The number of budget-friendly tools available for SaaS agencies is becoming overwhelming with each passing day. While there are many SaaS tools, agencies and companies can suffer from over choice when building their tech stack.

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To be frank, today’s market is highly diverse, and most SaaS tools are unique and offer powerful functionalities and features. 

With so many tools available, it leaves an agency confused about which one to pick.

To make life easier, we’ve curated a list of some best tools to choose from based on the purpose where they might be used and without having to burn a hole in your pocket.

Top 7 budget-friendly SaaS tools for agencies

Here are some top pocket-friendly SaaS tools an agency might consider for improving workplace efficiency and reaching their organizational goals:

1 - HighLevel - Customer relationship management

Does your agency rely on HubSpot for its customer relationship management (CRM) and sales and marketing requirements? Are you tired of spending too much money on this platform? If so, you’re not the only one as hundreds of HubSpot users face these problems.

Rather than using HubSpot, searching for HubSpot CRM alternatives can be an ideal decision.

One alternative is HighLevel, a white-label CRM platform ideal for digital agencies and consultants. The tools help in growing your business by generating positive reviews.

When your agency receives higher positive reviews, it automatically increases your Google ranking and enhances your SEO.

Apart from helping a brand close more deals and nurture leads into customers, this all-in-platform offers numerous features, such as appointment scheduling, email marketing, voicemail marketing, landing pages, white labeling, and appointment booking.

HighLevel helps you grow your agency and assist you in capturing, nurturing, and closing these leads into customers without having to duct-tape multiple platforms together.

Pricing: Offers a 14-day free trial, and their starter pack starts at $97 per month.

Why use HighLevel? According to research, the expected average ROI for every dollar spent on CRM software is $8.71.

2 - Skale - Link building and performance SEO tool

Skale is a link-building and performance SEO tool widely used by agencies and small businesses with no marketing knowledge. Apart from improving your SEO and increasing your ranking, Skale focuses on driving real business and key performance indicators (KPIs).

Rather than getting excited after witnessing an increase in ranking, the SaaS agency focuses on increasing qualified signups and monthly recurring revenue (MRR). This is what makes Skale different from other SEO tools and agencies.

Besides offering SEO for SaaS companies, Skale provides in-depth monthly reports about the SEO impact on rankings, leads, signups, and traffic. Interestingly, instead of providing SEO results within one year, Skale focuses on delivering results within three months.

The agency focuses on topical authority, which they believe is the recipe for SEO success.

The company focuses on partnering with websites that rank for their client’s keywords. This ensures high-quality link-building, which improves the SEO.

Pricing: Contact the agency to know more about their pricing model.

Why use Skale? The first five organic results in the search engine result pages (SERPs) account for 67.6% of all clicks.

3 - Freshbooks – Accounting tool

Freshbooks is an accounting tool that can help control the financial aspects of your business to generate revenue and prevent unnecessary expenses.

It’s an intuitive double-entry accounting experience that every agency needs.

The tool manages accounts receivable and accounts payable. This SaaS tool allows you to create an invoice and accept payment through debit and credit cards.

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Some key features of Freshbooks include expense tracking, time tracking, payment management, and invoicing. As an agency, set auto-payment reminders, which allows you to accept online payments.

Using this tool, the company can track expenses by attaching receipts, creating recurring expenses, and taking snapshots of receipts.

What’s more interesting is that Freshbooks helps prepare easy-to-understand financial reports, ensure compliance, and make smart financial choices for your agency. This cloud-based accounting tool can help your agency manage its accounting department.

Pricing: Offers a lite plan starting at $4.50 per month and their paid plan starting at $7.50 per month.

Why use Freshbooks? 82% of small businesses fail due to poor cash-flow management, making accounting software a must.

4 - Zoom – Team collaboration tool

With communication being the ABC of the business world, agencies need to emphasize excellent workplace communications.

Workplace communication is the key to success as companies are slowly using team collaboration tools like Zoom.

