40+ best digital marketing tools in 2024

You know you need software to help up your digital marketing game, but with thousands of apps out there promising to take your marketing strategy to the next level, how do you know which ones are right for you?

Here’s a comprehensive list of over 40 of the best digital marketing tools across various categories, along with their strengths and weaknesses, to help you build your digital marketing toolkit. 

Keep scrolling to learn more about the top digital marketing tools, or click on a category to jump ahead. 

The best digital marketing tools 

What are digital marketing tools? 

Digital marketing tools are apps that help you attract, engage, sell, and retain business online. You’ve likely heard the term thrown around a lot, and that’s because it can include apps in any category related to marketing—from social media to advertising to content optimization. You get the idea. It’s a broad-reaching term. 

Whether you’re starting your first business or you’re looking to scale an existing one, you likely need a collection of digital marketing tools—a digital marketing tech stack—to help you succeed. 

How to find the best tool for digital marketing

There’s no “best” digital marketing tool. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all starter pack. The best tool for digital marketing depends on various factors like budget, team size, and experience level. 

So instead of purporting to have the list to rule them all, my goal here is to help you find the best tools for your unique needs. I’ll suggest apps across various categories you’re likely considering—and maybe some you didn’t even know you needed. And if the suggested apps don’t check all the boxes for you, you’ll also find useful links to the best apps for each of the categories, so you can explore other promising options. 

How do we know these apps deserve to be on this list? The Zapier team and I have spent thousands of combined hours testing countless digital marketing platforms for our best apps lists, and these are the ones that came out on top.

The best digital marketing tools at a glance

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The best digital marketing tools to create website and social media graphics

Eye-catching visuals can make or break your company’s digital presence and branding. The good news is you don’t have to hire a designer or break the bank to get these scroll-stopping graphics. Here are the best tools to help you create high-quality visuals that will capture your target audience.

Unsplash for free stock photos

With over three million photos to choose from, Unsplash offers the most robust library of high-quality images across a wide range of categories, including Business & Work, Travel, and People. Unlike other free stock photo sites, Unsplash also allows you to curate photos you come across into personal collections—like “Festive” and “Mental health”—to use in future campaigns or projects. 

Unsplash also comes with an iOS app, so you can find and download images on the go. And its API is integrated into tools like Figma, WordPress, and Squarespace, which makes it easy to find stock photos without leaving your favorite platforms. 

Unsplash pricing: Free

Canva for template-based designs 

Let’s say you need to add simple text overlays to stock photos. Or perhaps you want to edit your own photos to be shared across different social media platforms. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, Canva makes this easy to do—even if you have zero background in design. 

Canva also offers pre-made design templates for every asset you could possibly need, including Instagram Reels, YouTube thumbnails, and presentations. This way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every design. And for an even faster workflow, take advantage of Canva AI—their AI-powered tools allow you to do things like generate and edit images using only text prompts.

Canva pricing: Free for limited access to most of the features you need, including design templates, stock photos, and AI-powered design tools; $10/month (billed annually) for Canva Pro, which offers unlimited access to more design templates, stock photos, and AI tools. 

DALL·E 3 for an easy-to-use AI image generator 

DALL·E 3—the latest version of OpenAI’s AI image generator—has a lot going for it. But what makes it stand out is that it’s ridiculously simple to use, especially now that it’s integrated with ChatGPT. Enter your prompt (what you want DALL·E to create), click Generate, and within a few seconds, you’ll have two AI-generated images to choose from. You can use DALL·E to create app mockups, ideate physical products, generate custom art pieces—the list goes on. You can even make light edits using natural language prompts.

And if you connect DALL·E to Zapier, you can automate your AI image generation to create images straight from the other apps you use most. Learn more about how to automate art inspiration with DALL·E and Zapier, or get started with one of these workflows.

DALL·E pricing: DALL·E 3 is included as part of ChatGPT Plus at $20/month and available for free through Microsoft Copilot

Read more:  How to automate AI image generation

The best digital marketing tools for editing photos 

While AI image generators are fun to play with, more often than not, what you really need is an app to make your photos shine. Here are the best digital marketing tools for manually editing photos or with an assist from AI. 

Adobe Photoshop for a powerful photo editing and design app

When it comes to image-editing tools, Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for a reason: it’s the most powerful full-featured image-editing and design app around—and that extends to its AI features.

Photoshop includes the advanced tools professional designers need, like layers, masking, blending modes, and RAW support. In terms of what photo editing tasks Photoshop can’t do…that’s still to be seen. To take the app’s capabilities even further, you can integrate it with a wealth of third-party plug-ins and extensions. The only downside? There’s a steep learning curve. 

You can also use Adobe Photoshop in tandem with Lightroom—another Adobe image editor that’s geared more toward managing and processing photos. Lightroom also integrates with Zapier, so you can automate your photo editing workflows. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Adobe Photoshop pricing: From $19.99/month for the Photography Plan, which includes Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. 

Pixlr E and X for an easy-to-use AI editor 

To clarify, Pixlr E and Pixlr X are two different apps: Pixlr E is the “advanced editor,” while Pixlr X is the beginner-friendly option. But honestly, both apps are easy to use. 

Pixlr E (pictured above) is a convincing replica of the industry leader, Photoshop. From tool selection to layers and even features like blending modes and opacity settings, every Pixlr E feature works just like you’d expect it to in Photoshop. Pixlr X is the equivalent of Adobe Express—it’s a great alternative for power users and graphic newbies alike to perform quick and easy edits. 

