Digital Marketing

Less Annoying CRM

CRM Software

Less Annoying CRM lives up to its name by offering a simple, affordable CRM with no confusing tiers, no upsells, and no long-term contracts. At a flat $15/user/month with all features included, it removes the pricing complexity that frustrates small business owners with other CRMs. The platform focuses on core CRM essentials — contact management, pipeline tracking, calendar integration, and task management — without the bloat of features most small teams never use. With free phone and email support and a setup process that takes just minutes, it's consistently rated as one of the easiest CRMs to adopt for businesses with 1–25 employees.

HubSpot

CRM & Marketing

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform that unifies marketing, sales, customer service, and content management tools into a single ecosystem used by over 194,000 customers in 120 countries. Its free CRM provides unlimited users and up to 1 million contacts, making it one of the most accessible entry points for businesses starting with customer relationship management. HubSpot's Marketing Hub excels at inbound marketing with tools for email campaigns, landing pages, social media scheduling, and SEO recommendations, while the Sales Hub provides pipeline management, email tracking, meeting scheduling, and deal automation. The platform's content management system (CMS Hub) enables marketers to build and optimize websites without developers, and Service Hub provides ticketing, knowledge base, and customer feedback tools for post-sale support.

MailerLite

Email Marketing

MailerLite is a budget-friendly email marketing platform beloved by small businesses and creators for its clean interface, generous free plan, and surprisingly powerful feature set. The free tier supports up to 1,000 subscribers and 12,000 monthly emails with automation, landing pages, and a website builder included — making it one of the best free options available. MailerLite's drag-and-drop editor includes interactive email elements like surveys, quizzes, and countdown timers that most competitors reserve for premium plans. The platform has maintained a strong reputation for deliverability and customer support while keeping prices approximately 30-50% lower than comparable tools like Mailchimp.

Beehiiv

Email Marketing

Beehiiv is a modern newsletter platform built by early Morning Brew employees, designed specifically for newsletter creators and media businesses looking to grow and monetize their audience. Unlike traditional email marketing tools, Beehiiv includes built-in growth tools like referral programs, recommendation networks, and boost features that help newsletters acquire subscribers organically. Its monetization suite includes native ad marketplace integration, premium subscriptions, and boost revenue — giving creators multiple income streams from day one. The platform has quickly become the newsletter tool of choice for independent creators and media companies, powering newsletters with millions of subscribers including The Milk Road and Exec Sum.

Plausible Analytics

Analytics Tools

Plausible is a lightweight, privacy-focused web analytics tool that provides essential website metrics without using cookies or collecting personal data, making it fully GDPR, CCPA, and PECR compliant out of the box. Its entire tracking script is under 1KB (45 times smaller than Google Analytics), which means zero impact on page load speed and no need for annoying cookie consent banners. Despite its simplicity, Plausible provides all the metrics most websites need — visitors, page views, bounce rate, session duration, referral sources, top pages, locations, and device data — in a clean, easy-to-read dashboard. The platform is open-source and can be self-hosted for complete data ownership, or used as a managed cloud service starting at $9/month for up to 10K monthly pageviews.

Ahrefs

Analytics Tools

Ahrefs is a comprehensive SEO toolset known for having the world's largest backlink index (over 35 trillion links) and a web crawler second in activity only to Google's. Its Site Explorer provides in-depth analysis of any website's organic search traffic, backlink profile, and top-performing content, making it the tool of choice for competitive SEO research. Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer covers 10 search engines (including Google, YouTube, Amazon, and Bing) with metrics like keyword difficulty, search volume, and traffic potential that help content creators prioritize the most impactful topics. The Content Explorer feature finds the most shared and linked-to content for any topic across the internet, while Site Audit continuously monitors your website's technical SEO health with actionable recommendations.

Monday CRM

CRM Software

Monday CRM is a flexible, no-code CRM built on top of the Monday.com work operating system that allows teams to manage their entire sales cycle from lead capture to post-sale support. Unlike traditional CRMs, Monday CRM lets you customize every aspect of your pipeline without any technical expertise — from deal stages to automations and dashboards. It integrates seamlessly with Gmail, Outlook, and hundreds of other apps, making it easy to centralize customer communication. The platform is especially popular with teams already using Monday.com for project management who want a unified workspace.

Close CRM

CRM Software

Close is a CRM built specifically for inside sales teams that make high-volume outreach via phone, email, and SMS. It stands out with built-in calling (including predictive dialer and call recording), native SMS messaging, and email sequences — all without leaving the CRM. Close's Smart Views automatically prioritize leads that need attention, helping reps focus on the highest-value activities. Trusted by fast-moving startups like Stripe, the platform is optimized for speed and efficiency, reducing the average sales cycle by eliminating the busywork that plagues traditional CRMs.