Have you ever spent a long afternoon logging data into a spreadsheet, pasting emails into your CRM, or trying to create simple graphics with complex design tools?
Pretty much every marketing and sales expert has a list of tasks like these that they dread all week, or all month, or always.
Usually, the worst tasks involve mindless repetition. Many times it’s because two tools don’t work with each other or because it takes 15 clicks to get to the features you need in your sales and marketing software.
Frustrated with a few of these tasks ourselves, we polled our community to learn which free marketing and sales tools have been lifesavers for simplifying these annoying processes.
A lot of these answers came from experts at marketing agencies. They have an especially large need for free sales and marketing software since they must repeat tasks like these for every single client!
In some cases, the free tools on this list have paid versions that provide even more functionality, but to be included in the list, the free version had to solve a real problem and be free forever—not just provide a preview or a free trial.
Without further ado, here are the 24 free sales and marketing software tools that marketers and salespeople in the Databox community are using to fill gaps in their processes: Databox Canva Recur Post Google Optimize Google Search Console Google Keyword Planner Screaming Frog SEO Spider Ubersuggest Answer The Public Moz Bar Yoast SEO HubSpot Marketing HubMailchimpTrelloG2 Track Grammarly Similar Web Linked In Website Demographics Drift Soapbox by Wistia Built With Linked Hub Zoom Hub Spot CRM1. Databox
Best free marketing software for reporting
“Databox is great if you wish to see the broad picture of your marketing activities today (and not after weeks of tinkering with hundreds of tools and connectors),” says Radek Zaleski of Netguru. “It also allows you to communicate with stakeholders very efficiently. We have used it for a short time, and we already love it.”
Free plan details: Databox has a free plan for individuals that includes three data sources, three users, and three data boards, and a free plan for agencies that includes 10 data sources, five users, and 10 databoards.2. Canva
Best free marketing design software
“Before Canva, we had to rely solely on team designers to create all visual assets,” says IMPACT’s Ramona Sukhraj. “That created capacity and efficiency issues—especially when we needed something quickly (e.g. social graphics).”
“Canva allows non-designers to create high-quality, perfectly-sized visual assets for a variety of social media platforms (and their paid ads), emails, blogs, and even print ads/materials.”
“Whether you need a quick graphic for a holiday greeting or a full infographic, Canva’s library of icons, templates, fonts, etc. makes it fast, easy, and fun to do. With it, we can still present and maintain a professional, consistent visual brand without needing our trained designers to drop everything to make it happen,” Sukhraj says.
Darrell Evans of Yokel Local Internet Marketing also recommends Canva: “There are great places to find low-cost stock imagery all over the internet. But if you really want to stand out in the crowd, you must personalize those stock photos to enhance your brand.”
“In my opinion, Canva is the simplest graphic design tool if you’re not proficient with Adobe’s suite of tools. If you’re anything like me, you’ll find Canva to be a lifesaver,” Evans says.
Free plan details: Canva is completely free to use and offers tons of free templates, images, and design elements. If you want to use a premium element, you just pay a-la-carte pricing for each design you create that includes a premium element.
Related: 22 Design Tools That Top Marketers Use To Quickly Create Beautiful Things3. RecurPost
Best free social media software for scheduling recurring updates
“With RecurPost you can quickly schedule all your social media updates on multiple social platforms,” says Nisha Kotecha of Good News Shared. “The difference between RecurPost and other social media tools is that once you put your update in, it will automatically share it again based on the schedule you set up.”
“This saves hours each week and helps me get the most out of each piece of content created—all for free.”
Free plan details: RecurPost’s free plan includes up to three social accounts, up to 100 recurring updates, and up to 10 daily/one-off posts per account.4. Google Optimize
Best free marketing software for A/B testing
“Google Optimize enables marketers to run A/B and multivariate tests directly on a web page,” says Keith Moehring of PR 20/20. “It is extremely easy to set up one of these tests directly within the system, and the data integrates directly with Google Analytics.”
Free plan details: Google Optimize’s free SMB plan includes A/B testing, limited multivariate testing, personalization, and integration with Google Analytics and Google Ads.PRO TIP: Monitor Your Sales Team’s Performance in One Dashboard
Smart Sales Managers know that to achieve your monthly and quarterly goals, you have to monitor your team’s sales performance on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. To do that, you need an actionable dashboard that summarizes both team and individual sales rep metrics and allows you to: Understand the current sales pipeline. Track sales rep performance. Compare team results to revenue goals.
If you use the HubSpot CRM, you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template showing some of the most important metrics for monitoring your sales team performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
Related: How to Run Effective A/B Tests According to 28 Marketing Experts5. Google Search Console
Best free SEO software for monitoring organic search metrics
“For information about website performance, most people go straight to Google Analytics, but I always like to check Google Search Console as well,” says Michael J. Schiemer of Bootstrap Business.
“It lets marketers do many things that are helpful for SEO: check on the indexing status of your pages; view search impressions, CTRs, and keyword rankings; quickly and easily submit sitemaps; index individual pages; and check for crawling or indexing errors or pages that aren’t mobile-friendly.”
“There are countless other features, so it’s a great free and user-friendly tool for marketers.”
Free plan details: 100% free
Editor’s note: If you regularly check both Google Analytics and Google Search Console to monitor your most important website KPIs, grab this free SEO dashboard that consolidates and visualizes data from both Google Search Console and Google Analytics.6. Google Keyword Planner
Best free PPC keyword research tool
“Google Keyword Planner is great for researching keywords and outlining a PPC campaign based on the results,” says Mary Jo Preston of Stream Creative. “It tells you about the competition for keywords, provides keyword search volumes, and helps you establish the budget needed for a PPC campaign.”
Free plan details: Anyone with a Google account can use Google Keyword Planner for free, even if you never run Google Ads. However, users that run Google Ads regularly get more accurate search volume data.7. Screaming Frog SEO Spider
Best free marketing software for SEO audits
“Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the best (if not the best) SEO audit tools available,” says Andrew Vinas of T-3. “It makes it easy to do a comprehensive audit of your client's websites to maximize SEO effectiveness.”
“As it crawls through every page of your site, it develops a roadmap so you can understand what needs to be done, what needs to be improved, and what needs to be fixed!”
Free plan details: Download the free version of Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl up to 500 URLs to identify issues like broken links, redirect errors, hreflang attributes, duplicate pages, and more.