November 12, 2020

The Top 10 best Google Workspace Apps for 2020

Google is releasing an array of updates for Google Workplace that boost company productivity and remote working. This article highlights the very best apps that work alongside Google Workspace.

The Best Google Workspace Apps

For many companies and individuals, work is no longer a physical place we go each day and as such the apps that we use to operate our lives is ever changing. Meetings that used to take place in person have moved virtual and instant messaging applications are more popular than ever.  Office workers no longer have spontaneous discussions at the water cooler, and we have instead turned our homes into remote working workspaces. 

Through this digital transformation, our time and attention is more fragmented and work is split over more apps than ever before.  But, choosing the best apps for your company is complicated.  

Google Workspace (i.e. the newly branded name for G Suite) incorporates all of the productivity applications you use and love including Gmail, Meet, Chat, Drive, Calendar, Docs, Sheets and Slides.  

While Google’s apps are industry leading, many of them cover only a small portion of the use cases that many companies require.  Rather than looking elsewhere, companies want to invest deeper in apps that work with Google Workspace.  This article will highlight some of the best applications that work within Google Workspace in the areas of Productivity, Project Management, CRM, Education and Workflow customization. 

1: Best Google Workspace Apps for Gmail

Sortd: Transform Gmail into a work-tracking tool

Sortd is an email-integrated work tracking system for teams that live in Gmail.  It offers a lightweight app that will help you grow your business, close more deals, manage projects and get more done as a team - right from Gmail.

Organize email communication and orders with customers, follow-ups with suppliers, and plan and manage projects - with one simple tool in Gmail that gives you and your entire team complete visibility over the status of work, and keeps everyone aligned.  Streamline processes and manage remote work with ease.

With Sortd, your entire team can now easily see who's working on what, with a transparent view of both email conversations and team tasks in the same place. Everyone now has a single version of the truth and your team can be better aligned than ever.

Pricing: Sortd offers a free plan, a Pro plan at $6 per month and a team plan at $8 per month.

GMass: Mail merge for Gmail

Use Gmail to send mail merge campaigns with automatic follow-up emails.  Connect to Google Sheets.  Personalize, schedule, track opens and clicks. Create email lists by searching your Gmail account. Send emails as replies to the last thread with each person. 

Gmass also allows you to connect to Google Sheets to send a personalized mass email using any of the columns in your spreadsheet.  Pricing: $8.95 per month to $19.95 per month on the premium account.

2: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Docs

Docusign: Add PDFs and Signatures to Google Drive

A lot of documentation is sent by email. If you would prefer to sign documents digitally, Docusign is one of the most popular apps in the market.

Docusign

When you get a PDF, you can drag your electronic signature and other data onto it, then return it to the sender. 

Pricing: Docusign offers a free plan and premium plans range from $15 to $60 per month.

Lucidchart Diagrams: Draw flowcharts, org charts and wireframes

Lucidchart provides collaborative online diagramming to make it easy to draw flowcharts, org charts, wireframes, UML, mind maps and more. Work together in real time with your team and clients.

Lucidchart is a visual workspace that combines diagramming, data visualization, and collaboration to accelerate understanding and drive innovation. With this intuitive, cloud-based solution, everyone can work visually and collaborate in real-time while building flowcharts, mockups, UML diagrams, and more.

Pricing: Lucidchart offers a free plan and premium plans start at $7.95 per month.

3: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Sheets

Yet another Mail Merge: Send mail merges from Gmail

Send mass emails with high deliverability directly from Google Sheets and Gmail.

With Yet Another Mail Merge you can send personalized emails to hundreds of recipients at once using your Gmail account.  It allows you to track emails opened, clicked, responded, bounced and unsubscribed in real time from the comfort of your spreadsheet

Pricing: Yet Another Mail Merge offers a free plan and premium plans starts from $20 for gmail.com accounts and $40 for G Suite accounts.

Awesome Table: Build web apps from spreadsheets

Display a Google Sheet's content in various formats and views: from a simple table to people directories, Gantt chart views, Google Maps, card views…

Spreadsheets are great to store business data. Yet nobody likes to read someone else’s spreadsheet. AwesomeTable brings spreadsheet data to life, makes it understandable, shareable and actionable.

