Business success is increased by 70% when an organization uses workflow management software. But that can only be achieved when using the right workflow tool.
There are plenty of free workflow tools available – great news for businesses tiptoeing around the idea of process management. But while your choices aren’t limited, choosing the wrong one can be a costly affair.
That’s why I did the heavy lifting for you and sorted through 50 free workflow tools to find the top 4. You can thank me later.
- How do you know if you need a workflow tool?
- What features should you look for in a free workflow tool?
- Our comparison criteria: How we went from 50 to 4 free workflow tools
- Our top picks for the best free workflow tools
- What does good workflow management give you?
- Effective workflow management is the secret to company success
How do you know if you need a workflow tool?
Workflow software helps businesses decrease costs by optimizing their organizational processes. If you don’t exactly need this type of software, you’re not likely to see a great return on your initial investment.
So, how do you know if workflow software is the right option for your business? Here are some factors to consider:
You have recurring work
You find your team spending time completing recurring work. Effective communication is then required between these team members to ensure that these recurring tasks are done the same every time to provide consistent results.
You don’t have an organizational knowledge base
Your senior team members have a fair understanding of company processes. But your newer employees are in the dark and there isn’t any operational knowledge documentation to help shed some light.
You’re using outdated process documentation
You have some process documentation but it’s difficult to update or maintain. So, your team never uses it.
Your team uses multiple processes
To work efficiently, your team needs to be running multiple processes simultaneously. It’s difficult to identify any bottlenecks or track the status of each of these processes.
Your processes run slow
You’ve noticed your team’s processes are running slower than they should be. There’s a lack of employee accountability when owning tasks within a process. You’ve noticed crossed wires and dropped balls.
Work applications are used alongside your processes
Several work applications are needed to successfully run your company processes. But these applications aren’t integrated into one another. Your employees then spend additional time completing data entry from one app to the other.
What features should you look for in a free workflow tool?
Once you’ve considered if workflow software would be a good fit for your company, it’s important to identify what features are a necessity for your team’s processes.
Templates
A workflow tool with pre-made templates is fantastic as companies can use and edit these instead of spending time creating workflows from scratch. Some free workflow tools don’t offer a wide variety of templates, which is something you should consider before picking one.
Automation
The goal of all workflow tools is to streamline your recurring work. That means you want a tool that provides automation capabilities. For example, integrating different applications and having them speak to one another helps optimize a process, as no manual data entry is needed.
Powerful and flexible collaboration
Workflow tools designed to break a process into tasks and subtasks are vital for any company. With these tasks and subtasks, you can plan out each step and ensure your workflow is as actionable as possible.
Your workflow tool should also let you assign these tasks and subtasks to different team members. Having these role assignments gives your employees clear visibility over what tasks they need to complete.
Due dates should also be included in your chosen workflow tool to ensure your employees know when these tasks need to be completed.
Analytics or workflow insights
Most free workflow tools provide you with various insights into your processes. This helps collect information about how, when, and why your processes are being run, which can be used to help make more informed decisions.
Our comparison criteria: How we went from 50 to 4 free workflow tools
We understand you’re busy. Browsing through endless free workflow tools isn’t a good use of your time. That’s why we went through 50 different free workflow tools for you and picked the top 4.
Here’s how we evaluated these free workflow tools:
Free to use
You can use these free workflow tools without paying a cent. Although you might not have access to all the features premium users have, you’ll still have workflow software that’s free forever.
Integration capability
The top 4 free workflow tools integrate with various other popular business applications. These integrations ensure you can set up process automation strategies between various other tools, which saves you time.
No-code
The best free workflow tools are ones with an easy-to-use interface. The tool you ultimately invest in should have no-code functionality to ensure it’s straightforward for you and your team to use.
Scalability
Your chosen workflow tool should be able to scale as your business grows. That means letting you upgrade your plan to access more advanced functionality and add more users.
Our top picks for the best free workflow tools
Automate.io
Automate.io lets users make multi-step workflows. These workflows can then be integrated between various work apps (like Salesforce, Slack, and Zapier). It’s an excellent option for those who want to customize their organizational processes to align with their specific needs.
The workflow tool promotes effective communication between employees and integrations between popular work apps can be included in workflows. This includes many productivity applications, CRM, and lead generation software.
Some of Automate.io’s great features include:
- A library of pre-built automation templates
- Easy-to-use interface
- Drag and drop functionality
What do you get for free?
