Top 10 Tools for Managing Remote Teams in 2024

In this article, you’ll discover 10 remote team management tools to optimize communication, collaboration, and productivity for employees who work from home.

Working remotely has become the new norm in today’s digital age, with the appeal of flexibility and no daily commutes making WFH option oh so appealing in the eyes of employees.

However, the transition to remote work has its challenges. To manage remote teams successfully, there need to be both a mindset shift and digital tools available to foster effective communication, collaboration, and connection across time zones.

Organizations must opt for the right digital solutions to keep their remote workers connected and engaged. And whether you’re working from home or managing a remote team, using proper software is essential for boosting productivity and maintaining company culture from afar. But with so many remote work apps available in the market, it can be quite a challenge to create the most effective suite of monitoring solutions, communication platforms, and collaboration hubs that will keep your virtual team on track.

In today’s article, we’ll explore top 10 remote team management tools across various categories that help optimize communication, collaboration, and productivity among distributed teams.

Common Challenges of Remote Work

Hardly anyone can argue that remote work offers numerous benefits. However, unique challenges of remote work need to be addressed as well. One of such challenges is communication. Lack of face-to-face interaction can easily result in miscommunication, which will lead to delays, misunderstandings, and broken collaboration. Remote software tools that facilitate real-time communication and video conferencing can help bridge the gap and ensure effective communication in remote teams.

Another challenge is productivity tracking. Without traditional office environment, monitoring the progress of remote employees to ensure they are meeting their goals can be quite a challenge. Remote software solutions with built-in time tracking and project management features can help address this challenge, providing visibility into employee and team productivity.

What’s more, remote work can give rise to feelings of isolation and disconnection. After all, in-office work creates a sense of camaraderie and provides options for social interactions. Remote software tools that foster a sense of community can help with mitigating these feelings and keeping remote teams engaged and connected.

Benefits of Remote Team Management Software

If you’re still on the fence about the idea of remote team management software, here are a few reasons why you should give it a try:

• Increased flexibility

  Flexible working hours allow your remote employees to have more time for their personal life, which results in a better work-life balance. However, how exactly do you ensure your remote team members are putting in the required work hours or completing their assigned tasks? A remote team management tool provides a considerable amount of data about every remote employee on the team, which allows you to ensure they’re following the process correctly when working remotely.

• Better communication

  When you manage a remote team, communication is vital to keep everyone on the same page. Efficient remote workforce management software can assist with employee onboarding, training, file sharing, as well as improve overall internal communication. Improved team communication will positively affect the company culture, increase employee engagement, and create a better remote workforce.

• Better collaboration

  Remote team management platform allows for better team collaboration and communication, saving time, reducing business expenses, and enabling teams to manage projects more efficiently. Despite the team members being in different time zones, managers can use remote work software and any project management, task management, and productivity tool to create projects and tasks, as well as use communication and file sharing services to manage mobile teams.

• Easier time tracking

  Time management tools need to be available for remote teams, providing for easier time tracking and project management. Time tracking tools allow managers to track the time each team member spends on tasks. This makes it easier to identify potential bottlenecks in workflows and areas for improvement.

• Efficient project management

  An important aspect of managing teams working remotely is to ensure remote workers manage projects well. Without good project management or proper remote work tools, it will be hard for employees to practice smart time management techniques. For remote work to function well and for better employee engagement, management must equip their remote specialists with the right digital tools so that they can do their jobs well. These remote project management solutions help with task distribution and project progress tracking, which makes remote work accessible to everyone.

• Reduced costs

  Remote workforce can save organizations money. Having a remote team eliminates the need for physical office spaces, reducing overhead costs such as rent or utilities and enabling reallocation of investment to other areas of business operations or provision of more competitive compensation packages to remote employees.

• Better Productivity

  A remote team management tool helps boost productivity by streamlining operations and eliminating repetitive tasks, such as sending emails, scheduling meetings, and updating files.

• Improved employee engagement

  Employee engagement can justly be considered one of the most important aspects of managing remote teams. To achieve high levels of employee engagement, you need to give your remote employees a bit of leeway through freedom to manage their own time. We stress it time and time again – micromanagement is one of the worst work practices managers can turn to.

