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Use these 15 tools to succeed as a freelance writer and build a financially rewarding career. We added their alternatives in case you need more options.

Freelance writing is a lucrative niche, especially for Africans targeting the US market.

Data from Upwork shows that professionals in this field earn up to $50,000 annually, which is nearly 120X more than the national annual average in Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy. To make the most of this niche, you need the right tools. That’s what this blog post is about.

Here, we’ve shared the top 15 must-have tools for freelance writers this year, plus their alternatives and prices. We’ve grouped them into three categories—writing tools, collaboration tools, and marketing and accounting tools—to make it easier for you.

Let’s begin.

Key Takeaways (Editor’s Picks)

• Google Docs is perfect for writing your articles, editing, and collaborating with teams.
• Use Grammarly to edit and proofread your documents and check for plagiarism.
• Surfer SEO can help you write search engine optimised articles to rank highly on search.
• Find synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes with WordHippo to enrich your writing.
• Take screenshots and make image annotations with Skitch.
• Read paywalled scholarly and peer-reviewed articles with Unpaywall for free.
• Centralise your processes and workflow with ClickUp and ensure easy collaborations.
• Use Zoom for virtual meetings and webinars.
• Access all Google products and apps in one place with Google Workspace.
• Securely store your passwords, payment details, and personal details in one app with Dashlane.
• Build an engaging website with WordPress.
• Reach, nurture, and convert prospects with Campaign Monitor.
• Use Collect Chat to get client feedback, generate leads, and schedule appointments.
• Join Peak Freelance to be a part of a community of freelancers to access expert resources, blueprints, and templates to grow your business.
• Manage your invoices and finances using FreshBooks.

Recommended posts

• How to Build Your Brand as a Freelancer In Nigeria
• Top 15 High-Paying Freelancing Niches for Nigerians
• 10 Ways Freelance Writers Can Get Clients
• How Freelancers Can Retain Their Clients

Best Writing Tools for Freelancers

Use these tools to produce better content and make freelance writing a breeze.

1. Google Docs

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free

Google Docs is intuitive when you get a hang of it. The free online document editor lets you create and collaborate on online documents in real time from anywhere and with any device. It also supports offline editing, which means you can edit documents without an internet connection.

Google Docs connects seamlessly with other Google applications, such as Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Workspace, bringing your favorite stack in one place. You can also integrate the tool with several Workspace add-ons and third-party apps to make it more extensible. 

Plus, the tool has a built-in AI-writing capability that lets you create better, smoother content.

Google Docs is automatically available to all Google account users.

Google Docs Features for Freelancers

• Allows seamless collaboration and offline editing.
• Provides advanced AI-writing capabilities.
• Supports seamless integration with multiple third-party apps.
• Uses industry-leading security measures to safeguard data.
• Lets you import PDF files and make them editable and shareable.
• Offers assistive features like Smart Compose, enabling users to write faster.
• Support voice typing.
• Provides built-in editing tools, like Spelling and Grammar.
• Comes with a native document translation capability.

Best Alternative: Microsoft Word—a word processor that lets users create professional-quality documents, letters, reports, and more. This tool offers similar capabilities to Google Docs, plus a desktop application that allows you to create documents without needing an internet connection.

2. Grammarly

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 (5,753 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts from $12 monthly)

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing tool that can help you edit and proofread your documents. It checks for plagiarism, grammar, and spelling errors, and also offers suggestions for improving your writing style. 

The tool promises to help users instantly generate clear, compelling writing while maintaining their unique voice. It’s available as a desktop app for Windows and Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Android mobile applications, and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge. 

Grammarly can also integrate seamlessly with Google Docs and Microsoft Office.

Top Grammarly features for freelancers

• Offers built-in plagiarism, spelling, and grammar checkers.
• Has a native citation generator.
• Provides easy paraphrasing tools.
• Comes with a tone detector.
• Supports AI-writing capabilities.
• Provides user writing analytics and reports.

Best Alternative: ProWritingAid—an online editing tool offering over 20 writing reports. But, unlike Grammarly, this software allows you to check for sticky sentences, repeated words and phrases, echoes, readability, structure issues, and more.

3. Surfer SEO

Ease of Use: 4.0/5

G2 Rating: 4.8 out of 5 (469 reviews)

Pricing: Pricing plan starts at $139monthly

Surfer SEO helps you write SEO-optimised content. It’s one of our favorite tools. The software uses artificial intelligence to provide instant feedback that helps writers produce content that ranks highly on Google search to boost organic visibility and generate quality website traffic.

Surfer can also help you with the research, planning, and structuring of your content. It works well with Google Docs, WordPress, and Jasper, so you can bring all of your content tech tools together in one place and save yourself the hassle of switching between multiple tools.

Surfer SEO features for freelancers:

• Provides instant on-page optimisation feedback.
• Offers a built-in content outline generator.
• Has a native content editor that allows seamless collaboration with a plagiarism checker.
• Supports seamless integration with multiple tools.
• Features a keyword research tool and site editor.
• Provides advanced AI-writing capabilities.
• Offers two browser extensions for keyword analysis and on-page optimisation. 

Best Alternative: Clearscope—an SEO content optimisation tool that aims to help users create content that drives more traffic. It supports unlimited users and pricing starts at $199 monthly.

4. WordHippo

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free

WordHippo is an online thesaurus that helps you enrich your articles with synonyms, antonyms, and rhymes to express your thoughts and ideas and create better-flowing and more engaging content. It also helps you get definitions and sentence examples to guide your writing.

Additionally, it helps you find two to 14-letter words. The best part is you can specify the letters you want the word to contain, start with, or end with. You can also find crossword and scrabble words with it.

The tool comes with a clean user interface, which makes it intuitive. 

Top WordHippo features for freelancers

• Provides an extensive database of synonyms, antonyms, word definitions, and rhymes.
• Comes with a built-in word finder, including crossword and scrabble word finders.
• Offers word pronunciations.
• Supports word translations.
• Lets users find the plural, singular, past tense, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, nouns, and present tense of words.

Best Alternative: Thesaurus.com—an online thesaurus of synonyms and antonyms that lets you discover so many ways to express an idea. It’s great if you discover that you’re using a particular word over and over.

5. Skitch

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s why the right image can make a big difference in your content. And Skitch can help. This desktop tool allows you to take screenshots and make annotations, shapes, and sketches.

It can help you get your points across with fewer words to make your idea become a reality faster.

Top Skitch features for freelancers

• Integrates with Evernote, an online note-taking and task-management tool.
• Lets users take screenshots, copy and paste, and upload images.
• Makes image annotation a breeze.
• Comes with a built-in image cropper and resizer.

Best Alternative: Snip & Sketch—a built-in Windows snipping tool for taking screenshots and annotations. You can use it by holding the Windows, Shift, and “S” keys together.

6. Unpaywall

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free

It can be tough to find good scholarly articles, studies, and reports. And when you manage to find them, it could be disappointing to find that you can’t access them due to a paywall. But Unpaywall removes this restriction, allowing you access to millions of peer-reviewed articles for free.

It integrates with over 50,000 library systems, publishers, search platforms, and repositories to democratize scholarship. You can access these resources with the free Chrome or Firefox extensions.

Top Unpaywall features for freelancers:

• Provides an extensive database of over 48 million free scholarly articles.
• Offers browser extensions.
• Supports REST API. simple query tool, and data feed.
• Returns JSON-formatted data.
• Open source and nonprofit.
• It’s fast, free, and legal.

Best Alternative: Remove Paywall—this online tool lets you read paywalled scholarly papers for free. It’s intuitive. All it requires is to enter the URL of the paywalled article to read it for free. Or, you can buy the Chrome extension for easy access.

Best Collaboration Tools for Freelance Writers

Use these tools to collaborate with your team across a wide range of projects and boost productivity.

7. ClickUp

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 (9,210 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts at $7 monthly for the annual plan)

ClickUp is a great way to collaborate with your team. It replaces all your other tools with one app, which saves costs and helps your team work more efficiently. ClickUp also lets you eliminate data silos, so your team can make decisions based on the same data.

Over two million businesses rely on this app for team collaboration, including world-leading brands, including Netflix, IBM, Booking.com, and Spotify.

Top ClickUp features for freelancers

• Offers unlimited storage, tasks, and integrations.
• Comes with collaborative documents or editors.
• Has built-in live chat and emailing features.
• Allows unlimited dashboard creation for progress tracking.
• Features whiteboards for visual collaborations.
• Supports custom templates and automation to streamline workflow.
• Offers robust support and documentation articles.
• Has desktop and mobile applications.

Best Alternative: Trello—an online productivity tool that helps teams manage their projects from anywhere and stay organised. It supports custom templates, automation, and multiple integrations.

8. Zoom

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (53,911 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts at $149.90 monthly for the annual plan)

Zoom connects teams online for video conference meetings, webinars, and live chats. 

The tool promises to help organisations across industries and geographies to consolidate communications, connect people, and collaborate in the boardroom, classroom, operating room, and everywhere in between. It comes with AI features that enable teams to work together better and get more done.

Top Zoom features for freelancers

• Provides video conferencing features for virtual meetings.
• Enables seamless collaboration and unified communications with team chat.
• Offers VoIP phone system for worldwide phone calls.
• Supports video recordings to facilitate collaboration over a video without scheduling a meeting.
• Comes with a native appointment scheduler.
• Let users create and brainstorm with the Zoom whiteboard.
• Helps you deliver AI-powered customer support with the built-in virtual agent.

Best Alternative: Skype—a Microsoft solution that helps businesses and individuals send instant messages, share files, and make free video and voice calls. It’s available on the web and as desktop and mobile apps.

9. Google Workplace

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

G2 Rating: 4.6 out of 5 (42,252 reviews)

Pricing: Paid plan starts at $6 per user per month.

Google Workspace helps you take every aspect of your business online and run it more efficiently.

It brings together all of Google’s online computing, productivity, and collaboration tools, software, and products into one place, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Meet, and Chat. These tools work together seamlessly, so you can collaborate easily with others and work more productively. 

Top Google Workspace features for freelancers

• Gives users access to all Google’s products.
• Integrates seamlessly with all these tools to easily manage your tools and eliminate app chaos.
• Provides native AI capabilities to boost the organisation’s productivity and creativity.
• Comes with enterprise-grade security to protect your business from cyber-attacks.
• Allows users to create professional email addresses.

Best Alternative: Microsoft 365—a similar app from Microsoft that aims to help users collaborate with teams easily and manage their MS tools in one place. It integrates with Microsoft Team, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneDrive.

10. Dashlane

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: 4.5 out of 5 (294 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts at $3.33 monthly for the annual plan.)

Dashlane stores all your passwords in one place, so you don’t have to worry about remembering too many passwords. It lets you autofill your passwords, payments, and personal details anywhere you need them with one click. This password manager uses zero-knowledge patented encryption that ensures that they don’t see your passwords and passkeys.

Over 22,000 businesses and 19 million people use Dashlane to stay safe online.

Top Dashlane features for freelancers

• Allows secure storage of passwords, payment information, and personal details.
• Lets users generate strong, unique passwords for all of their online accounts.
• Scans user’s passwords for weaknesses.
• Monitors the dark web to identify compromised passwords in a data breach.
• Supports two-factor authentication to add an extra layer of security.
• Enables password sharing with trusted contacts, such as family members or colleagues.
• Uses advanced encryption technology.
• Offer browser extensions for easy password saving and auto-fills.
• Provides VPN for WiFi protection.
• It is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android.

Best Alternative: LastPass—an online password manager that lets you generate strong passwords and store them in a secure vault. It features a browser extension and lets you import your passwords from other managers effortlessly.

Best Marketing & Accounting Tools for Freelancers 

These tools can help you manage your marketing and finances as a freelancer.

11. WordPress Website 

Ease of Use: 4.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free 

A website is a must-have for freelancers as it lets you take charge of your marketing, including branding, customer retention, and customer service. Getting one is easy with WordPress. It helps you build an immersive and functional website in a couple of days without needing to code.

The content management system (CMS) powers nearly 46% of websites on the internet, and its usage has grown by 11% since 2011 on average. 

Top WordPress features for freelancers

• Provides drag-and-drop features for easy no-code website design.
• Hosts over 60,000 plugins and 9,000 themes for site extensibility and customisation.
• Offers quick installation and upgrade.
• Responsive on different devices.
• Allows multiple user roles.

Best Alternative: Joomla—a free content management system that lets you quickly set up your website. It offers more flexibility than WordPress but with a steeper learning curve. But like WordPress, the CMS is mobile-ready and user-friendly.

12. Campaign Monitor

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

G2 Rating: 4.1 out of 5 (692 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts at $11 per month.)

Campaign Monitor is an email marketing platform that helps you connect with your audience, nurture leads with email sequences and automation, and drive conversions. It also has SMS capabilities, allowing you to leverage omnichannel campaigns to build strong customer relationships and maximise your ROI.

It’s popular among world-leading brands across different verticals, including nonprofit, media and publishing, retail, entertainment, travel and hospitality, and agencies.

Top Campaign Monitor features for freelancers

• Offer a drag-and-drop editor to create stunning emails.
• Has several pre-built email templates that can help you save time.
• Features native AI-writing capabilities that let users quickly create engaging emails.
• Allows users to combine SMS and email marketing in a single campaign or separately.
• Supports email automation that mimics a customer journey.

Best Alternative: Constant Contact—an online platform that lets you create email and digital marketing campaigns to drive your business goals. It combines email marketing, SMS marketing, social media marketing, and AI-powered marketing automation in one platform. Paid plan starts at $12 monthly.

13. Collect Chat

Ease of Use: 4.5/5

G2 Rating: 4.7 out of 5 (13 reviews)

Pricing: Free (Paid plan starts at $18 per month when billed annually.)

Collect Chat is an interactive, human-friendly chatbot that lets you collect data from website visitors. 

With this tool, you can create chatbots that collect feedback, suggestions, or surveys, schedule appointments, generate leads, or receive customer inquiries.

It aims to help users generate 3X more leads, spend 50% less on sales, and expend zero effort on collecting data. Over 25,000 businesses and organisations worldwide use this platform, including Yelp, Airbnb, and the UK government.

Top Collect Chat features for freelancers

• Provides drag-and-drop chatbot builder.
• Supports embeddable, landing page and website widget chatbots.
• Sends real-time email notifications to keep you updated.
• Integrates with over 100 third-party apps, including Zapier, Google Sheet, and Slack.
• Offer pre-built chatbot templates for different use cases, like appointment booking, lead generation, and customer surveys.

Best Alternative: SurveyMonkey—an online survey software that helps businesses collect feedback in minutes. It features over 300 survey templates to get you started right away. The tool integrates with over 100 applications and plugins to help users get things done quicker.

14. Peak Freelance

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: NA

Pricing: Free 

Peak Freelance is a free membership site for freelancers. 

It offers “ungoogleable” resources, expert interviews, blueprints, podcasts, and events to help them grow their freelance business. The platform promises to help freelance writers land better clients, build their brands, and scale from $250 monthly to over $1,000.

Peak Freelance accepts members across the world, including the U.S., Europe, India, Nigeria, and the Philippines.

Top Peak Freelance features for freelancers

• Features an extensive library of resources that can help freelancers grow and level up.
• Offers premium courses and templates.
• Allows members to submit jobs.
• Provides an online community for freelancers.
• Hosts quarterly challenges to help members move forward.

Best Alternative: Slack Community—an online community for like-minded people to meet, connect, share opinions, and learn from each other. Find and join relevant communities to start connecting.

15. FreshBooks 

Ease of Use: 5.0/5

G2 Rating: 5.4 out of 5 (670 reviews)

Pricing: Paid plan starts at $4.25 

FreshBooks is a great option for freelancers who want to keep track of their finances. It’s an invoice and accounting software for small businesses. The platform can automate your financial management tasks, keep your books organised, and save you time.

It integrates with over 100 applications to help keep your teams and clients connected.

Top FreshBooks features for freelancers

• Helps users create professional-looking invoices without design skills.
• Offers double-entry accounting features that show your profitability, cash flow health, and spending details.
• Provides automated online payment options to help freelancers get paid faster.
• Allows easy collaboration among teams, clients, and contractors.
• Offers mobile application that lets users send invoices, track expenses, and collaborate on the go.

Best Alternative: Invoice.ng—a free invoicing and accounting software, suitable for freelancers and small businesses in Nigeria. It helps you receive payments in minutes, send receipts, manage expenses, and more.  The platform can integrate with your website via API.

FAQs

What are the best tools for freelance writers?

Several tools can help you boost productivity as a freelance writer. Some of them are Google Docs, Grammarly, WordHippo, and Skitch.

Others include: 

• Hemingway Editor: An online tool that helps you identify and correct clunky writing and make your writing more clear and concise.
• ProWritingAid: A comprehensive writing tool that can help you with everything from grammar and punctuation to style and word choice.
• Copyscape: A plagiarism checker can help you ensure that your work is original and free of plagiarism.
• Canva: A graphic design tool that can help you create professional-looking images and graphics for your blog posts, articles, and social media posts.

What are the benefits of using tools for freelance writers?

Some benefits of using freelance writing tools include: 

• Increased productivity: Freelance writing tools can help you save time by automating tasks, such as grammar and spell checking, and by providing you with insights into your writing.
• Improved quality: They can improve the quality of your writing by catching errors and suggesting improvements.
• Greater efficiency: These tools can help you work more efficiently by providing you with access to resources and information that can help you complete your projects faster.
• Increased visibility: Some freelance writing tools can help you increase the organic visibility of your content by providing you with actionable on-page SEO optimisation tips.

How do I choose the right tools for freelance writers?

When choosing your freelance writing tools, it is important to consider your specific needs and preferences. Some factors to consider include:

• The features and functionality of the tool
• The price of the tool
• The ease of use of the tool
• The customer support offered by the tool

Freelancing Tools for Writers: What Next?

We have shared our favorite tools for freelance writers and their alternatives. 

Pick the ones that work for you, your budget, and your skill level. These tools can help you streamline your processes, collaborate with clients, and get more work done. If you’re just starting, you may want to choose free or low-cost tools. Then upgrade to more powerful tools as your business grows.

Once you’ve chosen the right tools, take some time to learn how to use them effectively. This will help you get the most out of your investment and make your freelance writing business more successful.