Both Pixlr E and X are featured here because of how they save you time when used together. For example, since Pixlr saves projects in a combined library, you can pop a photo into Pixlr X for a quick retouch, then switch back to Pixlr E for more advanced editing. 

Pixlr pricing: Free for limited AI use and 3 image saves per day; from $1.99/month for Plus, with 80 monthly AI credits, unlimited saves, and no ads.

The best digital marketing tools for social media management 

Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use to find new clients, drive traffic to your website, and engage with customers. But doing all of this is next to impossible using regular consumer apps. To do it effectively, you need a social media management app. Here are the best social media management tools that allow you to automate, analyze, and manage your social media presence all in one place. 

Buffer for tailoring posts to each channel

When you have to be on multiple channels and want to tailor your posts to all of them, Buffer is the tool for the job.

When you create a new post, the AI Assistant detects which social media channel you’re writing for and adapts the output accordingly. After it generates the first option, you can cycle through more, ask to rewrite, or use the expand/shorten options as needed. 

The AI assistant is impressive, but the rest of the supporting cast is also strong. You can run multichannel campaigns—they work like email marketing drip campaigns—so you can reach the perfect balance between recurring and fresh content.

And now that you’re turning each idea into 10 tailor-made posts, you’ll want to connect Buffer to Zapier, so you can move data and trigger automations while you sleep. Learn how to automate Buffer with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Buffer pricing: Free plan includes 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, and 100 ideas; $5/month/channel (billed annually) for the Essentials plan, which includes 2,000 scheduled posts, engagement tools, detailed analytics, and storage for 2,000 ideas.

FeedHive for content recycling and conditional posting 

It’s not a crime to repurpose content. Quite the opposite. As your follower count grows, your new audience deserves to get the full picture of what you stand for, and your long-time fans could use a refresher.

FeedHive is a great tool for this. It uses AI to take posts you already published and reuse them in a new post for the same or different channel. It also leverages AI to help you fine-tune your posts for maximum engagement. 

You can also create post categories in FeedHive, allowing you to build a system out of your content schedule. For example, if you post how-tos on Monday, inspirational content on Wednesday, and a short-form video on Friday, you can lock in these categories on a weekly calendar. After that, you can create posts and assign them to these categories. They’ll be queued and will go out at the right time, in the right slot.

FeedHive pricing: Creator plan starts at $19/month for 4 social accounts with AI Writing Assistant included. AI hashtag suggestions and AI performance prediction available only on higher paid plans.

Read more: How to create social media posts with AI for free

The best digital marketing tools for making presentations 

Creating polished presentations is a tedious and time-consuming task—and that’s after you’ve outlined your slides. If you’re delivering a basic presentation, the classics like Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides will do the trick. But if you want to quickly create professional-looking slideshows that actually keep your audiences engaged, here are the best apps for making presentations. 

Gamma for generative AI features 

With Gamma, you can leverage the power of AI to generate a fully fleshed-out deck in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document—pick a presentation theme, and watch as your slides come to life. 

The results will likely need some fine-tuning—Gamma’s much more geared toward the iterative chatbot experience (à la ChatGPT)—but it still provides a useful jumping-off point. Gamma also offers a couple of practical features that help you keep your audience focused on the topic at hand: 

• Content blocks: group your content into collapsible blocks directly on your slide, expanding them only when you’re ready to present. 

• Spotlight: highlight one talking point at a time, while Gamma automatically fades out the rest. 

Gamma pricing: Free Starter plan includes unlimited users, 400 AI deck credits, and basic analytics; $8/user/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan that includes unlimited AI credits up to 15 cards and no “Made with Gamma” badge.

Beautiful.ai for AI-powered design

If you need help making your data and ideas look as good as they should, then Beautiful.ai is for you. As the name suggests, Beautiful.ai uses AI to automatically modify your presentations—from layouts to alignment to granular spacing issues. Need to edit your slides further? The platform is a little different from most presentation software, but it’s still intuitive to use. For example, to resize an image, simply drag a handle to make it bigger or smaller. 

And if you use Google Drive, you can connect it with Beautiful.ai to quickly save all your presentations in your go-to cloud storage app, making it more convenient for sharing and team collaboration.  

Beautiful.ai pricing: $12/month (billed annually) for the Pro plan that includes unlimited slides, AI content generation, and PowerPoint import/export; $40/user/month for the Team plan that includes extra collaboration and workspace features, like a shared asset library, and custom brand controls.

The best digital marketing tools for webinar hosting 

Webinars are a great way to increase your brand awareness, move leads through the sales funnel, and amplify your brand’s authority. But there’s more to hosting a webinar than simply creating compelling content—you also need to invite and manage attendees, interact with your audience, and actually run the webinar. This is where webinar software comes in. Here are the best webinar hosting platforms to help you streamline and automate all the logistics related to running a successful webinar. 

Zoom for a familiar user experience 

Chances are you’re already familiar with Zoom for video conferencing. But the same features that make it great for connecting with your teammates also make it ideal for hosting webinars, especially if you’re presenting a lot of videos or featuring multiple panelists. 

Since Zoom is such a popular tool, it’s safe to assume that everyone already has it installed on their computer and configured to work. This means that joining your webinar is as simple as clicking a link. 

Once your webinar’s live, Zoom offers additional features to create a dynamic webinar, including side-by-side views and engagement-boosting tools like Q&A, polling, and reactions. You can even connect Zoom with Facebook and YouTube, so you can extend your reach, or connect Zoom to Zapier to automate your webinar workflows. Learn more about how to automate Zoom, or get started with one of these premade templates.