10 Best Remote Desktop Software

When choosing the right tool to implement for remote team management, there are different categories of remote software to consider. Some apps facilitate teamwork and communication, others enable task management, while other tools help with efficient time tracking.

Here is our carefully curated list of top 10 software tools across various categories that are essential for remote work in 2025 to improve your remote operations and keep your virtual workforce connected and performing at its best.

Communication tools

For a team to be productive, it needs to have clear and effective communication. Remote communication and collaboration platforms facilitate real-time communication via messaging (text and audio), video conferencing, and screen sharing to keep everyone on the team connected, no matter where they are. Most of them also offer additional features, such as whiteboards, file sharing, and shared calendars to enhance collaboration.

1. Slack: best for team instant messaging

Slack is a messaging tool used for instant messaging that lets you organize conversations by topics, teams, or projects using customizable channels. Accessible from anywhere, it offers the ability to set up a channel (chat room) for any part of your business and conduct chats privately or with the whole team. Slack has file sharing capabilities built in too. It also offers instant notification features, a mobile app, and integrations with other popular work apps like Google Drive, Trello, Notion, and Zoom to streamline workflows and help remote teams stay connected and productive.

2. Notion: best for creating wikis

Notion helps teams create centralized wikis to collect company knowledge, guidelines, employee handbooks, FAQs, and much more. Remote teams can also build and customize databases where various company data, from sales leads to product specifications, can be organized and shared. Another bonus point is the option to control access and editing privileges for users based on their roles.

3. Vowel: best for video meetings

Vowel generates AI-powered summaries and transcripts of every video meeting so that it’s incredibly easy to revisit any of your previous calls. You can even text search in these meetings and jump to the point in the video to save time. To make meetings more engaging, the tool offers agendas, emojis, timers, screen sharing, and notes features.

4. Zoom: best for advanced video conferencing

Zoom is a nice app for remote teams that need an advanced video conferencing option. It is a feature-rich platform that helps remote workers communicate with each other and collaborate more efficiently. With features like virtual backgrounds, screen sharing, and breakout rooms, remote teams can conduct in-house meetings, client calls, and brainstorming sessions, no matter where everyone on the team is located.

Collaboration tools

One of the biggest challenges of remote work is maintaining a sense of connection and engagement among team members. Collaboration tools can help bridge this gap by providing platforms for keeping initiatives on track and sharing important documents from integrated workspaces accessible anywhere. 

5. Google Drive: best for file storage

Google Drive offers a generous 15gb of free storage for personal use. The web interface is simple and intuitive, which makes it easy even for the least tech-savvy users to store, access, and share files. The platform removes productivity bottlenecks by allowing remote teams to share files easily with one another and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It’s especially a must-have for the remote teams who produce content or share calendars.

6. Dropbox: best for document sharing

Dropbox file sharing solution comes with an intuitive interface and is accessible across various devices, including web browser, desktop, and mobile apps. Dropbox helps remote teams with sharing multimedia files, which can be accessed even without the internet. A lighter file sharing tool, it may be perfect for smaller teams. With its block-syncing feature, Dropbox enables managers to make quick updates, and helps your team members view the changes almost immediately. This makes collaboration a breeze for remote teams working from different locations.

Project management and task tracking tools

Project management and task tracking remote management tools help remote teams organize workloads, assign tasks, set deadlines, and track progress. These are essential for helping teams stay on top of their work and keep employees accountable through self-monitoring.

Features like to-do lists, dashboards, charts, and project views make it almost impossible for project details of any size to fall through the cracks.

7. Asana: best for project management

Asana lets teams create and manage projects with clear goals, milestones, task assignment, deadlines, and dependencies, which promotes accountability and transparency. The software generates customizable reports that show comprehensive data on team performance. Asana helps remote teams manage tasks, deadlines, and project progress. It can be used it for assigning work, setting deadlines, and tracking KPIs, which enables full visibility into what remote employees do during workday. The intuitive interface makes it simple to manage projects from anywhere. It offers free plans for individuals and small teams up to ten people, and comes with a plethora of integrations.

