You know you need software to help up your digital marketing game, but with thousands of apps out there promising to take your marketing strategy to the next level, how do you know which ones are right for you?
Here’s a comprehensive list of over 40 of the best digital marketing tools across various categories, along with their strengths and weaknesses, to help you build your digital marketing toolkit.
Keep scrolling to learn more about the top digital marketing tools, or click on a category to jump ahead.
The Best Digital Marketing Tools
For website and social media graphics: Unsplash, Canva, and DALL·E 3
For editing photos: Adobe Photoshop and Pixlr E and X
For social media management: Buffer and FeedHive
For presentations: Gamma and Beautiful.ai
For webinars: Zoom and Livestorm
For video creation and hosting: Peech, YouTube, and Wistia
For building websites: Wix
For building eCommerce websites: Shopify and Square
For building landing pages: Carrd, Unbounce, and Zapier Interfaces
For keyword research: Ahrefs Free SEO Tools
For AI chatbots: ChatGPT and Gemini
For building your own chatbot: Manychat, Zapier Chatbots, and Zapier Central
For forms and surveys: Google Forms and Typeform
For AI-powered content writing and editing: Jasper, Writesonic, and Grammarly
For email marketing: Benchmark Email, Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign
For SMS marketing: SimpleTexting and Sakari
For CRM and lead management: Zoho CRM Plus and HubSpot
For marketing automation: Brevo and Klaviyo
What are digital marketing tools?
Digital marketing tools are apps that help you attract, engage, sell, and retain business online. You’ve likely heard the term thrown around a lot, and that’s because it can include apps in any category related to marketing—from social media to advertising to content optimization. You get the idea. It’s a broad-reaching term.
Whether you’re starting your first business or you’re looking to scale an existing one, you likely need a collection of digital marketing tools—a digital marketing tech stack—to help you succeed.
How to find the best tool for digital marketing
There’s no “best” digital marketing tool. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all starter pack. The best tool for digital marketing depends on various factors like budget, team size, and experience level.
So instead of purporting to have the list to rule them all, my goal here is to help you find the best tools for your unique needs. I’ll suggest apps across various categories you’re likely considering—and maybe some you didn’t even know you needed. And if the suggested apps don’t check all the boxes for you, you’ll also find useful links to the best apps for each of the categories, so you can explore other promising options.
How do we know these apps deserve to be on this list? The Zapier team and I have spent thousands of combined hours testing countless digital marketing platforms for our best apps lists, and these are the ones that came out on top.
The Best Digital Marketing Tools at a Glance
The Best Digital Marketing Tools to Create Website and Social Media Graphics
Eye-catching visuals can make or break your company’s digital presence and branding. The good news is you don’t have to hire a designer or break the bank to get these scroll-stopping graphics. Here are the best tools to help you create high-quality visuals that will capture your target audience.
Unsplash for Free Stock Photos
With over three million photos to choose from, Unsplash offers the most robust library of high-quality images across a wide range of categories, including Business & Work, Travel, and People. Unlike other free stock photo sites, Unsplash also allows you to curate photos you come across into personal collections—like “Festive” and “Mental health”—to use in future campaigns or projects. Unsplash also comes with an iOS app, so you can find and download images on the go. And its API is integrated into tools like Figma, WordPress, and Squarespace, which makes it easy to find stock photos without leaving your favorite platforms.
Unsplash pricing: Free
Canva for Template-Based Designs
Let’s say you need to add simple text overlays to stock photos. Or perhaps you want to edit your own photos to be shared across different social media platforms. With its intuitive drag-and-drop editor, Canva makes this easy to do—even if you have zero background in design. Canva also offers pre-made design templates for every asset you could possibly need, including Instagram Reels, YouTube thumbnails, and presentations. This way, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every design. And for an even faster workflow, take advantage of Canva AI—their AI-powered tools allow you to do things like generate and edit images using only text prompts.
Canva pricing: Free for limited access to most of the features you need, including design templates, stock photos, and AI-powered design tools; $10/month (billed annually) for Canva Pro, which offers unlimited access to more design templates, stock photos, and AI tools.
DALL·E 3 for an Easy-to-Use AI Image Generator
DALL·E 3—the latest version of OpenAI’s AI image generator—has a lot going for it. But what makes it stand out is that it’s ridiculously simple to use, especially now that it’s integrated with ChatGPT. Enter your prompt (what you want DALL·E to create), click Generate, and within a few seconds, you’ll have two AI-generated images to choose from. You can use DALL·E to create app mockups, ideate physical products, generate custom art pieces—the list goes on. You can even make light edits using natural language prompts.
And if you connect DALL·E to Zapier, you can automate your AI image generation to create images straight from the other apps you use most.
DALL·E pricing: DALL·E 3 is included as part of ChatGPT Plus at $20/month and available for free through Microsoft Copilot
The Best Digital Marketing Tools for Editing Photos
While AI image generators are fun to play with, more often than not, what you really need is an app to make your photos shine. Here are the best digital marketing tools for manually editing photos or with an assist from AI.
Adobe Photoshop for a Powerful Photo Editing and Design App
When it comes to image-editing tools, Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for a reason: it’s the most powerful full-featured image-editing and design app around—and that extends to its AI features. Photoshop includes the advanced tools professional designers need, like layers, masking, blending modes, and RAW support. In terms of what photo editing tasks Photoshop can’t do…that’s still to be seen. To take the app’s capabilities even further, you can integrate it with a wealth of third-party plug-ins and extensions. The only downside? There’s a steep learning curve. You can also use Adobe Photoshop in tandem with Lightroom—another Adobe image editor that’s geared more toward managing and processing photos. Lightroom also integrates with Zapier, so you can automate your photo editing workflows.