Zoom Webinars pricing: Starts at $79/month (or $690/year), which includes up to 500 attendees and limited event analytics and reporting.

Livestorm for managing multiple webinars 

If you host webinars on a regular basis, you need an app that automatically tracks your event schedule, so you don’t have to. Enter: Livestorm. In addition to webinar schedule management and an easy-to-use interface, Livestorm comes fully loaded with all the features you need to host a webinar and keep your audience coming back for more: 

• Customizable registration forms that you can send via email, share via link, or embed right on your website. 

• Pre-built, automated email flows for every event, which you can edit or send as is. 

• Custom calls to action that can be pushed live any time during the event.

Livestorm also offers in-depth event analytics, so you can fine-tune your webinar based on what’s working for your audience—and what’s not. 

You can also connect Livestorm with the other apps in your stack via Zapier. With the Livestorm and Zapier integration, you can automate new registrant notifications and changes to your CRM data.

Livestorm pricing: Free plan includes up to 20-minute sessions and 30 live attendees per event; Pro plan starts at $79/month (billed annually), which includes up to 4 hours per session, 100 live attendees per event, and HubSpot integration. 

Read more: Automate your webinar marketing

The best digital marketing tools for video creation and hosting 

As social media platforms increasingly favor videos over still images, successful businesses need to jump on the video train if they want to get in front of their customers. While adding another medium (and all its related efforts) sounds daunting, AI video generators and video hosting platforms can help you streamline the process. Here are the best tools for the job. 

Peech for an intuitive workflow  

When it comes to content, it’s no longer enough to CO;TD (create once, tailor distribution). Peech speeds up the work of tweaking one asset to fit every channel’s technical specs and target audience.  

For example, you can highlight specific lines of a webinar transcript, and Peech’s built-in AI tools (available only on paid plans) will automatically transform them into videos with subtitles and sized to platform-specific ratios, ready to be published.

Peech pricing: Free plan includes 2 downloads and 3 video uploads per month with a Peech watermark; Creator plan for $89/seat/month (billed annually) gets you 10 uploads and downloads per month with a Peech watermark and a limited set of AI features.

Read more: How to automate your video post-production tasks

Wistia for marketing-rich features

If your primary objective for sharing videos is to generate leads and optimize your ROI, Wistia is the app for you. With Wistia, you can gate your content and use the app’s Turnstile email collector to prompt viewers to enter their email address, so they can access your video. Once a viewer enters their information, they’re automatically added to your email list using Wistia’s email integrations, including email marketing software like Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp. 

If you don’t want to gate your content, Wistia offers other powerful video marketing features, including annotation links, end-of-video CTAs, and detailed video stats. And you can connect Wistia to Zapier to automate your video hosting workflows. Here are a few premade templates to get you started. 

Wistia pricing: Free plan includes ten 15-minute videos with Wistia branding, basic video analytics, and Zoom and social media integrations; $19/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan that includes 20 30-minute videos with no Wistia branding, basic CTAs, and email integrations.

YouTube for free video hosting and its existing viewership 

If you want to increase your reach, YouTube is your best bet. Thanks to the platform’s popularity and built-in audience of over 120 million active daily users already interested in video content, all you need to do is optimize your videos for search—or encourage fans to “smash that Like and Subscribe button”—and you may be able to build a native audience.

Of course, you still have the option to add the videos to your website with a simple embed code—but note that every YouTube video embedded on an external website looks like a YouTube video.

When you connect YouTube with Zapier, you can automatically handle the manual tasks that otherwise make channel-building a chore. Learn more about how to automate YouTube, or get started with one of these workflows. 

YouTube pricing: Free for uploading and hosting videos.

The best digital marketing tools for building websites 

If you want to increase your brand’s visibility, you need a website. While building a website these days isn’t particularly difficult, it’s still time-consuming. That’s where website builders come in. Here’s the best free website builder you can use to build your website. 

Wix for an all-around site builder

If you need to build a website to do things like sell products, take bookings, or run a blog, Wix is a solid choice. And since you can access a lot of the necessary features on a free plan, it’s a budget-friendly option. 

You can create a website from scratch, choose from over 800 design templates, or use Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to create a site, complete with AI-generated writing and visuals. These powerful AI features are also why Wix tops our list for the best AI website builders. From there, customizing your site is intuitive with Wix’s drag-and-drop editor. Wix also offers detailed SEO features to help you rank on search. While it won’t replace hiring an SEO expert, it’s a good leg up.

As an added bonus, Wix integrates with Zapier, which means you can automatically send form submissions wherever you need them. Learn more about how to automate Wix, or use one of these pre-made templates to get you started.

Wix pricing: Free plan includes .wixsite.com domain, and basic features; $17/month (billed annually) for the Light plan, which includes no Wix branding, a custom domain, and a light marketing suite.

The best digital marketing tools for building eCommerce websites

Every business has its own ideal format—some operate best completely online, while others prefer a little in-person mingling. However you want to sell your products, the right website builder makes it easy to quickly start selling online.  Here are the best eCommerce website builders to help you do everything from listing products to processing payments to shipping inventory. 

Shopify for getting up and running quickly 

If you primarily want to sell your products online, Shopify makes it easy to get an online store up and running quickly. Shopify’s web app is intuitive to use: everything is clearly labeled and buttons do what you think they should. For example, if you want to add a product, all you have to do is click Products in the sidebar, and then the Add Product button. Fill in all the relevant details (for example, product name, price, and quantity), and bam—it’s ready to be sold in your online store. 