Our users create sales assets portals, catalogs of products, maps of customers and suppliers, knowledge-bases of procedures and processes, maps of points of sales or production sites, people directories, and so much more.

Pricing: Awesome Tables offers a free plan and paid plans start at $39 per month to $249 per month.

4: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Calendar

Calendly: Online appointment scheduling

Schedule meetings without the hassle. Never get double booked. Calendly works with your calendar to automate appointment scheduling.

Use the Calendly to access all of your event types, select and share your available times to meet in just a few clicks.  Mark and save event types as your favorites for even quicker access and choose specific time slots to display in emails to quickly set up ad hoc meetings 

Pricing: Calendly offers a free plan and paid plans start at $8 to $12 per month.

Gong: Schedule meeting and capture recording consent on meetings

Gong captures and analyzes every word of every sales conversation (meetings, calls, and email) – so you have the unfiltered voice of the market.

With the Gong for G Suite, seamlessly schedule, join, and manage your recorded meetings on Google Calendar and Google Meet. Notify users and capture their consent to be recorded by taking them through the Gong consent page, before joining your designated web conference meeting room.

Easily schedule your Gong recorded meeting by selecting the Gong meeting link. Instantly join meetings with one-click, across desktop, mobile, and conference rooms. Simplify administration of the Gong add-on with an easy installation and centralized deployment.

Pricing: Is not disclosed on their website.

5: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Drive

Kami - PDF and Document Annotation

Kami is a leading digital classroom app. It allows you to take any existing document, including scanned PDFs, and write, draw, type, annotate, comment, augment, enhance, and otherwise bring it to life – all within your browser. 

Kami’s intuitive design and collaborative features are specifically designed to improve classroom engagement and interaction – all while making the task of providing and completing classroom assignments effortless. 

Pricing: Kami offers a free plan and paid plans start at $99 per year for classes up to 150 students.

Lumin: PDF and Document Annotation

Lumin PDF brings your documents to life with smart editing and markup tools to help you easily annotate PDF documents and images. Add text, images, comments, shapes and signatures. All from your browser.

Highlight, edit and sign PDF files from your browser! Lumin PDF allows you to share and edit PDF files in real-time.

With Lumin PDF you can, highlight and underline text, erase blocks of text, add digital signatures, rotate and remove individual pages, draw lines and shapes, add comments and more.

Pricing: Lumin PDF offers a free plan and paid plans starts at $5 to $10 per month.

6: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Slides

Pear Deck: Build engaging interactive content into Google Slides

Pear Deck for Google Slides brings your Google Slides to life with interactive questions that can be added to any presentation. Design your presentation in Google Slides and engage your class through Pear Deck.

Add the Power of Interactive Questions to Google Slides. You could instantly see who’s confused and who’s ready for more.  With the Pear Deck you can add formative assessments and interactive questions to your presentations.

It also offers a library of templates designed to support learning objectives at the beginning, middle and end of a class. 

Pricing: Pear Deck offers a free plan and paid plans start at $149.99 per year.

Flaticon: Icons for Slides

Flaticon offers one of the largest icon databases for your Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Spreadsheets and Google Forms.

Pricing: Flaticon offers a free plan and paid plans start at 7.49 EUR/month.

7: Best Google Workspace Apps for Google Forms

Form Approvals: Turn form submissions into interactive workflows

Turn Google Form submissions into interactive workflows. Designed for use within organizations of all sizes to automate processes, control departmental spend, save paper, and provide visibility to senior management.

Form Approvals is powerful and easy to use. You can create a form to capture information/data requiring approval, assign approvers, set approving order and include routing conditions.  You can also, automatically email approvers the submission details, including one click approve/decline and track the status of requests throughout the workflow process. 

Pricing: Form Approvals offer an free plan and paid plans start at $6 to $40 per month on an annual basis. 

Form Director: Direct Google Form response to Google Docs, Sheets, Slides

Form Director turns your Google Form submissions into Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, Calendar events, Contacts, Tasks, Cloud Database records, Email notifications and more.