8. Trello: best for creating to-dos

Trello can justly be considered one of the most flexible and fun project management tools. It enables tracking content production all the way from concept to publishing and helps follow work pipelines all the way through, which makes it easy to keep track of both daily work tasks and long-term business goals. Trello Kanban-style boards help remote teams stay organized on every single project.

Time tracking and productivity monitoring tools

Time tracking remote employee management tools don’t necessarily mean micromanaging employees every minute, but rather their aim is to help remote teams stay focused and productive throughout their workday. They also make it significantly easier to track billable hours of freelancers and contractors, as well as to manage team schedules.

Its most used features include time tracking for tasks and projects, timesheets summaries, productivity reports, and invoice generation based on hours worked.

9. Hubstaff: best for managing timesheets

Hubstaff comes in handy for situations where managers risk to lose track of how much time their teams of remote employees are spending on different tasks. It gives managers insights into what their employees are focusing on through the day. Using this data as a base, managers can optimize productivity by setting time limits and putting a cap on the amount of time spent on each project at most.

10. Clockify: best for streamlining time tracking

Clockify is an intuitive time tracking platform for recording working hours. Its rich features, such as various timers, manual log entries, data-driven reports, and customizable timesheets facilitate accurate time tracking for insights into productivity. Clockify enhances team collaboration with shared project updates and integrates with numerous tools to improve workflow efficiency.

Honorable mention: Kickidler

Kickidler is a truly unique feature-rich project management tool designed to boost teamwork and productivity. Its comprehensive functionality that combines time tracking with both project management and data loss prevention (depending on the suite you choose) allows for easy task assignment, deadline tracking, and progress monitoring all within one intuitive interface.

This user-friendly solution helps remote teams manage tasks, deadlines, and project progress from anywhere in the world. You can use it to assign work, set due dates, track KPIs, and get visibility into what everyone on the team is working on.

Users can customize the software to organize projects in a way that suits them best. The platform enhances collaboration through integration with other apps, streamlining communication and project execution. It's a truly versatile and efficient solution for teams seeking to improve their productivity and achieve company goals effectively.

The software is essential for anyone managing remote teams. It runs on virtual employees’ desktops, gathering data based on their different work habits, which can then be used to create powerful analytics.

Kickidler’s scalability and cost-effectiveness make it a popular choice for businesses of any size that aim to improve time management and project transparency.

Key features:

• Time tracking: Managers get clear insights into how much each team member is working and what they are focusing on in real time, learning their work patterns and typical productivity levels.
• Task management: Managers can create, assign, and track tasks, which makes work processes more transparent and ensures everyone knows what needs to be done and when.
• Project management: Users can organize tasks, set deadlines, and allocate resources, ensuring that projects are completed efficiently and on schedule.
• Gantt chart: Users get an overview of projects, schedules, and dependencies, which gives structure to the team’s work and helps spot potential roadblocks and plan accordingly.
• Resource management: Managers get full understanding of their team’s capacities, allowing a balanced distribution of tasks.
• Detailed reports and dashboards: Both managers and employees get real-time comprehensive summaries of various work-related data, from individual work habits to team project progress, which enables data-driven decision-making.
• Billable hours tracking: Organizations and freelancers alike can accurately record and invoice time spent on client work, streamlining the revenue-generating process.
• Integrations (API): The software integrates with other popular employee management tools we’ve mentioned on our list, streamlining the existing workflow by keeping everything connected and improving productivity without disruption.

Final Thoughts

Remote work is here to stay, and with the right software for remote team management, businesses can unlock the full potential of their remote teams.

In today’s article, we explored the common challenges of remote work, listed the reasons to use remote software, and looked at the most popular tools and platforms vital for remote teams and freelances looking to enhance productivity and maintain efficient operations.

Now that you have the knowledge from this guide, you’re well equipped to navigate the world of remote software and optimize your productivity. Embrace remote software, harness its power, and watch your remote team thrive!

Boost Your Remote Team Efficiency with Kickidler today!