Tools for building ambitious startups

Snappa is a browser-based graphic design tool that lets non-designers quickly create social media graphics, ads, blog images, and thumbnails using templates, stock photos, and fonts.

Alternative toCanva|AEAdobe Express|Stencil

Snitcher identifies anonymous website visitors at the company level, tracks purchase intent in real time, and pushes enriched visitor data into sales and marketing tools.

Socialinsider is a social media analytics and competitor benchmarking platform offering performance metrics, content analysis, and sentiment tracking across major social networks.

Sonadier is a no-code platform for building custom business applications using forms as building blocks, with databases, automation workflows, and cross-team data sharing.

Alternative toAirtable|Jotform|KKnack

Spark is a cross-platform email client that unifies multiple accounts, with smart inbox sorting, natural language search, and team collaboration features for shared inboxes.

Adobe Express (formerly Adobe Spark) is a web and mobile design app for quickly creating social media graphics, flyers, web pages, and short videos using templates and AI tools.

Alternative toCanva|VVistaCreate|Snappa

GitHub Discussions is a forum built into GitHub repositories where communities ask questions, share ideas, and hold conversations that do not fit issues or pull requests. It is the successor experience after Spectrum.chat.

Alternative toDiscourse|Discord|Slack

Square provides payment processing, point-of-sale hardware and software, invoicing, and developer APIs for businesses to accept payments in person and online.

Alternative toStripe|PayPal|SSumUp

A platform where developers discover, compare, and share the software tools and technologies in their tech stacks, and where companies can track what their teams use across engineering.

Alternative toProduct Hunt|GG2|AlternativeTo

A bot that automates asynchronous agile workflows such as daily standups, retrospectives, backlog grooming, planning poker, and 360-degree feedback inside Slack and Microsoft Teams.

An open-source GitHub repository listing free platforms and strategies for marketing a new startup, including news aggregators, product directories, content platforms, and search techniques.

A free online course from Y Combinator teaching startup fundamentals through video lessons from YC partners and industry leaders, with co-founder matching and progress tracking.

An external monitoring platform that tracks uptime for websites, APIs, SSL certificates, domains, page speed, and servers, with instant alerting and public status pages.

Alternative toUptimeRobot|PPingdom|BSBetter Stack

A browser-based graphic design platform for quickly creating social media graphics, blog headers, ads, and promotional images using templates, stock photos, icons, and fonts. Note: the service announced it is shutting down.

Alternative toCanva|CCrello|EEasil

A community-driven catalogue of free transparent PNG images organized into categories like icons, logos, and characters, available to download for personal and educational projects.

A library of high-resolution stock photos released under the Creative Commons CC0 license, free to download and use even for commercial purposes without attribution.

A social media management suite for publishing, scheduling, and analyzing stories and posts across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and Snapchat, with performance analytics.

Alternative toLater|Buffer|Hootsuite

An affiliate management tool that consolidates transactions, revenues, clicks, and payments from over 200 affiliate networks into a single dashboard and unified API for publishers and developers.

A CRM built directly into Gmail that handles sales pipelines, email tracking, contact management, mail merge, and team collaboration without leaving the inbox.

Alternative toHubSpot|PPipedrive|Copper

A beginner-friendly website builder for creating single-page and multi-page sites, portfolios, and small online stores, with hundreds of templates and built-in e-commerce.

Alternative toCarrd|WWix|SSquarespace

A payments and financial infrastructure platform that lets businesses accept payments globally, manage subscriptions and billing, issue cards, and embed financial services through its APIs.

Alternative toPayPal|AAdyen|Braintree

A service that automates startup incorporation in Delaware, handling company formation, EIN acquisition, equity issuance, and 83(b) tax election filing so founders can bank and raise quickly.

Alternative toClerky|FFirstbase|Ddoola

An email design platform with a drag-and-drop editor and 1,600+ templates that lets designers and developers build responsive HTML emails and export them to email service providers.

Alternative toBBEE|Mailchimp|UUnlayer

A daily planner that combines tasks, calendar, and a structured planning ritual to help people plan their day intentionally by pulling work from tools like Asana, Notion, and Gmail.