While Shopify ticks most boxes right out the gate, its extensibility and app store are what really make it such a powerful and popular option.

Shopify also integrates with Zapier, so if you want to automatically add new customers to your email marketing list, track orders with a project management tool, or connect Shopify to any of the other apps you use, you can easily do it. Learn more about how to automate Shopify, or get started with one of these workflows.

If Shopify offers more bells and whistles than your business needs, check out these Shopify alternatives instead.

Shopify pricing: Free for 3 days; $29/month (billed annually) for the Basic plan that includes basic reports, shipping discount, and credit card rates of 2.9% + $0.30 per online transaction.

Square for selling in person and online

If you run a small business that sells products online and in person (primarily in the U.S.), Square is the way to go. With Square’s free plan, you can set up a fully functional eCommerce store in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is complete the questionnaire about your business and its needs. Then Square will guide you through the process of configuring your online store to meet them. 

Square also offers basic email marketing features, so you can keep in touch with your customers, run ad campaigns, or get customer feedback—all while growing your revenue. It also syncs your online and offline products under a single dashboard, making it easy to manage your inventory.

One notable downside to Square is that its storefront customization options (or lack thereof) offer little flexibility in terms of the look and feel of your site. 

Square also integrates with Zapier, so you can connect it to thousands of other apps. Here are popular ways to automate Square, plus some pre-made workflows to get you started.

Square pricing: Free with a 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction includes an unlimited catalog, basic site layouts and controls, marketing tools, and a Square branded site; $29/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan with a 2.9% + $0.30 fee per transaction includes a custom domain and advanced design features with no Square branding.

Read more: Shopify vs. Square

The best digital marketing tools for building landing pages 

Landing pages are a great way to test new ideas, so you can adapt to whatever seems to resonate with your target audience. Since the key to landing pages is iteration, you need a landing page builder that can move as fast as the ideas flowing from your brain. Here are the best landing page builders to help you create professional landing pages in a matter of hours—or even minutes.  

Carrd for making free landing pages 

If you need to make basic landing pages without breaking the bank, Carrd is one of the best options out there—and most of its core features are available for free. 

Select one of the landing page themes, and get to editing. While most of the editing tools are simple to use—for example, drag content containers in a snap-and-fit motion—editing text isn’t as intuitive: you have to click the text, and then edit it in the sidebar. But Carrd does support Markdown formatting for a faster way to customize your copy. 

To add marketing features like forms and third-party widget embeds like Stripe and PayPal to process payments, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro Standard plan. But at $19/year, it’s still a reasonable price. 

Carrd pricing: Free plan includes access to core Carrd features and 3 sites with “Made with Carrd” branding; $19/year for Pro Standard includes up to 10 sites with no branding, custom domain URLs, and Google Analytics. 

Unbounce for small businesses with a budget 

Unbounce offers every landing page feature you could possibly want: design templates, drag-and-drop builder, AI-powered tools—like Smart Builder, which automatically generates a landing page based on how you intend to use it—and even pop-ups and sticky bars.

Unbounce’s real power, however, is in its A/B testing and targeting tools. For example, you can dynamically replace text on your page, so you could change your headline to say “Human Resource Management Apps” or “HR Management Tools,” depending on what someone’s searching for. 

Unbounce does come at a fairly steep price, though—and an even steeper learning curve. But if you’re prepared to invest the time, Unbounce will make it worth your while.

Since you’re spending a pretty penny to make it happen, you’ll want to be sure you get your leads where you need them. Connect Unbounce with Zapier, so you can automatically add new leads to your CRM, event marketing, or email marketing tool. Learn more about how to automate Unbounce, or get started with one of these templates. 

Unbounce pricing: $59/month (billed annually) for the Build plan that includes unlimited landing pages, 1 domain, and 20,000 monthly visitors; $112/month for the Experiment plan includes dynamic text replacement, limited AI features, and A/B testing.

Read more: Automatic workflows to get the most out of your landing page

Zapier Interfaces for building landing pages quickly

Zapier Interfaces lets you create landing pages either from scratch or from an ever-expanding library of templates. All your data is then stored inside Zapier Tables (a no-code cloud database). 

What sets Zapier Interfaces apart from other landing page builders is how it integrates with your Zaps (automated workflows). You can add buttons at any point of your landing page sequence to trigger a Zap, making your landing page the starting point for automation and data transfer. 

You don’t have to ditch your existing apps, either. With the Zapier Interfaces integration, you can connect your favorite tools and automatically update your data with the latest info. This way, you can do things like send leads that come in through your landing page directly to your email marketing tool.

Interfaces pricing: Free; Advanced customization and configuration options available for an additional $20/month. 

The best digital marketing tools for doing keyword research 

In a highly-competitive market, anything you can do to boost your search presence is a plus. And with the right keyword research tool, it’s easy to find the right keywords to target—without breaking the bank. Here’s the best free keyword research tool to simplify and streamline your research process. If you’re looking for something beyond keyword research, there are plenty of other SEO tools to choose from:

Ahrefs Free SEO Tools for simple SEO tools

Ahrefs Free SEO Tools can handle just about anything a basic SEO operation needs: keyword research, yes, but also link building, ranking and traffic monitoring, and SEO audits. Among other tools, the full suite of free SEO tools includes a Free Keyword Generator (up to 150 keyword ideas), Keyword Difficulty Checker (difficulty score, backlink estimate, and basic SERP analysis), and Keyword Rank Checker. 

While these free tools won’t give you the same in-depth data you’d get on a paid plan, it’s still a pretty robust set of tools for zero dollars. And if your budget changes, you can always upgrade.

