Tools we quietly recommend

People sometimes email and ask what else they should use alongside BossBot. This is our short, honest answer — the tools we actually trust to sit next to us in a small business owner's stack.

The criteria are strict, and mostly not what a comparison site would use. We look for three things: does this tool treat its user like a human, is its pricing honest with the person paying it, and is the company behind it grown-up about its own limits. That's it. Everything on this list has been used by us, by the small businesses we've worked with, or both.

There's a list not on this page — the other WhatsApp / chat tools we compete with. We can't be objective about them, so we don't try to be. If you want a comparison, we've written honest ones on the blog.

Honest note. Some of the links below are affiliate links — if you sign up for a paid plan on one of these tools via our link, we receive a small commission. It does not change what you pay, and it never affects whether a tool made this list. See our full disclosure.

Booking & scheduling

Booksy

Calendar built for salons, therapists, and independent beauty professionals.

Because the front-desk person at a busy salon should not be reaching for a computer between clients. Booksy's mobile-first flow is one of the few we've seen that actually respects the pace of the day.

Watch out for: per-booking transaction fees on some plans. Read the pricing page carefully before switching.

Fresha

Free booking software for salons and spas, monetised on payment processing.

A rare "software is free, payments cover the cost" model that actually works for a small salon. Good UI, honest about how they make money.

Watch out for: the payment-processing cut is the whole business model — if you already have a card processor, do the math before switching.

Calendly

Cross-timezone scheduling for anyone who has calls with strangers.

Consultants, tutors, coaches, therapists doing remote sessions. The reliability of the timezone handling alone is worth the price.

Payments

Stripe

The payment processor we use ourselves at BossBot.

We are not being paid to say this. Stripe's checkout, refund handling, and customer portal are the least frustrating in the industry, and their docs are genuinely helpful. Every small business selling anything online should at least look at them.

Watch out for: Stripe's country availability varies. Check yours before committing.

Notes, docs, and thinking

Notion

One flexible workspace for docs, wikis, and small databases.

The tool small business owners keep coming back to when they've outgrown Google Docs but do not want the complexity of a "real" project management system. Free tier is generous. AI features are opt-in, not shoved in your face.

Basecamp

Team communication designed to reduce interruptions.

Built by a small company that publicly rejects the "always-on" work culture. If you're running a team and Slack is quietly ruining everyone's evenings, Basecamp is the philosophical opposite — and it's still one of the most well-designed team products in the industry.

Selling physical products

Shopify

The default e-commerce platform for a reason.

If you sell physical products online and don't have a strong reason to use something else, this is the correct answer. BossBot integrates natively (Shopify is one of the few marketplace integrations we support).

WooCommerce

Own-your-stack alternative to Shopify, built on WordPress.

If you already run a WordPress site and want e-commerce without paying a monthly platform fee, this is the honest choice. More technical setup than Shopify — but genuinely yours to keep.

Watch out for: hosting quality matters a lot. Cheap WordPress hosting will make your store slow.

Connecting things to other things

Zapier

How BossBot connects to tools we don't natively integrate with yet.

Almost every "does BossBot integrate with X?" question we get has "yes, via Zapier" as the honest answer. We say this on our own honesty page (see the manifesto). Zapier's free tier covers most small-business needs.

Books worth reading, if you're building something small

Not tools, but the ideas here have shaped how we think about what BossBot should and should not be. All of these are available on Bookshop.org if you prefer supporting independent bookshops over Amazon.

The Great Good Place — Ray Oldenburg

On the disappearance of the "third places" — cafés, salons, corner pubs — where community life used to happen.

If you run a small business that customers walk into, you're operating one of the last remaining third places in your neighbourhood. This book explains why that matters, and what's at stake when we automate the humanity out of it.

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson (Basecamp)

A short book on running a calm, humane, financially-healthy business without burning out the people in it.

The best counter-narrative to Silicon Valley's "10x your team" mythology. Written by founders who have quietly run a profitable software business for over 20 years without VC, without layoffs, and with an actual weekend.

Can't Even — Anne Helen Petersen

On millennial burnout and how modern work has been designed to consume the people doing it.

Reading this changes how you see the "efficiency" pitch of most SaaS. It's a book about your receptionist as much as it is about anyone else.

What we're deliberately not linking to

We don't list WhatsApp / CRM / chat tools that compete with us — we can't be objective, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying nothing. The blog has honest comparisons if you want them.

We also don't list tools that fail the three criteria at the top of this page — even when they'd pay us to. If a name is missing here that you expected to see, that's usually why.

If you know a tool that deserves to be on this list — especially a small one that respects the humans using it — email [email protected]. We read everything.