The best marketing tools save you money, time, and make your job easier, but here’s the kicker — finding them is never easy.

Testing out tools to see how well they’ll fit in your workflow is a hero’s quest. It takes time, effort, and cold sales emails galore. The result? You try a bucketload of free tools but rarely ever find the champions.

Good news though: we’ve put together this list of 41 free online marketing tools to pull you out of this conundrum. Here, you’ll find tried-and-true tools that I’ve either personally used (and recommend) or real marketers use and swear by. 

Be sure to bookmark this piece so you can revisit it anytime you need a shortlist of tools, from AI-powered writing hacks to time-savers and project management platforms. 

Jump to a category:

Free CRM software

1. EngageBay

EngageBay is great for solo and small business marketers for tracking and managing sales deals in one platform. It offers an easy-to-use, drag-and-drop interface and filters to segment contacts.

2. Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is part of Zoho’s suite of products, giving you 5,000 records for free with the option to remove untouched records from your leads, freeing up space in the freemium version. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Freshsales CRM. It gives you artificial intelligence-based features to prospect, qualify leads, and close deals. 

Video makers

3. Vimeo Create

Vimeo Create is an easy-to-use tool to whip together high-quality, professional-looking videos using templates (or start with a blank canvas if you prefer).

Edit the video you make to add titles and elements to it and use the aspect ratio option to resize videos within seconds. You can also connect your account with platforms like Facebook and Constant Contact to share the video content you create directly from Vimeo Create.

4. iMovie

iMovie remains a staple for video making, especially for beginners. This free video maker for Apple devices helps you create simple videos on the go. Start from scratch or get help from the software’s Storyboards or premade templates. 

Paid option to consider when ready: 

Vimeo Create’s premium plan for advanced features like adding custom CTAs and end cards to your videos and accessing their engagement analytics. 

Social media tools

5. Buffer

The free Buffer plan helps you manage three social channels, letting you plan and schedule ten posts for each channel (such a time saver!). 

6. Social Mentions

Social Mentions monitors your brand mentions and hashtags across social media, showing you how often and in what tone your target audience is talking about you or using your custom hashtag(s). 

7. Hypefury

Hypefury is a Twitter-specific scheduler — great for marketers doubling down on this platform. You can schedule not only tweets but also Twitter threads using this tool. 

8. Sparktoro

Sparktoro is an audience research tool. Its free tools give you a score of Twitter users’ real influence, help analyze their followers, and show what other marketers are talking about and sharing on Twitter.    

Paid option to consider when ready:

Hootsuite for planning, scheduling, analyzing — even reporting on your social content using one tool. 

Writing and editing tools 

9. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor improves your writing’s readability score. To do so, it highlights long, difficult-to-read sentences as well as those that use passive voice.

10. Grammarly

Grammarly freemium catches typos and checks your grammar.

11. ​SpeechTexter 

SpeechTexter allows you to speak into the tool so it can type out your content — great for days when you don’t feel like or can’t (God forbid) type. 

12. ChatGPT

ChatGPT helps with brainstorming ideas, getting first drafts out, writing meeting itineraries, and more. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Writer for improving content readability, grammar, and repurposing while maintaining your brand voice and editorial standard. 

Brainstorming and collaboration

13. Miro

Use Miro’s free plan to create three editable mind mapping and brainstorming boards (or pick from their pool of brainstorming templates).

14. Figma

Figma is a free team collaboration tool for prototyping and collaborating on designs. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Twist for organized async team collaboration including organized file sharing.

Content marketing tools  

15. Coschedule headline analyzer

Headline Analyzer scores your headline titles for SEO and click worthiness, helping create engagement-driving headlines. 

16. Blog Topic Generator

Enter five words related to your niche or blog theme and HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator will give you a week’s load of ideas to blog about. 

17.  Content Idea Generator

Portent’s Idea Generator is perfect for sparking ideas for content writing. Enter a keyword and the tool will give a fistful of fun suggestions that you can then improvise on.  

18. PrimoStats

PrimoStats gives you original stats to add to your content without wasting time down in the research rabbit hole. The free plan gives you access to 1,200 stats.    

19. Yoast

Yoast is a free WordPress plugin that helps optimize your content for SEO by evaluating its keyword usage and readability. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

GatherContent. It’s a content operations platform that lets you manage your entire content marketing — create templates, briefs, style guides, and content workflow complete with an editorial calendar.

