9 Best WFH (Work From Home) Apps in 2024

Work from home (WFH) offers employees the flexibility they've always wanted, but received freely only during and post the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Surveys indicate that a majority of workers prefer hybrid work due to the flexibility it affords, positive effects on their well-being, and lack of commute time.

For organizations and managers that let employees work happily from home, the new work dynamics present challenges for teamwork, meetings, and time management, among other issues. But they're solvable, as the apps on this list prove. They address the common problems that arise when working from a comfortable environment, away from colleagues and managers.

Here's our list of the top WFH apps for companies having remote or hybrid work arrangements.

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Top WFH Apps for Hybrid and Remote Teams

The work from home apps for Android and iOS in this list help improve focus, productivity, collaboration, and online meeting experience. Check them out:

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1. Freedom

It's easy to get distracted when you're working from home. The temptation to check your Instagram or rewatch match highlights on YouTube can get the better of even the righteous among us. And that's okay once in a while. But if you're finding it difficult to invest in deep work more frequently, blocking apps and sites can be brutally effective in keeping your mind on your work.

The Freedom app blocks digital distractions across all of your devices. Select your devices, choose apps and sites, and set your schedule, the duration during which you wish to be free of unwanted distractions (aka a Freedom session). It works like a charm. As a user puts it, "The Freedom app disciplines me when I don't have the human strength to do so."

Freedom works on Mac, Windows, Android, iOS, and as a browser add-on for Chrome. It offers premium features - focus-boosting ambient sounds, the option to annotate sessions, and to enable a Locked mode that prevents you from ending a Freedom session. The app offers plans for individuals and teams.

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2. Standuply

If daily check-ins are important for your team, finding a time slot that is convenient for everyone on your remote team can be difficult. Standuply enables asynchronous standups, and sends reminder messages that serve as a gentle nudge to keep everyone accountable. Although the app is mainly geared toward engineering Scrum teams, any organization that must conduct daily check-ins for a distributed workforce will find Standuply useful in keeping everyone updated on important conversations and working dedicatedly.

The work from home app enables standups in Slack or Microsoft Teams. It integrates with task trackers, enabling team members to manage their to-dos within these collaboration platforms, and reports progress through bot surveys. 360-degree feedback reviews and polls/surveys keep everyone engaged and informed no matter where they work from. Scrum teams can use Jira task trackers in Standuply for time tracking, planning poker, and backlog refinement.

Apart from a free plan covering three users, Standuply offers team, business, and enterprise plans.

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3. Zapier

We get so accustomed to doing the same tasks every day that we don't stop to think if we can automate them and get back some of our time. It would make WFH more enjoyable or less cumbersome, whichever way you want to look at it. Zapier is the app you need to eliminate manual tasks that you should be automating. You will save time and improve your productivity.

Zapier integrates with thousands of leading apps and platforms, including Gmail, Slack, Google Drive, Outlook, HubSpot, Jira, Zendesk, and Dropbox. It comes with pre-designed workflow templates called Zaps, which automate workflows between different apps without having to code anything.

If you do have coding skills and want to add more complex automation tasks, you can add customizable triggers and actions to your Zaps using Python or JavaScript. But for most users and use cases, no coding is necessary to automate tasks, which can range from automatically sharing content on different social media platforms and saving files to the cloud to creating Trello cards from new Slack messages and sending leads personal messages. Zapier offers free, professional, team, and enterprise plans.

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4. ClickUp

ClickUp offers features for efficient project management and collaboration among team members, and between remote and office teams. For one, it brings all your work into one place, providing team members at various locations centralized access to projects and tasks. For another, it offers digital whiteboards and mind maps to help visually collaborate with remote team members. You can, for example, brainstorm on an upcoming social media campaign by drawing designs or visually explaining video concepts, sharing YouTube links, or unleashing creative ideas.

The app has collaboration features to keep teams on the same page. You can leave annotations and comments on files and assign comments to create tasks directly from discussions. Its goal-tracking feature keeps teams aligned and working towards the same objectives. Dashboards provide an overview of work progress and keep remote and office teams updated on project status. The app provides a real-time view of which member is online and the task or project they're working on.

ClickUp integrates with commonly used work apps like Slack, Zapier, and Google Calendar, saving time on switching between apps and ensuring consistent processes. It is also a productivity-booster, offering 50+ automation templates to automate repetitive and manual tasks and coordinate workflows on autopilot. The app offers a free forever plan and paid plans for small, mid-sized, and enterprise teams.