Ahrefs pricing: Free; $83/month (billed annually) for the Lite plan includes 500 credits per month, 5 keywords lists, and AI-generated keyword ideas.

The best AI chatbots for marketing research

Whether you’re in the beginning stages of starting a business or you’re revamping your marketing strategy, there’s a lot of research involved in developing buyer personas, identifying competitors, and getting tips for how to fill in existing market gaps. But you don’t have to do all the heavy lifting yourself. Here are the best AI chatbots to use for early-stage marketing research. 

ChatGPT for the industry standard 

ChatGPT has dominated the chatbot conversation ever since it came on the scene in late 2022. The app is extremely simple to use: enter your prompt and watch as ChatGPT spits out a response within a matter of seconds. 

One thing worth emphasizing is that ChatGPT shouldn’t be used as a standalone research tool, especially since it’s been known to generate factually inaccurate responses. Instead, you might find it to be better at brainstorming blog ideas, writing long-form articles or business emails, and coming up with content marketing ideas. 

If you use the more powerful GPT-4 model (available on paid plans), you have more flexibility—it’s trained on a much larger dataset and it’s more accurate with its writing output. With a paid plan, you can also build your own custom ChatGPT, trained with your own knowledge source files.

When you connect ChatGPT with Zapier, you can also integrate ChatGPT into your existing workflows. Learn more about how to automate ChatGPT, or get started with one of these examples. 

ChatGPT pricing: Free for GPT-3.5 Turbo; $20/month for ChatGPT Plus, which gives you access to the latest GPT model and general access to ChatGPT, even during peak times.

Gemini for a better research experience

Google Gemini (formerly Google Bard) offers a lot of what ChatGPT does, faster, and for free. But here are the features that really set it apart: 

• Real-time data: Gemini is powered by Gemini Pro and can offer responses based on real-time, current events. 

• Response exports: You can export your Gemini responses to a Google Doc or a Gmail draft—fully formatted and ready to go.  

• Web images: In addition to generating AI images for free, Gemini can surface relevant images from Google Search. You can also click on an image, and Gemini will open the web page with the image source in a new browser tab.

With Zapier’s Google Vertex AI and Google AI Studio integrations, you can also access the model behind Gemini from all the apps you use at work. It’s a little less applicable to the everyday user, but it works. Here are a few examples to get you started.

Google Bard pricing: Free to users who have access. 

Read more: Gemini vs. ChatGPT

The best digital marketing tools for building your own chatbot 

These days most websites have a built-in chatbot available to answer customer queries. Chatbots allow customers to find what they need faster and increase the likelihood that they’ll continue to work with you—a true win-win. And bots are easier to build than ever, thanks to a variety of no-code tools. Here are the best chatbot builders.   

Manychat for a straightforward bot-building experience

From its easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor to its extremely reasonable price point, Manychat is a solid option for building your own chatbot. Even on a free plan, you get access to many features that most other chatbot builders charge for: audience segmentation, growth tools, and unlimited chatbot flows. But your chatbot does come with the Manychat branding. 

Choose from over 25 templates, and customize them using a wide range of available triggers and actions. And with Manychat’s no-code visual editor (think: flowchart), it’s easy to understand how conversations will flow based on any given response or action. 

Manychat also works on popular channels like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, and SMS. The only downside is that the website widget redirects people to Messenger, rather than offering a built-in chat box, which can be frustrating. 

For now, Manychat doesn’t offer any built-in GPT-powered features—though you can still integrate it yourself. You can also use Zapier to connect Manychat to your other apps to get even more out of it. Learn how to automate Manychat with Zapier, or get started with one of these pre-made workflows.

Manychat pricing: Free for up to 1,000 contacts; $15/month for the Pro plan, which includes more channels, analytics, and no Manychat branding.

Zapier Chatbots for building a chatbot for free

Zapier’s free AI Chatbot lets you create custom AI-powered chatbots with the power of GPT. Creating a chatbot is easy: you just give it a name, an optional greeting and prompt placeholder letting chatters know what to do, and then the directive. In the directive, you’ll tell the chatbot who it is, what it knows, and how it should answer. You can even train the bot on specific documents, so it can serve as a knowledge source based on your documentation. Alternatively, you can kickstart the process by using a premade template like the Customer Service bot, the Lead Gen bot, or the Sales Support bot.

Once you’ve created your chatbot, share it through a direct link or, if you have Chatbots premium, embed it on your website.

You can also integrate Zapier Chatbots with the rest of your tech stack. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

Zapier Chatbots pricing: Free plan includes 2 chatbots powered by GPT-3.5; from $20/month for 5 chatbots, 1 knowledge source, and the ability to embed it on your website.

Zapier Central for working hand in hand with AI bots

If you use Zapier automation to help you scale, AI can support that process by analyzing, interpreting, and acting on data. Zapier Central brings it all together under one roof.

Central is an experimental AI workspace that lets you teach AI bots how to tackle tasks—no code required. Those bots can finish work, automatically, across all your favorite apps.

Think of these bots as mini teammates who help you with specific tasks, like analyzing data or drafting responses to customers. By chatting directly with AI, you can train them by showing them the exact behaviors to follow—without using a line of code.

Zapier Central pricing: Free during public preview

The best digital marketing tools for building forms and surveys

Online forms and surveys are some of the best ways to get the information you need from your audience. But your ability to create a good survey is only as good as the tools in your arsenal. Whether you’re creating a simple registration form or a detailed market research survey, here are the best tools for building forms and surveys, so you can collect important information—and then do something with it. 

