Business Tools

A curated list of tools and services useful for building and running online businesses. Categories are organised by function.

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General

• Free For Dev — A comprehensive list of free tiers and services for developers.

Ecommerce Platforms

• Shopify
• BigCommerce
• WooCommerce
• Squarespace
• Wix
• PrestaShop
• OpenCart
• Magento — Now Adobe Commerce.
• Volusion

Note: 3dcart has rebranded to Shift4Shop. Weebly has been largely absorbed into Square Online. Etsy and Salesforce are listed under Marketplaces and CRM respectively.

Marketplaces

• Etsy — Handmade and vintage goods marketplace.

CRM

• Salesforce

Point of Sale (POS)

• Ecrebo

Content Management Systems

• WordPress
• Strapi — Open-source headless CMS.
• Contentful
• Contentstack
• Amplience
• Prismic
• Sanity
• Storyblok
• ButterCMS
• DatoCMS

Note: GraphCMS has rebranded to Hygraph.

Search Engines

• Algolia
• Elasticsearch
• Solr
• Typesense — A modern, open-source alternative to Algolia.
• Amazon CloudSearch
• SearchSpring

Note: Swiftype and Searchify have seen limited recent activity. Sphinx remains available but Elasticsearch and Typesense are more commonly adopted today.

Personalisation

• Dynamic Yield — Now part of Mastercard.
• Monetate
• Qubit

Note: Evergage has been acquired by Salesforce and integrated into their platform.

Supply Chain

• Blue Yonder
• Comestri

Order and Delivery Tracking

• Bringg
• Metapack

Ecommerce Analytics

• Sales Samurai
• eRank — Etsy sales analytics.

Note: Ech Spy (echspy.com) appears to be defunct. Verify before use.

Monitoring

• Sentry — Error monitoring and performance tracking.
• New Relic — Full-stack observability.
• Datadog — Cloud monitoring and analytics.
• Noibu — Ecommerce frontend monitoring.

Note: AppDynamics has been part of Cisco for some time. Its positioning has shifted; evaluate whether Datadog or New Relic better suits your needs.

Images

• Midjourney — AI image generation.
• Raw Pixel — Free and paid stock images.
• Thumbly — YouTube thumbnail generator.
• Jasper AI — AI-generated artwork.

Note: DeepAI (deepai.org) has limited its free offerings significantly. Midjourney and Jasper are the more reliable options today.

Image Editing

• Fotor
• Canva — Also listed under Design; handles light image editing well.

Logos

• Placeit — Logo and branding marketplace.
• Looka — AI-powered logo generator.
• Brandmark
• Logo Maker

Illustrations and Icons

• Undraw — Open-source SVG illustrations.
• Lordicon — Animated icon packs.
• Iconscout

Design

• Figma
• Canva
• Sketch — macOS only.
• Adobe XD

Note: InVision has significantly scaled back its product offerings. Figma is now the dominant tool for collaborative design prototyping.

Print on Demand

• Printify
• Printful

Voice Over

• Well Said Labs — AI-powered voice-over generation.

Video Generation

• Pictory — Converts blog posts and scripts into video automatically.
• Synthesia — AI avatar video generation.

Note: Magisto has been acquired by Vimeo and rebranded. Use Vimeo's video tools or Pictory as alternatives.

Product Photography

• Pebblely — AI-generated product backgrounds.

Feature Flags

• Unleash — Open-source feature flag platform.
• Split — Now part of Harness.
• LaunchDarkly

A/B Testing

• Optimizely
• Monetate

CV Generators

• FlowCV
• Kickresume
• Resume.io
• ResumeLab
• Resume Genius

VPN

• WireGuard — Self-hosted VPN protocol. Lightweight and fast.
• Algo VPN — An Ansible-based script to deploy a personal WireGuard or IPsec VPN.

Stock Market APIs

• Alpha Vantage
• Polygon
• IEX Cloud
• Finnhub
• Yahoo Finance

Databases

• Firebase — Google's serverless database and backend platform.
• Supabase — Open-source Firebase alternative built on PostgreSQL.
• MongoDB
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL
• MariaDB
• Redis
• Cassandra
• Couchbase

File Transfer

• SFTPGO — A fully featured SFTP server written in Go.

Vue.js Ecosystem

• VueUse — Collection of essential Vue 3 Composition API utilities.
• Nuxt — Meta-framework for Vue.js applications.
• Vuetify — Material Design component library for Vue.
• Vite — Fast build tool and dev server.
• Vue Router — Official client-side routing for Vue.
• Pinia — The recommended state management library for Vue 3.

Note: Vuex has been superseded by Pinia for Vue 3 projects. VueFormulate has been replaced by Formkit.

React Ecosystem

• Next.js — The React meta-framework for production.
• React Router — Client-side routing for React applications.
• Redux Toolkit — The recommended way to use Redux today.
• Material UI — A comprehensive React component library (now called MUI).

Note: Gatsby has seen a significant decline in adoption. Next.js is the dominant choice for React-based sites and applications.

CSS

• Tailwind CSS — Utility-first CSS framework.