Form Director covers user cases from Publish Proposals, Agreements, Invoices, Estimates, Contracts, Bills to Letters by submitting Google Forms.

Manage multiple services with a simple on/off  switch.  Generate, store and email Google Docs, Sheets and Slides into several formats (PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc).  Share generated files with multiple recipients with edit / view/ comment access.  Get success notification on a templated email messages. 

Pricing: Form Director offers a free plan and paid plans start from $6 to $59 per month.

8: Best Google Workspace Apps for Project Management

Project management is a competitive space. Simple tools like Trello and Sortd for Gmail can be integrated directly into G Suite and Gmail.  If you are looking for Gantt Charts and portfolio management, you can look at more complex tools.

Smartsheet:  Plan, capture, manage, automate, and report on work

Smartsheet enable your team needs to plan, manage, automate, and report on work. Edit and easily share work in grid, card, Gantt, or calendar views. Capture data with forms, and automate workflows and repetitive tasks. 

Create dashboards and reports and integration with your favorite chat tools. Smartsheet empowers better collaboration, accountability, innovation, and real-time visibility into what matters most, to make better decisions faster. 

Collaborate online to assign tasks, set automatic reminders and alerts, attach any type of files directly to a project, have discussions right in the context of the work and view your work as calendar or Gantt timeline with dependencies. With Smartsheet, your team is connected wherever you are - and you can have unlimited free collaborators.

Pricing: Smartsheets offers paid individual plan at $14 per month and business plan at $25 per month per user.

Wrike: Project Management

Wrike’s project management features help teams track dates and dependencies associated with projects, manage assignments and resources, and track time. These include an interactive Gantt chart, a workload view, and a sortable table that can be customized to store project data.

Wrike  also offers end-to-end workflow automation and tools like creative brief approvals that solve specific business approval problems.

Pricing: Wrike offer a free plan and paid plans start at $9.80  to $24.80 per user per month.

9: Best Google Workspace Apps for Sales and CRM

Shared Contacts for Gmail: CRM contacts management

Share Google contacts with anyone inside and outside your organization. It gives you the ability to share contact groups with any Gmail or Google Apps user, just like you share a Google Doc or a Calendar. 

With Shared Contacts for Gmail, share labels (contacts groups/address books) with other G Suite and Gmail Contacts. 

Pricing: Shared Contacts for Gmail’s offer paid from $0.99 to $2.49 per user per month.

Insightly: Icons for Slides

Insightly provides customer relationship management (CRM) and project management software for businesses across a variety of industries such as manufacturing, consulting, health & wellness, media and others. Businesses use Insightly to manage contacts at every stage of the sales process, track customer relationships, monitor their sales pipeline, and more. 

With Insightly, all critical information – leads, contacts, emails, events, projects, tasks, sales opportunities and reports – are centralized and available via web and mobile app. When the whole team has the most current info at their fingertips, your company sells more and satisfies customers better.

Pricing: Insightly offers paid plans from $29 to $99 per user per month. 

10: Best Google Workspace Apps for Education

EasyBib: Check your paper for grammar and plagiarism

The Bibliography Creator by EasyBib allows you to easily create a bibliography for your research paper.  Automatically cite books, journal articles, and websites just by entering in the titles or URLs. Format citations in MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard, and over 7K other styles.

When you're finished creating your bibliography, click Generate Bibliography and we'll alphabetize your citations and add them to the end of your paper.

Pricing: EasyBib’s paid plan cost $9.95 per month. 

Flubaroo: Grade and assess assignments on Google Sheets

Flubaroo is a Google Spreadsheets add-on that helps educators quickly grade and analyze online assignments and assessments, as well as share scores with students.

Get scores for each student, and identify students in need of extra help. View average score, and a histogram of scores. Quickly identify questions which a majority of the students missed. Share scores with students via email or Google Drive, along with optional notes to the class and/or to each student. Assign your own score to open-ended questions. Send stickers and badges when you share grades.

Pricing: Flubaroo is free to use.

Written by
Rodney Kuhn