Google Forms for quickly creating powerful forms for free

At the low price of free and unlimited everything (forms, questions, submissions, and collaboration), Google Forms is hard to beat. The app provides the same simple yet powerful interface you may be used to if you use other Google apps like Google Docs and Google Sheets. 

You can create a form from scratch. Or, to speed up the form creation process, Google Forms offers 17 form templates, each pre-loaded with stock questions you can edit. As you edit, Google Forms tries to guess what kind of questions you’re adding to the form, and then modifies it accordingly. For example, if you type, “How do you rate…”, Forms will automatically update the question type to linear scale. Need to add more advanced features like skip logic? It’s hidden, but it’s there. 

When the responses start pouring in, you can view them as graphs, pie charts, or simple lists (depending on the question type), making it easier to understand the data. 

Once you have your data, you can connect Google Forms to Zapier to be sure it gets to the right place. Here are some ideas for how you can automate Google Forms. Or you can get started with one of these templates.  

Google Forms pricing: Free for unlimited everything. 

Typeform for conversational forms 

If you’re looking for a form builder with more capabilities like advanced customization, embeddable chatbots, and complex logic paths, Typeform is a solid option for beginners and advanced survey builders. 

Create a form from scratch, choose from over 100 form templates, or let Typeform’s AI build a form for you. From there, you can modify the design by switching up the question card layouts, fonts, icons, and alignments. Typeform makes it easy to share your form via email, social media, or QR code. You can even embed the form on your website as a chat window, showing the questions card by card, making it a truly conversational form. 

To help you get even more out of your responses, Typeform offers the ability to tag submissions, letting you organize them by your own categories, or even attach tasks if a response requires a follow-up. 

You can also connect Typeform to Zapier, making sure all your Typeform data gets to where you want it, and even sending out automated follow-ups. For more inspiration, check out other ways to automate Typeform. Or click on a template to get started.

Typeform pricing: Free for up to three surveys with ten questions each; $25/month (billed annually) for the Basic plan gets you unlimited forms and questions, and up to 100 responses each month.

The best digital marketing tools for AI-powered content writing and editing

You’re probably familiar with ChatGPT as the leading AI text generator tool (for now), but if you’re looking to test AI-powered writing assistants, here are the best AI-powered tools to take your writing and editing to the next level. 

Jasper for writing long-form content 

Jasper is an AI-powered writing assistant that’s arguably the best at generating high-quality marketing assets of any length. But quality comes at a cost: Jasper is one of the pricier AI text generators on the market.

As with most AI text generators, you can get Jasper to create content based on a template—for example, a blog post, social media ad, and eCommerce product descriptions. Or, you can start from scratch in a Google Docs-like editor. And since Jasper uses the best grammar, language, and plagiarism tools available, you’ll have a solid first draft right from the start. 

Jasper can also be trained to write in multiple brand “voices,” so it can produce different results depending on the medium you’re writing for. Want to optimize your content for search? Jasper integrates with tools for SEO and performance ranking, making it easy to ensure that you’re creating the highest-performing content possible. 

Jasper also integrates with Zapier, which means you can connect it to all the other apps you use at work and put your AI text generation on autopilot. Learn more about how to automate Jasper, or try one of the pre-built workflows below.

Jasper pricing: $39/month (billed annually) for the Creator plan, which includes 1 seat, 1 brand voice, and the ability to save content templates; $59/month for the Pro plan includes 10 knowledge assets, 3 brand voices, and assets for 3 marketing campaigns.

Writesonic for GPT-4 content 

If having the latest and greatest AI model matters to you, Writesonic is the app for you. Writesonic offers features that you’d expect from any other AI text generator, including a Google Docs-style editor, templates, and a browser extension, but what sets it apart from other apps is that it dynamically toggles between multiple AI models to generate the best output. 

To help you save even more time, Writesonic offers an AI article writer, which generates blog posts that are already optimized for search, complete with internal links, and you can customize the length (up to 5,000 words). 

You can also connect Writesonic to Zapier to automate more of your content creation processes. Learn more about how to automate Writesonic, or get started with one of these premade workflows. 

Writesonic pricing: Free trial includes 25 generations per month and 25 credits (one time) to use advanced features like AI Article Writer; $16/month (billed annually) for the Individual plan, which includes Writesonic, Chatsonic, and Photosonic (AI image generator), and other advanced features.

Read more: Writesonic vs. Jasper

Grammarly for all-around editing 

Now that you have a close-to-final draft in hand, it’s time to edit and refine. And the best AI grammar checker tool for the job, without a doubt, is Grammarly. It comes fully loaded with most of the editing features you need: spelling and grammar checker, custom style guide, and plagiarism checker. The only built-in feature that’s missing is the ability to reword sentences within the document, but you can use its Free Paraphrasing Tool for that. 

One thing worth mentioning is that sometimes the suggestions are off—or totally wrong. For example, Grammarly will always suggest that “lululemon” be edited to “Lululemon” (which is not how the company treats its name). But if you’re on a business plan, you can create a style guide for your organization, and Grammarly will take that into account when it gives you feedback on your writing. 

The recent addition of a generative AI tool, GrammarlyGO, adds a few extra editing features, including options to identify gaps in writing, offer general improvement ideas, and pick out the main point. They aren’t particularly insightful (yet), but it’s nice to see Grammarly continuing to develop its tools.

