foreman cons:

Contractor Foreman does a great job of providing easy-to-learn construction management software at an affordable price. Its features cover every aspect a construction firm could need, with ample room for customization.

The downside? There seems to be a sentiment of dissatisfaction with certain buggy elements within the software, namely the time-tracking and estimates features. It’s usually along the lines of “I love the estimates feature; it’s just a shame that it can be buggy.” So, while there’s value there, the user experience appears somewhat shaky.   

But even with that in mind, users seem to be flocking toward Contractor Foreman as a substitute for enormous and expensive construction management software. If a platform offers the tools you need at a cheaper price, it doesn’t make sense to stick to the shiny solution with 55+ tools you’ll never use. 

Ultimately, the appeal is understandable. Contractor Foreman covers the needs of most construction SMBs at a reasonable price range. It’s easy to use, implement, and learn, making it one of the more popular choices out there.

Contractor Foreman pricing: Basic ($49/month); Standard ($79/month); Plus ($125/month); Pro ($166/month); Unlimited ($249/month)

Best construction management software for collaboration

Autodesk Construction Cloud (Web, iOS, Android)

Autodesk Construction Cloud pros:

Autodesk Construction Cloud cons:

There seems to be a sentiment on loop among Autodesk users, and it’s that Autodesk is overkill.

Is that a good or bad thing? Well, it depends on the business using it. Autodesk is built for massive projects and massive companies with a wide range of clients. Think of construction firms that undertake projects in different states and cities at the same time, ones with big teams and big needs.

Autodesk excels at creating an amazing user experience. The dashboard is simple and easy to navigate. Tools are organized in such a way that they don’t overwhelm users as they navigate the platform, with a straightforward interface that looks a lot like other CRMs or project management software users might be used to. 

Despite the ease of navigation, it’s not an easy tool to learn due to the sheer number of features and their complexity, but there are a lot of resources, guides, and helpful content that can help new users get over that hurdle. For example, a construction company considering Autodesk can access workflow guides to see how they can implement the software into their day-to-day operations and what they stand to gain.

Maybe the biggest obstacle for Autodesk for most users is that, in spite of its well-rounded features, it’s likely too expensive for many SMBs. But for those with the onboarding time, personnel, budget, need for complexity, and patience, this construction management platform is in its own class.

Autodesk Construction Cloud pricing: Bundles (by request); Autodesk Build Monthly; ($145/user/month); Annual ($1,625/user/year)

The best construction management software for value for money

Buildertrend (Web, iOS, Android)

Buildertrend pros:

Buildertrend cons:

• Challenging automation and reporting features

• Limited customization of the client experience/interface

• Lack of integration capabilities with popular cloud storage solutions

Most popular among residential construction companies, Buildertrend offers great and easy-to-use features for project scheduling, client comms, and budgeting. Whitney Hill, the CEO of SnapADU, shared with me that “the recent enhancements in budget tracking have given the team more flexibility and improved their financial oversight.” They’re also fond of the mobile app experience, as it provides their superintendents with seamless on-the-go management.

She also argued that its reporting tools could be more comprehensive or robust and that its financial/budgeting management tools don’t quite measure up to bigger competitors. And there are a few other drawbacks: some key feature enhancements seem slow, leaving them wanting more in terms of automation and tailored client interfaces, and it doesn’t integrate with popular cloud storage solutions despite the comprehensive document management tools.

Here’s the thing: Buildertrend provides great value for its pricing. They update/enhance the platform and the features frequently, too, which tells me that Buildertrend will only get better over time and that user concerns are on the team’s radar. 

Buildertrend pricing: Essential ($199/month; $499/month after 1 month); Advanced ($499/month; $799/month after 1 month); Complete ($799/month; $1,099/month after 1 month)

The best construction management software for ease of use

Fieldwire (Web, iOS, Android)

Fieldwire pros:

Fieldwire cons:

Fieldwire excels at managing on-site tasks and providing teams with a mobile app that can keep them in the loop from start to finish and top to bottom. It’s easy to set up and navigate, even for the not-so-tech-forward folks.

Fieldwire’s support team gets a huge vote of confidence, as users say they consistently support users and actively tweak and add new features as needed.

That said, Fieldwire seems generally preferred for its on-site capabilities. Some users mix solutions, leveraging Fieldwire for on-site needs and another app for more in-depth project management.

Fieldwire is especially unique for its ease of use. It’s difficult to get some crews and partners involved in projects to adopt new software, but users say that Fieldwire’s ease of use makes it a less painful experience. Its efficiency—especially with on-site task management—makes it a very easy product to learn.

If your firm deploys crews to work on projects that require onsite paperwork or communication, Fieldwire provides exactly what you need at a great price. But if your business requires more of a focus on the project management side of things, it might not be the best fit for you, unless you pair it with another app.

Fieldwire pricing: Basic (Free); Pro ($39/user/month); Business ($59/user/month); Business Plus ($79/user/month)

Other flexible tools you could use for construction management

The construction world is massive, and its needs, in most cases, require very specialized software. But that’s not to say it can’t be done with a more generalist tool.

Lots of construction managers use popular and flexible project management tools that aren’t made for the construction industry—and it’s effective. Here are a few juggernauts that folks in construction say can help you manage your projects, especially if you’re working on a budget.

• ClickUp: ClickUp is a versatile platform, with some users noting that there are far too many ways to use it. This makes it industry-flexible, but a bit overwhelming, especially for new adopters. It also has a great free plan.

• monday.com: Like ClickUp, monday.com is feature rich and flexible—and it’s known for its advanced reporting.

• Zoho: Zoho has more than 70 different apps in its suite, and project management and customer billing are some of its strengths. 

For more project management apps that can help construction managers, take a look at the best free project management software, the best project management software for small business, and the best enterprise project management software.

How to leverage construction management software to its full potential

In my journey through user reviews, expert input, and shady Reddit recommendations, I’ve found that a huge factor in how businesses choose one construction management software over another is the balance between features and price.

That may sound obvious, but it matters on this scale. A construction giant won’t be able to leverage smaller solutions to accommodate their needs, and SMBs won’t be able to invest in a shiny solution they won’t use 80% of anyway.

The key is to find construction management software that you can confidently implement, onboard, scale, and afford long term. 

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