Business Tools
Business Tools
A curated list of tools and services useful for building and running online businesses. Categories are organised by function.
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
Point of Sale (POS)
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
Order and Delivery Tracking
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
Logos
- Placeit — Logo and branding marketplace.
- Looka — AI-powered logo generator.
- Brandmark
- Logo Maker
Illustrations and Icons
Design
Note: InVision has significantly scaled back its product offerings. Figma is now the dominant tool for collaborative design prototyping.
Print on Demand
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
CV Generators
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
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.