Freelancer management tools

20. Toggl Hire

Toggl Hire lets you assess freelancers’ skills before hiring them by creating assessments for their skills. 

21. Google Meet

Use Google Meet to hop on free calls with freelancers to explain your brand and content requirements.

Paid option to consider when ready:

Content Harmony to generate briefs for freelancers. 

Invoicing tools

22. Zoho invoice

Zoho Invoice lets you create free invoices.

23. Deel

Deel is a secure payment platform for hiring and paying global teams in 90 countries (in the free plan). 

Paid option to consider when ready: 

Deel premium to automate invoicing, pay contractors in 150+ countries, and more. 

Graphics and design tools

24. Canva

Canva is a super simple and easy tool for creating blog and social media graphics within minutes. Use their templates to get started or start from scratch if you’ve a knack for designing.

25. Venngage

Venngage is another intuitive DIY design tool that lets you create five free beautiful visuals including presentations, infographics, reports, charts, graphs, and printable. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Visme. Use it to create animated visuals including videos and access your visual content’s performance analytics. 

Productivity tools

26. Otter.ai

Otter’s basic, free plan transcribes 30-min long videos, webinars, and podcasts so you don’t have to do it all manually. You can transcribe 300 minutes per month and upload up to three audio and video files. 

27. Vimeo screen recorder

Vimeo’s free screen recorder is a Chrome extension for recording unlimited — up to two hours long — video messages (record with or without your webcam footage). It’s perfect for making videos for internal team comms, briefing and sharing feedback with freelancers, and creating product explainer videos. 

28. Pocket

Pocket lets you save content (videos, podcasts, and blog posts) for reading them later. You can also add tags to the content to reference them easily and get the audio player to read written content for you. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Evernote for taking and organizing notes, setting reminders, and sharing them with your team. 

Free time-saving tools

29. Zapier

Zapier helps you connect different apps and automate steps between them using zaps. The free plan lets you create 100 one-step zaps per month.

30. Waldo

Waldo is a free Chrome extension that speeds up your research. It offers an ad-free Google search experience; pulling out content from ranking pieces for easy skimming, and offering filters to let you find whatever you’re looking for easily and quickly. 

31. WayBack Machine

WayBack Machine is another Chrome extension that works by giving you website archives. Use it to source examples for the content you create and review how competitors and/or inspiring businesses planned different campaigns in the past.  

Paid option to consider when ready: 

Zapier Premium for creating multi-step zaps. 

Project management tools

32. Trello

Trello is an uber easy-to-use project management tool, giving you ten free Kanban boards to manage your work in as many columns as needed.

33. Notion

Notion is a fully customizable project management tool. You can use it to create Kanban boards, tables, documents, or whatever you want. It also comes with Notion AI that summarizes content, creates tables from linked content, and more.

34. ClickUp

ClickUp is another intuitive and customizable tool. Use it to create documents, get different views of your project pipeline, and a lot more. If getting started feels overwhelming, simply pull out one of their templates and you’re good to go. 

Paid option to consider when ready:

Asana. It’s great for task, project, and work management and comes with tons of integrations. 

Free SEO tools

Google Trends shows you how popular a keyword or phrase is across defined time brackets.

36. Keyword Rank Checker

Ahref’s Keyword Rank Checker shows you where a keyword you search for is ranking in the search engine results pages.

37. Website Authority Checker

Another free tools by Ahrefs, Website Authority Checker show you a target site’s domain authority (DA).

38. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic enlists all the questions people are asking related to a keyword.

39. Keyword Tool

Free Keyword Research Tool by Ryan Robinson gives you keywords for terms you search for, showing you their search volume and ranking difficulty. 

Paid options to consider when ready:

Semrush or Ahrefs for a full suite of keyword research tools and link building and Clearscope for optimizing content to rank better.  

Analytics tools 

40. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a free tool to track your website traffic and engagement behavior (how long they’re spending on a page, for example).

41.  Hotjar

Hotjar’s free plan gives you unlimited heatmaps to understand how your site visitors are interacting with your website — the CTAs they’re clicking, and where they’re getting stuck.  

Paid option to consider when ready:

Chartbeat for tracking content engagement analytics in real-time.

More free resources 🥳 

Here’s hoping you’ve found useful software to try from this list of free marketing tools. And if you’re looking to learn more about video marketing, in particular, we’ve got tons of resources for you: