Top 5 Process Management Tools You NEED to Use

I really enjoy my free time. I know in some circles that’s basically blasphemy, but there’s no actual benefit to pulling 12-hour days even on weekends. In fact, the longer your workday is, the less productive you are.

Sure – you didn’t choose those long days, but there’s no way you could get through your workload without them.

Well, actually, you can.

Effective process management is something every business needs, but few even think about. Process management makes work easier and everyone a whole lot happier.

Here at Process Street, we’re all about efficiency and automation. Good process management doesn’t just happen by accident; you have to build it, and you have to maintain it.

Fortunately, there are tools for that. I’ll go over our five favorite process management tools that’ll boost your efficiency and productivity – and still make sure you get weekends off.

Finally, If you know what you’re after, feel free to skip ahead:

• What are process management tools?
• Process management, workflows & SOPs: Process Street
• CRM & sales processes: Creatio
• L&D processes: Scribe
• Project management processes: Trello
• Tracking processes: Airtable
• One last point

What are Process Management Tools?

“So, what are business process management tools?” I hear you ask.

In a nutshell, BPM tools help you manage, automate, and optimize repetitive tasks. They allow you to eliminate bottlenecks while making everyday processes more efficient.

But there’s more! BPM software handles requests and approvals, so everyone’s in the know. This will give your people time and energy to spend on other important duties

And you won’t have to chase people up because you’ll be able to see what they’re working on. It’ll support everyone in getting everything done on time.

But if they don’t, at least you’ll know about it!

Best process management tools

Now that you know what BPMs are, I’ll tell you what to look for in an effective process management tool.  

There are certain features you’ll want your process management software to have.

To make things easier, I’ve created a list of the top 5 essential BPM features.

Here it goes:

1. No-code

Customizing business processes is a tough job in itself. So why make it even harder?

One of the benefits of process management tools is that they make your work easier. So it should go without saying that no-code is the way to go!

It used to be a web developer’s job to roll out processes and create apps – now virtually anyone can do it. A no-code BPM tool lets you intuitively drag and drop items, design visual workflows, and more. You’ll save valuable time, resources, and money.

2. Customizable

The best business process management tools will always be customizable. Because business environments are constantly evolving, you’ll want to stay ahead of the game. Customizable tools allow you to adapt all internal processes to your ever-changing business.

3. Integrations

There are likely hundreds of apps your team uses daily. To effectively streamline your processes, you need to be able to access them all from one place and share data across apps.

You can access them all from one place and share data across apps. When it comes to the best features of process management tools, this one is a must-have.

4. Triggers and automations

Most tasks require some form of follow-up. This could be feedback or a notification. When choosing between business process management tools, ensure that they let you receive notifications. This will allow you to quickly send and receive messages and escalate tasks accordingly.

5. Drag-and-drop

If you want to get things done fast (and who doesn’t), then you need a drag-and-drop feature in your BPM tool. Whether you want to move around an image, video, or form, dragging and dropping lets you do all that swiftly and easily. Simply pick a tool and drop it wherever you need it.

Process management, workflows & SOPs: Process Street

Best for

Business process management and team collaboration.

Basically, Process Street improves your team’s recurring processes – onboarding new hires and new customers, getting manager approvals when you need it (and not a week later), or making sure that team meeting actually stays on track this time. Or – even better – doesn’t have to happen at all.

Process Street is an all-in-one, no-code modern process management platform (yeah, I know) that enables your teams to efficiently and accurately run your recurring processes without digging around for some binder in a back closet.

With Pages – your free-forever digital knowledge base – you’ll wonder what you ever did without it. Plus, you get all your processes and all your documentation together in one easy-to-find place.

Key features

• Capture and organize all of your operational knowledge and SOPs with Pages, which allow standalone documentation to live side-by-side with your interactive workflows.
• Add the complete functionality of Process Street workflows to your Slack workspace with the Slack App and get more done with less effort!
• Integrate your workflows with Salesforce, DocuSign, and others with Process Street’s first-party integrations, plus thousands of additional apps through Zapier.
• Build workflows with conditional logic to create branching pathways that allow your processes to stay dynamic, flexible, and adaptable – no matter what the situation.
• Guest users allow you to keep your important data secure while collaborating with external colleagues. Guest users only see what you want when you want.
• Compatible with: Slack, Zoom, Salesforce, Google Sheets, Jira, DocuSign.

Pricing

For $415 per full member per month, the Pro plan offers unlimited workflows/runs, Pages, and members. The Enterprise plan comes with everything included in the Pro plan, as well as a dedicated Success Manager to support you every step of the way.

CRM & sales processes: Creatio

Best for

CRM and sales.

Creatio pretty much functions as your all-in-one sales management and CRM platform. With Creatio’s tools, you can automate every step of your sales cycle to ensure those valuable leads turn into repeat sales.

The 360-degree view gives you a comprehensive customer profile to simplify creating tailor-made engagement. Everyone loves the personal approach, and Creatio makes it easy to build genuine relationships with your customers.