From interviewing a candidate and organizing a webinar to interacting with team members and clients, a tool like Zoom is essential to your SaaS toolkit.

Zoom is the most widely used video conferencing and team collaboration tool as it promises superior performance, features, and stability.

Zoom differs from others because it allows 500 participants to attend a single meeting simultaneously.

The Zoom app allows you to conduct meetings, chats, webinars, conferences, root systems, and online events. Zoom is a tool in your arsenal that powers all your communication tools.

Other impressive Zoom features include virtual backgrounds, screen sharing, unlimited chat time, and easy-invite URL codes.

Pricing: Offers free and various paid plans based on the business requirement.

Why use Zoom? Video conferencing improves communication for 99% of people.

5 - ProofHub – Project management tool

ProofHub helps you stay at the top of your projects and ensure the timely completion of all projects. This SaaS-based project management tool offers features such as collaborating on projects, tracking milestones of each project, and assigning tasks to team members.

Though the tool doesn’t provide invoicing, budgeting, and resource management features, it empowers a team to communicate on work from anywhere. 

As this tool offers a rich set of features, it helps you coordinate, swiftly plan, organize and deliver projects on time.

What differentiates ProofHub from other tools is that it offers features ranging from time tracking to task management and online proofing to bespoke workflows.

ProofHub is available in French, German, Russian, Italian, and Polish. The tool comprises every feature you need to get your work done efficiently.

The tool serves all your project management needs by keeping track of the project’s progress, creating a project, assigning tasks, interacting with your team, and completing your projects on time.

Pricing: Offers a free trial and their paid plan starting at $89 per month when billed annually.

Why use ProofHub? A company wastes 12% of its resources due to inefficient project management.

6 - Sendinblue – Email marketing tool

If someone tells you that email marketing is dead, they’re probably trying to mislead you. Even in the age of social media, an email is a tool that can help you reach your audience.

Today, marketers who want to send campaigns in bulk consider using Sendinblue for their email marketing requirements. Businesses across the globe use this tool to build and grow relationships through transactional emails, email campaigns, marketing automation, SMS messages, chat, CRM, and retargeting ads.

The real power of Sendinblue lies in its versatile and flexible marketing automation platform. 

Using the tracker, you track web behavior and use this information and email engagement to create automated workflows. This can help you save time and empower you to scale your business with no work at all. 

Sendinblue is a MailChimp alternative that offers more features.

From providing email marketing automation to assisting in social media marketing, the tool helps you connect with your audience.

Pricing: Offers free pricing, and their starter plan starts at $25 per month, offering unlimited contacts.

Why use Sendinblue? Email is 40% better at converting in comparison to Facebook and Twitter.

7 - Hootsuite – Social media marketing tool

Hootsuite is a horsepower that allows businesses to build and strengthen their social media campaigns. Apart from building the brand, this intuitive tool strengthens the connection with customers and boosts results through social media integration.

Typically, Hootsuite provides training, certification, and coaching to enhance their social media prowess. It helps monitor posts and messages and manages all the social media channels. 

Businesses that use Hootsuite can plan their upcoming campaigns and focus on content management to attract potential customers.

Hootsuite helps businesses launch social campaigns, deliver a five-star social media experience, and manage customer conversation. It helps track customer conversations and gather actionable social media insights to make critical business decisions.

This tool allows businesses to post across multiple social networks like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

Pricing: Offers a free 30-day free trial, and their paid plan starts at ₹1915 per month.

Why use social media marketing tools? 1 in 3 adults consumes news from Facebook, making timely sharing of content essential on this platform.

Key takeaways

The truth is, we all need help, including small businesses and agencies. You can’t waste time searching for tools that can positively impact your business.

There is so much else to do. Using the right SaaS tools can serve your purpose. From building products and getting the right content to dealing with existing customer problems, these tools can fulfill your agency’s requirements.

These seven tools can help you save effort, time, and energy to make your work stress-free and hassle-free.

While these tools are just the tip of the iceberg, they can bring a revolutionary change in your business and increase its growth.