Adobe Photoshop pricing: From $19.99/month for the Photography Plan, which includes Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.
Pixlr E and X for an Easy-to-Use AI Editor
To clarify, Pixlr E and Pixlr X are two different apps: Pixlr E is the “advanced editor,” while Pixlr X is the beginner-friendly option. But honestly, both apps are easy to use. Pixlr E (pictured above) is a convincing replica of the industry leader, Photoshop. From tool selection to layers and even features like blending modes and opacity settings, every Pixlr E feature works just like you’d expect it to in Photoshop. Pixlr X is the equivalent of Adobe Express—it’s a great alternative for power users and graphic newbies alike to perform quick and easy edits. Both Pixlr E and X are featured here because of how they save you time when used together. For example, since Pixlr saves projects in a combined library, you can pop a photo into Pixlr X for a quick retouch, then switch back to Pixlr E for more advanced editing.
Pixlr pricing: Free for limited AI use and 3 image saves per day; from $1.99/month for Plus, with 80 monthly AI credits, unlimited saves, and no ads.
The Best Digital Marketing Tools for Social Media Management
Social media is one of the most powerful tools you can use to find new clients, drive traffic to your website, and engage with customers. But doing all of this is next to impossible using regular consumer apps. To do it effectively, you need a social media management app. Here are the best social media management tools that allow you to automate, analyze, and manage your social media presence all in one place.
Buffer for Tailoring Posts to Each Channel
When you have to be on multiple channels and want to tailor your posts to all of them, Buffer is the tool for the job. When you create a new post, the AI Assistant detects which social media channel you’re writing for and adapts the output accordingly. After it generates the first option, you can cycle through more, ask to rewrite, or use the expand/shorten options as needed. The AI assistant is impressive, but the rest of the supporting cast is also strong. You can run multichannel campaigns—they work like email marketing drip campaigns—so you can reach the perfect balance between recurring and fresh content. And now that you’re turning each idea into 10 tailor-made posts, you’ll want to connect Buffer to Zapier, so you can move data and trigger automations while you sleep.
Buffer pricing: Free plan includes 3 channels, 10 scheduled posts per channel, and 100 ideas; $5/month/channel (billed annually) for the Essentials plan, which includes 2,000 scheduled posts, engagement tools, detailed analytics, and storage for 2,000 ideas.
FeedHive for Content Recycling and Conditional Posting
It’s not a crime to repurpose content. Quite the opposite. As your follower count grows, your new audience deserves to get the full picture of what you stand for, and your long-time fans could use a refresher. FeedHive is a great tool for this. It uses AI to take posts you already published and reuse them in a new post for the same or different channel. It also leverages AI to help you fine-tune your posts for maximum engagement. You can also create post categories in FeedHive, allowing you to build a system out of your content schedule. For example, if you post how-tos on Monday, inspirational content on Wednesday, and a short-form video on Friday, you can lock in these categories on a weekly calendar. After that, you can create posts and assign them to these categories. They’ll be queued and will go out at the right time, in the right slot.
FeedHive pricing: Creator plan starts at $19/month for 4 social accounts with AI Writing Assistant included. AI hashtag suggestions and AI performance prediction available only on higher paid plans.
The Best Digital Marketing Tools for Making Presentations
Creating polished presentations is a tedious and time-consuming task—and that’s after you’ve outlined your slides. If you’re delivering a basic presentation, the classics like Microsoft PowerPoint and Google Slides will do the trick. But if you want to quickly create professional-looking slideshows that actually keep your audiences engaged, here are the best apps for making presentations.
Gamma for Generative AI Features
With Gamma, you can leverage the power of AI to generate a fully fleshed-out deck in a matter of seconds. All you need to do is give the app a topic—or upload an outline, notes, or any other document—pick a presentation theme, and watch as your slides come to life. The results will likely need some fine-tuning—Gamma’s much more geared toward the iterative chatbot experience (à la ChatGPT)—but it still provides a useful jumping-off point. Gamma also offers a couple of practical features that help you keep your audience focused on the topic at hand:
- Content blocks: group your content into collapsible blocks directly on your slide, expanding them only when you’re ready to present.
- Spotlight: highlight one talking point at a time, while Gamma automatically fades out the rest.
Gamma pricing: Free Starter plan includes unlimited users, 400 AI deck credits, and basic analytics; $8/user/month (billed annually) for the Plus plan that includes unlimited AI credits up to 15 cards and no “Made with Gamma” badge.
Beautiful.ai for AI-Powered Design
If you need help making your data and ideas look as good as they should, then Beautiful.ai is for you. As the name suggests, Beautiful.ai uses AI to automatically modify your presentations—from layouts to alignment to granular spacing issues. Need to edit your slides further? The platform is a little different from most presentation software, but it’s still intuitive to use. For example, to resize an image, simply drag a handle to make it bigger or smaller. And if you use Google Drive, you can connect it with Beautiful.ai to quickly save all your presentations in your go-to.
And that’s just scratching the surface when it comes to the best digital marketing tools. Whatever your marketing needs may be, there’s a tool out there waiting to elevate your game. Remember, these recommendations are based on extensive testing and research, so you can trust that they’ll deliver results.
So go ahead, dive into the world of digital marketing tools, and watch your marketing efforts soar to new heights!