Team collaboration software: 7 tools that won’t waste your money

Most businesses build their team collaboration software stack the same way: one tool at a time, filling needs as they come up. When you’re just starting out, this seems like a reasonable approach.

But there’s a catch. Approaching the challenge of enabling team collaboration this way is how you end up with a Frankenstein’s monster of a stack, made entirely of parts that are stitched together inorganically.

Even if the parts are good, the disconnection between them causes problems. You’re paying more subscription fees than you can track. You’re not sure who has access to what. And you’re drowning in admin work.

This is a guide to taking the alternative route: building a team collaboration stack that has the essential tools in one place and is as consolidated as possible to save you money and time.

7 team collaboration tools your stack needs

Every team collaboration stack needs to cover the same ground: chat, email, video, documents, storage, and project management. It’s also worth adding visual collaboration and a knowledge base to that list.

Here are the seven tools you need to cover everything you need while protecting the confidentiality of your data.

1. For team chat: Slack

Slack is the go-to choice for team chat. It turns conversations into organized, searchable channels — set up by project, team, or topic — instead of long, scattered email threads. Voice and video huddles let anyone start a quick call without leaving the app, and file sharing keeps context attached to the conversation. Providing all the structure a small team needs, Slack scales with your headcount, fitting seamlessly into your growing stack via an integration library connecting hundreds of other tools.

2. For business email and calendar: Proton Mail

Proton Mail gives you all the same essential business email functionality as Gmail or Outlook, with the added bonus of end-to-end encryption. Google and Microsoft process messaging content to power search and AI features; Proton Mail’s encrypted architecture ensures your business communications are for your eyes only. Proton Calendar is bundled in, so your event details — including meeting titles and guest lists — also stay private, and scheduling doesn’t require a separate app or another login.

3. For project and task management: Trello

Trello simplifies task tracking to its bare essentials without sacrificing utility: managing boards and task cards that move from to do to done, with almost no learning curve for new team members. When we talk about consolidated platforms later, bear in mind that this is a tool most platforms don’t replace — so it’s worth budgeting for as its own line item in your stack.

4. For video conferencing: Proton Meet

Zoom might be the go-to for video conferencing for many businesses, but it’s far from the most private option. Its AI Companion feature processes call content — including anything commercially sensitive — to generate summaries and transcripts. Proton Meet’s default end-to-end encryption ensures that what’s said on a call stays between the people on that call. Guests join with a link and no account, and the free tier covers one-hour calls with up to 50 participants.

5. For visual collaboration: Miro

Miro is essentially a digital whiteboard, but its infinite canvas gives distributed teams a shared space for planning, brainstorming, and workshops that no whiteboard — or even chat thread or document — can replicate. Miro packs in enough features that mastering all of it takes time, but getting started takes just minutes: templates for retrospectives and roadmapping sessions mean new teams aren’t starting from a blank canvas.

6. For cloud storage and document collaboration: Proton Drive

Proton Drive offers business cloud storage that matches Google Drive and Dropbox on granular per-file permissions and version history. Where it pulls ahead is what happens if a breach occurs. Google and Dropbox need access to your file content to index it for search and power AI features; that means they hold the keys to your contracts, financial records, and product roadmaps, and a breach on their end could expose that content directly. Proton Drive is end-to-end encrypted by default with zero-access architecture: Proton can’t decrypt your files, so neither can anyone who breaches its servers.

Proton Drive also covers document collaboration, since Proton Docs and Proton Sheets are included with every Proton Drive plan. Docs and Sheets cover the same core functionality as Google and Microsoft’s document tools (real-time co-editing, comments, and version history), while adding end-to-end encryption, ensuring your contracts, drafts, and financial models get the same protection as everything else in your stack.

7. For a knowledge base: Notion

Many businesses — particularly those scaling fast — struggle with the chaos that comes with disorganized internal documentation. Notion centralizes internal documentation, wikis, and reference material in one searchable space, cutting down on the scattered, outdated copies competing for attention. Plus, it’s flexible enough to double as light project tracking if your team doesn’t need a dedicated tool like Trello.

But if your team stores confidential client files, strategy documents, product plans, or company IP in the cloud, we recommend using a more secure Notion alternative such as Proton Drive.