- 300 monthly actions
- 5 Bots
- 5 min Data Check
- 1 team members
- Single Action Bots
Learn more here.
Miro
If you’re looking for a collaborative whiteboard platform, Miro is the right choice for you. This workflow tool allows you to facilitate meetings, run agile workshops, collaborate asynchronously and in real-time, as well as showcase ideas.
With Miro, you get a workflow tool with a template library for you to browse through hundreds of different workflows. It’s well-known for its use in remote and hybrid design teams. You also have access to multiple software integrations like Jira, Trello, Zoom, and Slack.
We think it’s a great tool to use for process mapping. That’s why we use it at Process Street while running our internal workflows.
Features you might like include:
- Infinite canvas
- Easy visibility over tasks and dependencies
- Mouse-over collaboration
What do you get for free?
- 3 editable boards
- Premade templates
- Core integrations
- Basic attention management
Learn more here.
Qntrl
With Qntrl’s workflow orchestration software, teams gain complete visibility and control over their business processes. This workflow tool is designed to provide users with real-time status updates, centralized request submissions, and customized work views.
Its automation functionality allows employees to automate work that is recurring within a process. Companies can also use this workflow tool to assign requests without needing any manual intervention and automatically generate documents.
Here are other great features offered:
- Accessible contextual information
- Enforceable business policies
- Shareable feedback and workflow updates
What do you get for free?
- Up to 5 users
- Create up to 3 orchestrations
Learn more here.
Process Street
We’re confident in our product’s title as one of the best workflow tools on the market. We don’t just sell it to you; we use it ourselves every day! Not including it in this list would have been a disservice to you. So, here it is:
Process Street is a free workflow tool built with no-code functionality to help users turn their recurring processes into streamlined and interactive workflows.
Team workflows are stored in a centralized knowledge base and accessibility can be managed to ensure complete transparency over organizational processes.
Its modern process management is designed for teams to create standalone documentation that lives alongside their existing workflows – Pages. You’re also provided with many integrations (like DocuSign, Slack, and Salesforce) to manage tasks with limited effort.
Some of Process Street’s standout features include:
- Guest users and permissions to effortlessly collaborate internally and externally
- Conditional logic for adapting workflows to different circumstances
- Automation for tedious and recurring tasks
What do you get for free?
- 1 workflow
- 1 active workflow run
- 1 full member
- Unlimited free members for pages
- 100 integration actions / month
- Unlimited storage (5MB / file)
- All core features
- Email & chat support
Learn more here.
What does good workflow management give you?
So, what is investing in one of these free workflow tools going to do for you?
Better productivity
A good workflow tool helps identify tedious tasks and automates them within a process. Such automation helps streamline your team’s processes and encourages employees to use their time more productively – because they’re no longer spending time completing recurring work.
Workflow tools that automate recurring work don’t just increase productivity. They also save you money since recurring work costs businesses $5 trillion every year.
All information needed to complete their tasks is provided in the task itself and any bottlenecks can be identified almost immediately. This added visibility ensures that employees have everything they need to be doing work as efficiently as possible.
Decreased errors
Making errors is inevitable but you can reduce the number of mistakes you make. And when these inevitable errors are made, your workflow tool can pinpoint the place where these mistakes happened. This helps you map out why these issues are happening and prevent them from recurring.
Increased trust, transparency, and control
Good workflow tools decrease micromanagement. This is because a well-designed workflow offers clear direction to those working on the process.
The process’s progress, duties, and goals are clearly outlined and accessible to everyone involved. This increases transparency as employees know what is required of them and managers are empowered to delegate through task assignments.
Easily juggle multiple tasks
With free workflow tools, your organizational processes are neatly organized in a centralized knowledge base.
You no longer need to search for information between instant chat platforms, email threads, or project boards.
You can run multiple tasks in one area without having to revert to various other work applications – no confusion or delays.
Effective workflow management is the secret to company success
A good workflow tool can help a business make process management a whole lot easier. However, your chosen workflow tool should have the right features to fit your company’s needs. One of these needs might be affordability.
When starting out, free workflow tools are great because they help your company manage processes more efficiently without having to make a hefty investment.
However, once you start to scale, you want a free workflow tool that will scale with you. This will help empower your team to continue creating and running efficient, optimized workflows.
What do you think is the most important consideration to make when picking a free workflow tool? Let us know in the comments!
The post We Tried 50 Free Workflow Tools – Here Are Our Top 4 first appeared on Process Street | Checklist, Workflow and SOP Software.
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