Grammarly pricing: Free includes basic writing suggestions and 100 GrammarlyGO prompts/month; $12/month for the Premium plan includes full-sentence rewrites, plagiarism detection, and 1,000 GrammarlyGO prompts/month. 

The best digital marketing tools for email marketing

Email marketing tools allow you to tap into one of the most effective marketing channels: email. These platforms make it easy to connect directly with your target customers, deliver the right message to the right people at the right time, and gain valuable insight into customer behavior. From sending email newsletters to drip campaigns and the software that powers it all, here are the best tools for email marketing. 

Benchmark Email for a full-featured email marketing app

If you’re looking for a powerful email newsletter platform, you can’t go wrong with Benchmark Email. This app has it all: easy-to-use automation, segmentation, and a supremely intuitive editor.

Create a newsletter from scratch, pull in a past email and edit, or choose from nearly 100 well-designed email templates, and then use the drag-and-drop editor to customize it. You can also build landing pages to help grow your subscribers using the same drag-and-drop editing tools.

Benchmark Email also offers robust analytics on actions like opens, clicks, bounces, and unsubscribes. And you can take it one step further with a click map of your email content and subscriber-level activity. 

When you connect Benchmark with Zapier, you can automate tasks like adding new subscribers to your email list and validating email addresses. Here are a few examples to get you started.

Benchmark pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts, 3,500 emails/month, and basic features; starts at $13/month for the Pro plan, which includes up to 500 contacts, 7,500 emails/month, landing pages, and A/B testing. 

Read more: Email marketing automation ideas

Mailchimp for a trusted name  

At this point, Mailchimp is almost synonymous with “email marketing platform”—and it’s obvious why: it offers a magical combo of robust features, approachability, and cost-effectiveness. The app includes a landing page builder, customer journey mapping, list segmentation, retargeting ads, and even A/B testing—all in its free plan.

Once you’re ready to move beyond what the free plan offers, Mailchimp makes scaling accessible with three different paid tiers. Plus, Mailchimp can handle email programs of any size: if you can afford to let it grow with you, you’ll never have to switch to another app.

On top of all this, Mailchimp also offers other marketing tools for social media, eCommerce, lead forms, landing pages, and websites, making it a truly all-in-one tool for all your marketing needs. And you can connect Mailchimp to Zapier to automate your email marketing workflows. Here are a few ideas to get you started. 

Mailchimp pricing: Free for up to 500 contacts and up to 1,000 sends/month with limited features; starts at $13/month (billed annually) for the Essentials plan, which includes access to all email templates, custom branding, expanded automation features, and A/B testing functionality.

ActiveCampaign for advanced drip email campaign automations

If you need to create customized journeys for your subscribers, the range of triggers, conditions, and actions ActiveCampaign offers makes it the best email drip campaign tool for the job. 

The app offers all the features you’d expect from an email marketing platform, but this is its standout feature: you can add a “Goal,” which serves as an objectives tracker. If the objective is met—say, the customer buys a seat in your workshop—you can have the automation skip the rest of the nurturing sequence, and instead add them to the workshop preparation sequence. 

ActiveCampaign takes things a step further by offering basic CRM features, live chat widget and messenger integrations to add to your website, and a website tracking code that helps you gather data. 

To help drive that ROI, you can connect ActiveCampaign with Zapier, too. Expand your subscriber list by bringing leads in from wherever they originate. Learn more about how to automate ActiveCampaign, or get started with one of these templates.

ActiveCampaign pricing: Starts at $29/month (billed annually) for the Marketing Lite plan, which includes email campaigns for up to 1,000 contacts and basic automation features; starts at $49/month for the Plus plan, which includes eCommerce, analytics, SMS marketing, and abandoned cart automation. 

Read more: ActiveCampaign vs. Mailchimp

The best digital marketing tools for SMS marketing 

If you have a small business, SMS is one of the best ways to keep in contact with your customers. SMS marketing apps let you send order confirmations, booking reminders, and special offers via text message. Best of all, your customers can even text you straight back. Here are the best SMS apps for small businesses. 

SimpleTexting for easy-to-run SMS marketing campaigns 

If you’re looking to quickly run an SMS marketing campaign, SimpleTexting is your best bet. It offers an intuitive user interface, with everything accessible from the main screen—you can even probably get by without viewing any of their tutorials. It’s that easy. 

While you can contact customers directly, SimpleTexting is more focused on easy-to-run marketing campaigns, where you text the same message to everyone on a list. SimpleTexting also lets you conduct more technical marketing efforts like running surveys, polls, and sweepstakes.

There are lots of other nice features, too. You can configure an away message in case a customer texts you when you’re closed, and the cheapest plan comes with three user seats so you can collaborate with your team. You can leave notes on conversations or assign them to your teammates. All in all, it just checks a lot of boxes.

SimpleTexting also integrates with Zapier, so you can do things like automatically send SMS messages to new leads and add subscribers to a SimpleTexting list. Here are a few more ideas to get you started.  

SimpleTexting pricing: From $33.20/month (billed annually) plus a $4 one-time carrier registration for 500 credits to send messages (incoming messages are free). Additional credits cost $0.055 on the entry plan; there are higher volume plans if you need to send more texts.

Sakari for an affordable option 

If you mostly plan to send outgoing text messages to your customers, like booking confirmations, delivery notifications, and other similar texts, Sakari is one of the best options—and could save you some money.

Sakari is a fully-featured SMS messaging app with a great web app, offering all the features you’d expect: send two-way texts, set up autoreplies, create marketing campaigns—the list goes on. 