Key features

• 360-degree view creates a single database of all accounts and contacts, with location maps, connections between accounts, activities they’re involved in, and relationships within company structures.
• Manage your field sales team with visit schedules for each representative, geo-tag check-ins, and appropriate action tips for each category of customer.
• Creatio can integrate directly with your website so you can register and process all orders from a single window.
• Identify only your sales-ready leads to hand over to your sales team, with detailed analytics to ensure each customer gets the sales rep most suited to their needs.
• Compatible with Excel, MS Exchange, Google, and more.

Pricing

Chartio has an adjusted pricing structure depending on the products and services you need and the size of your team/organization. While that sounds a little vague and potentially confusing, they do have a handy page where you can calculate the actual costs for your needs. I can also fully attest to the helpfulness and friendliness of their CS staff.

L&D processes: Scribe

Best for

Learning and development.

Teaching someone a new process is super difficult – especially if you have to rely on verbally walking them through it. You could jump on a video call every time you need to explain a task – or you could use Scribe.

Scribe is kind of the new kid here, but it’s got loads of potential for onboarding, upskilling, and generally sharing all those really efficient tips and tricks your colleague seems to come up with.

Once you hit record, Scribe captures your process while you work – screenshots and step-by-step guides included.

These guides aren’t just a one-off, though; embed them in your other workflows so the whole team gets in on those super-secret tips.

Key features

• Automatically generated step-by-step guides for your most common processes.
• Fully customizable & personalized instructions.
• Ability to embed Scribes within existing tools (like Process Street ) to facilitate knowledge sharing.
• Records your processes in the background while you work for minimal interruption.

Pricing

Free Basic plan with auto-generated guides, free sharing, and works across web apps. $29/per user/month Pro plan adds advanced formats, engagement insights, and branded guides. The custom-priced Enterprise plan features auto-redaction, added governance & security, and SSO & directory sync.

Project management: Trello

Best for

Team collaboration and project management.

One of our engineers put it best: Typically, when you have a project, everyone gets into a room with a whiteboard and loads of nice pastries to brainstorm how to do it. When you work remotely, you can’t do that. But Trello comes pretty close.

Trello gets you going in just a few seconds, so you can get straight to sharing information and getting your project done. The lists and cards on every board provide clear transparency about who is responsible for what and how far along they are – which is absolutely crucial for any collaboration, but especially so for the remote team.

Trello will keep everyone on track and your team’s productivity up. (Pastries not included.)

Key features

• Trello cards hold all the info you need about a project through reminders, comments, file attachments, and status.
• Butler (Trello’s automation bot) can schedule assignments, create custom buttons, move lists, and tons of other common tasks to save your team valuable time.
• View productivity metrics, board stats, assignments, and timelines right from your Dashboard.
• Facilitate communication with fully-customizable workflows that ensure all your team members stay up-to-date.
• Compatible integrations with Slack, Dropbox, Evernote, Google Drive, & more.

Pricing

Trello offers 3 paid plans and a free plan for individuals. The Standard plan gives you unlimited boards, unlimited storage, custom fields, and advanced checklists for $5 per user/month. At $10 per user/month, Premium also includes admin/security features, dashboard & timeline views, data export, and priority support. The Enterprise plan starts at $17.50 per user/month.

Data management: Airtable

Best for

Keeping track of projects and initiatives.

Airtable lets you create a living database for all your information – then organize it, connect it, and change it however you want.

Our team uses both Gallery Views and Kanban Views to organize our assignments, track our publishing calendar, and keep up with progress on those very important collaborative projects. For asynchronous teams, especially, Airtable is a powerful tool for coordination and transparency.

And the thing we all love about work apps – Airtable has automations and integrations. So you can connect all your process management tools together without having a million tabs open in your browser (at least for different apps; I can’t help you with the other tabs).

We use an automation that pulls suggested pitches from Slack into Airtable and then generates a workflow run in Process Street to create a blog post. And you know we are all about the automation game, so if we vouch for an app, its automation has got to be pretty darn excellent.

Key features

• The Interface Designer is a no-code solution for building interactive, visual interfaces anyone on your team can use.
• Flexible reporting lets you create visual charts with the exact information you need – no jumbled fluff to sift through.
• Easily switch between Views to track projects with Kanban, meet deadlines with Calendar, and manage projects with Gantt.
• Keep your teams in sync by pulling data from other platforms, sharing views across teams, and consolidating your data all in one place.
• Integrates with over 1000 apps like WordPress, Zendesk, and Stripe.

Pricing

Airtable offers a Plus plan that starts at $10/month and includes unlimited bases, automatic syncing, and 3 sync integrations. For $20 per seat/month, the Pro adds access to 20 GB of attachments per base, Gantt & Timeline Views, 7 sync integrations. For those ready for some super custom service, Enterprise offers an ongoing success program and add-on professional services.

One last point

The best part about all of these apps is that they all integrate with one another, which is a huge timesaver. With Process Street’s Automations feature and Zapier integrations combined, it makes the perfect hub for all your process management tools. Once combined, you can create records, log data, document procedures, assign tasks, and so much more all from within a single workflow.

And keep track of it all with notifications via Process Street’s Slack app.

Once you have all those automations set up, you can get on with the really important stuff. Or, you know, finally take that weekend off.

And if you’re still unsure which product to choose, don’t despair. Process Street’s free account is one of the best free process management tools that you can test to see if it fits your needs.

You can also read this guide to help you decide before you buy.