Benable — create shareable lists of things you recommend!

E.g., products you love, local businesses, travel recs - you can add anything to a Benable list!

Discover

💻 Small Business Tools That Actually Work (and Don’t Cost a Kidney)

15 items

Cut 'N Snip Creation Heather Carpenter

Starting a small business is hard enough without hemorrhaging cash on overpriced tools that promise the world and deliver a headache. This list rounds up budget-friendly, beginner-approved tools for design, marketing, organization, and growth—all tes...

Sections

1. Design Without Losing Your Mind

2. Marketing That Doesn’t Feel Like Selling Your Soul

3. Organization for the Chronically Overwhelmed

1. Design Without Losing Your Mind

Because not everyone has a degree in graphic design — and that’s totally fine.** These tools make it easy to create professional visuals for your business, even if your artistic skill tops out at stick figures. From logos to social posts, these picks...

A lifesaver for small business owners. Drag, drop, and design like a pro — without needing Photoshop-level skills. The templates alone will change your branding game.

Canva Pro | Your all-in-one design solution

Stock up on fonts, templates, and design assets made by independent creators. It’s a shortcut to beautiful branding without the “custom designer” price tag.

Creative Market

Instantly remove backgrounds from images. It’s perfect for product photos, profile pics, or cleaning up marketing graphics.

Remove Background from Image for Free – remove.bg

Free, high-quality stock photos that *don’t* look like bad corporate brochures. Great for blog posts, social media, or website visuals.

Background Image Pictures | 1000+ Free Images on Unsplash

Easily generate on-brand color palettes. Because picking the “perfect blush pink” shouldn’t take an entire afternoon.

Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator!

2. Marketing That Doesn’t Feel Like Selling Your Soul

Effective marketing should feel genuine, not forced. You don’t need a marketing degree (or a massive ad budget) to get noticed online. These tools make it easy to grow your audience, send better emails, and track what’s actually working.

Both are great but I prefer MailerLite with their clean, simple email marketing platform for beginners. Affordable plans, easy automations, and no coding headaches.

MailerLite vs Mailchimp: Which is Best in 2025?

Manage your social media, schedule posts, and track analytics all in one dashboard. Bonus: it won’t make you want to throw your laptop.

Metricool

The perfect link-in-bio tool for small business owners juggling multiple offers, socials, and links. Simple, effective, and free to start.

Linktree Free, Starter, Pro and Premium Pricing

A social media scheduling tool that’s visual, intuitive, and built for Instagram (but plays nice with others too).

Later

Essential for getting found locally. Claim your listing, add photos, and make it easier for customers to discover you.

Get Listed on Google - Google Business Profile

3. Organization for the Chronically Overwhelmed

Sticky notes and “mental to-do lists” aren’t project management systems. If your business brain feels like a browser with 47 tabs open, these tools will help you stay organized, plan your days, and actually hit deadlines.

A flexible workspace for planning, tracking, and organizing literally everything. Think digital notebook meets CEO brain dump.

Choose from 30000+ Notion templates | Notion Marketplace

Visual project boards that make task management (almost) fun. Perfect for keeping track of client work or product launches.

Trello

All the essentials — Gmail, Docs, Sheets, and Drive — working together seamlessly. Reliable, professional, and beginner-friendly.

Google Workspace

A simple time tracker to see where your hours go (and make sure you’re actually billing for them).

Clockify

A powerhouse for teams or solo entrepreneurs juggling multiple projects. Customizable dashboards, task lists, and automations galore.

ClickUp