What sets Sakari apart is the pricing. It starts at $16/month for 500 SMS messages sent or received. Additional messages start at $0.032 compared to SimpleTexting’s $0.055 on the entry plan—and the differences are more extreme with greater volume.

As of this writing, Sakari offers only 11 app integrations. But when you connect Sakari with Zapier, you can unlock thousands more. Here are a few ideas to get you started. 

Sakari pricing: From $16/month for the Starter plan which includes 500 messages sent or received, one free number, and unlimited users and contacts; additional SMS messages from $0.032.

Read more: Automate SMS messaging

The best digital marketing tools for CRM and lead management

Is your current lead management solution disjointed from how you actually connect with your leads and customers? Here are the best customer relationship management (CRM) and lead management apps to help you standardize your workflows and create more consistent touchpoints across channels.

Zoho CRM Plus for an all-in-one CRM for small businesses

Zoho CRM Plus combines sales, marketing, help desk, social, projects, and other channels into an all-in-one solution that gives you the most bang for your buck. Even as you move to pricier tiers, Zoho remains affordable considering all the features you get: advanced reporting, segmentation, integrations, and predictive intelligence, to name a few. 

Overwhelmed with data? Ask Zoho’s resident AI, Zia, questions about your data instead. Zia can even suggest new products and services to offer to your customers and predict how likely they are to do business with you again. Zia is one of the best implementations of AI in the CRM space.

Zoho includes one of the more comprehensive reporting features of all CRMs. Dozens of pre-made reports can be configured to show a range of views (chart, table, and tabular), all of which can be customized. You can even view all the activities and touchpoints, like site visits, sales, emails, and campaigns, related to a customer or lead, giving you a more complete picture of how each person interacts with your company.

Zoho CRM also integrates with Zapier, connecting it to thousands of other apps to maximize your team’s time. Here are a few ways to automate Zoho CRM, or you can start with one of the templates below.

Zoho CRM Plus pricing: $57/month/user (billed annually) includes 10 GB data storage for up to 200 users, one brand (10 social channels), 10 customer service channels, 250+ survey templates, and unlimited reports. 

Read more: How to analyze and score leads with OpenAI’s GPT and Zapier

HubSpot for scaling a business 

Companies looking to scale their operations may naturally think to go with the dominant name in the CRM field: Salesforce Sales Cloud. But since Salesforce’s pricing can be prohibitive, it’s worthwhile to consider the more affordable solution for scaling your business: HubSpot. 

Compared to many other CRMs, HubSpot is easy to use. It also extends its capabilities with sales add-ons, over 1,000 third-party app integrations, and optional Hubs that add service, marketing, and other functions.

HubSpot’s CRM tool automatically logs emails with your contacts, helps sales teams navigate and chart sales opportunities, and syncs data across all marketing properties, making it easier to track all your contact interactions and close more leads. 

And you can connect HubSpot to Zapier, so it works with all your other digital marketing tools. Learn more about how to automate HubSpot, or get started with one of these workflows. 

HubSpot pricing: Free for up to 5 users; starts at $15/seat/month (billed annually) for the Marketing Hub Starter plan, which includes 10 email automations, list segmentation, and reporting dashboards.

Read more: The ultimate guide to CRM automation

The best digital marketing tools for marketing automation 

Without automation, marketing teams would be spending most of their valuable time checking off tedious tasks instead of focusing on high-impact, big-picture tasks. There are tons of marketing tools out there that enable you to build automated workflows, but some shine above the rest. Here are the best tools for marketing automation.

Brevo for an affordable all-in-one solution

When it comes to marketing automation, Brevo gives you the best bang for your buck. While the platform is relatively simple and lacks the flexibility of other tools, even on a free plan, you can automate email, SMS, chat (including social media), and WhatsApp—more mediums than most paid marketing software.  

Brevo’s workflow builder also offers a ton of options, including conditions like delays and A/B splits, and actions like webhooks and CRM updates. And the app isn’t limited to just a marketing workflow builder—its built-in features extend its capabilities to also be your CRM and meeting scheduling tool.

When you connect Brevo with Zapier, you can automatically do things like add contacts from other marketing platforms straight to Brevo. Here are a couple of examples to get you started. Plus, discover more popular ways to automate Brevo with Zapier.

Brevo pricing: Free plan includes one user, unlimited contacts, 300 emails/day, and Brevo branding; Starts at $22/month (billed annually) for the Marketing Starter plan, which includes 20,000 emails/month, and basic reporting and analytics. Remove the Brevo branding for an additional $12/month (available on paid plans).

Klaviyo for user-friendliness

The platform also provides several jumping-off points for creating automated workflows to do things like prevent lost sales, nurture subscribers, build customer loyalty, update customers on their order status, and send abandoned cart reminders.

Zapier is among Klaviyo’s more than 300 integrations. Pair Klaviyo with Zapier to do things like create subscribers from website form submissions or add contacts to your customer list in your favorite PPC platform. For more inspiration, check out other ways to automate Klaviyo. Or get started with one of these premade templates. 

Klaviyo pricing: Free plan includes up to 250 contacts, 500 monthly email sends, and 150 free monthly SMS/MMS credits; the Email plan starts at $30/month, which includes up to 1,500 contacts, 15,000 monthly email sends, and mobile push notifications.

Automate your digital marketing tools

A comprehensive digital marketing tech stack is crucial to growing your business. But these apps also require a lot of work to keep running. 

With Zapier, you can connect your business-critical apps with the other tools your team uses most—like form builders and meeting schedulers—so you can streamline your processes and easily scale your efforts. Here are some automation resources to get you started.