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5. Miro

Miro is among the best apps for working from home you can use, thanks to its collaboration and ideation driving features that bring distributed teams together. It is essentially a digital whiteboard where teams can collaborate in real-time, using cursor tracking, comments, and @mentions, which keep everyone on the same page. Miro integrates with other work from home and productivity apps [CAN LINK TO ARTICLE ON THE BEST PRODUCTIVITY APPS], including Zoom, Teams, Slack, Jira, and Asana, to streamline your workflow.

In a scenario where you're using Microsoft Teams, Miro can support remote collaboration and work in different ways. Its whiteboard canvas allows team members to brainstorm, plan, and ideate together in real-time during MS Team meetings. Teams can also collaborate asynchronously, contributing to the Miro board at different times, which is especially well-suited if your teams are distributed across various time zones. The Miro notifications bot keeps you informed about activity on your boards, so you're always up-to-date on feedback and reviews.

Miro offers free, starter, business, and enterprise plans.

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6. Krisp

Online meetings should be peaceful and feel like a natural extension of your in-office meetings. But as you've guessed, this isn't always possible with the inevitable background sounds in any lively home. Pets, children, street traffic, and echoes are all too common during video or audio calls. While they're tolerable, it is also true that background sounds can be distracting. WFH noise-cancellation app Krisp removes all unwanted background noise, ensuring nothing other than your voice is heard, in HD audio quality, no less!

The AI-powered app automatically detects and removes different background sounds, including those of crying babies, barking dogs, street traffic, keyboard clicks, and other aural distractions. It also removes any noise coming from other participants on the call. Krisp works with any conferencing app and any headphones and device.

What also makes Krisp one of the best home productivity apps is how it makes your meeting-related tasks a breeze. The app automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes online meetings. In addition, it allows you to assign tasks to team members, prioritize action items, and set deadlines, offering ready-to-use templates for generating and sharing discussion points, meeting summaries, and action items. You can even connect Krisp with your calendar to automate note taking and sharing.

Lest we forget, Krisp offers virtual backgrounds to keep your immediate surroundings private or liven up a dull or disorderly background. The app has plans for individuals and teams, and enterprises and call centers.

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7. Doodle

Scheduling meetings when remote workers are involved is never easy, regardless of whether team members are in different time zones or not. Even on a flexible schedule, you should still have an easy way to plan a meeting time that works for all team members or consider asynchronous collaboration. With Doodle, you can align people on a meeting time without the slog and burden of email chains.

The app involves all participants in deciding on a time that is convenient for them. You create a group poll, add times for the meeting, and let participants choose what works for them. Share a link and collect responses. You can invite people via Doodle and keep track of who has responded and who hasn't. To encourage responses, include a deadline for getting back to you. Once the group poll is closed, Doodle will send out calendar invites to all participants. Simple and clever, it gets the job done.

The app integrates with several leading work apps, including Google Meet, Zapier, Outlook, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and more. Free, Pro, Team, and Enterprise plans are available.

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8. HiPeople

Recruiting roles can be performed from anywhere. If you allow your recruiters to work from home on some days, HiPeople is a great tool for easily completing the critical task of creating candidate assessment tests and the mundane task of running reference and background checks. The AI-powered platform lets you do both at scale, boosting team productivity from home and office. You can customize when and how you do reference checks, edit existing templates from HiPeople, create custom questions, or utilize AI-powered custom questions to get deeper insights. HiPeople has helped users reduce time-to-fill and get a lot done faster, in a centralized and secure platform.

The app is an effective driver of productivity and collaboration. Create a workflow in HiPeople to automatically send invites via email or text to candidates' references and follow up with them without delay. Share reference check reports and discuss candidates with remote/in-office team members using comments and notes.

Creating candidate assessments takes up a lot of time. You may need to use multiple tools to create questions using different formats, such as text, video, or multiple-choice. When you use HiPeople, you can easily create custom questions in different formats, make the most of the 1000+ job-specific templates to assess candidates, and even use the AI assessment builder that curates tests based on job descriptions. Evaluate candidates on hard skills, soft skills, cognitive abilities, personality and culture, and language competency. To give an example, the soft skills assessments HiPeople provides out-of-the-box are abstract thinking, testing adaptability, expressive skill, and ethical competence, among several others.

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Make WFH Easier, More Productive, and More Fun!

Many more work from home tools have emerged after the COVID-19 pandemic. AI-powered remote work apps are on the rise. They're effective in helping supercharge productivity and reach new levels of efficiency and effectiveness. It costs you nothing to try the free plans or sign up for free limited-period trials. You'll have a clear idea of how WFH apps can make a difference in productivity and collaboration. Wisely chosen apps will earn you brownie points from your employees and motivate them to pursue higher-value and creative tasks with the time savings and insights they receive from the tools.