The hidden cost of a disconnected collaboration stack

Let’s say you’re starting from scratch and decide to go with the seven tools we recommend. Here’s how your collaboration stack will look (notice that there are’s only seven rows, as Drive includes both Docs and Sheets) — and it looks pretty solid.

However, if these tools are all running individually, not consolidated under one platform, you’re opening yourself up to three big problems.

1. The hidden subscription bill

Individually, the tools in our seven-tool stack don’t seem to cost that much. Add those subscriptions up, however, and (at the time of writing) a team of 25 is running up a bill of approximately $15,900 a year. And your team probably isn’t even using every seat.

It’s easy to lose track of what you’re spending on a set of disconnected team collaboration tools. You know they’re automatically renewing, but you’re reluctant to cancel the one you suspect nobody’s using because that means finding the login details. Or you’re worried that someone on your team must need it. (Why else would you have it?)

2. The cost of insecurity

Disconnected tools multiply your attack surface, with each surface a potential misconfiguration waiting to happen. In the long run, that could cost you dearly. Proton research shows that 25% of SMBs experienced a data breach last year, and 57% of breached SMBs lost between $10,000–$100,000.

3. The burden of admin

Time is money, and multiple tools demand that you spend a lot of both. Think of all that time spent adding and revoking permissions across seven tools (assuming you remember to), or reconciling seven separate invoices, or trying to figure out if anybody’s actually using that Miro seat you’ve been paying for since March. All these costs might not show up on one invoice. But they’re there.

What a consolidated collaboration stack gives you

The answer to reducing the cost and waste of a disconnected stack isn’t better tools, and it certainly isn’t more tools. The answer is a team collaboration platform that covers as many of the functions your disconnected tools are currently fulfilling as possible, while also giving you a secure and easily administered foundation for whatever other tools you need.

Pick your platform wisely, and replacing multiple tools with one platform will simplify and secure your team collaboration in a single stroke. When you have one platform handling team communication, file storage, document collaboration, and admin, you’re only dealing with:

1. One bill, one renewal date, with one owner. Zero autopilot charges for unused tools
2. One admin dashboard to control onboarding, offboarding, and access permissions. (No contractors hanging around in your Dropbox months after project completion)
3. One security model, with one permissions system to administer, no gaps between tools, and no seven-tool misconfiguration risk
4. One audit trail so you can see who accessed what, when, all in one place (and provide proof when investors or regulators come calling)

A consolidated, encrypted stack won’t just save you in subscriptions and security incidents. It sends a signal to your customers that you’re serious about handling their data seriously. It lets investors know that your operations are under control.

The platform to consolidate your stack: Proton Workspace

With our digital workspace platform for businesses Proton Workspace, you get all the Proton products and features we’ve mentioned on one platform: Mail (including Calendar), Meet, and Drive (including Docs and Sheets). 

Instead of running those products as separate subscriptions, each with its own admin panel and its own bill, you get all of them under one account and one security model.

• The subscription saving: purchasing Mail, Meet, and Drive as separate subscriptions costs more than getting them together, since each one carries its own base fee on top of your per-seat pricing. Proton Workspace consolidates all of them into a single line item instead. Proton Workspace doesn’t replace Slack, Trello, or Miro (you’ll still need separate tools for chat, project management, and visual collaboration) but on the tools it does replace, the saving is real.
• The admin relief: Instead of three dashboards, you have one. Instead of three invoices on three different renewal dates, one. You can see exactly who’s using what, so no more paying for seats nobody’s touched since March. And when someone joins or leaves, onboarding and offboarding means one action for each user, not three. (And no more contractors retaining access to folders that are no longer their business.)
• The security foundation: You’ve established a secure foundation for collaboration. Proton Workspace is ISO 27001 certified, and GDPR and HIPAA compliant. All its services keep your data protected with end-to-end encryption and Swiss jurisdiction. Not even Proton can access your files.

On top of this, you get extra products bundled in: Workspace Standard subscribers get a business VPN and team password manager bundled in; Premium subscribers get these, plus Lumo, our business AI assistant. 

Migrating your email and calendar to Proton is straightforward: Proton’s Easy Switch tool imports your existing emails, contacts, and calendars automatically (including from Gmail).

Few SMBs get their collaboration stack right the first time around. The right team collaboration platform is the one your team uses, your admin controls, and your finance team can see on one invoice.