Top 15 'Beyond-the-Zoom-Call' Remote Work Tools to try for Unlocking Your Team's Creative Genius in 2025
Let's be honest. If you have to sit through one more "circle back" Zoom call that could have been a three-sentence email, you might just throw your laptop out the window. We've all been there. The initial scramble of 2020 to get everyone online was about survival. We grabbed the most obvious tools—Zoom, Slack, Google Docs—and made it work. But now, as we look towards 2025, "making it work" is no longer good enough. The challenge has evolved from simple communication to something far more complex: fostering genuine, spontaneous, and groundbreaking creativity from a distance.
The silent killer of remote creativity is the rigid structure of back-to-back video calls. True brainstorming doesn't happen in a scheduled 45-minute window; it happens in the messy, unstructured spaces in between. It's the whiteboard doodle, the casual "what if" by the coffee machine, the shared burst of inspiration. How do we replicate that digital magic? The answer isn't more meetings. It's a smarter, more intentional tech stack designed for deep collaboration, not just endless conversation.
This is where we move beyond the basics. The tools that got us through the pandemic are not necessarily the tools that will propel us into a future of innovative remote work. It's time to upgrade our digital toolkit. We've sifted through the noise to find the platforms that truly understand the nuances of creative collaboration. These are the 15 'beyond-the-Zoom-call' tools that will help you and your team unlock your collective genius in 2025.
1. Miro
The Infinite Digital Whiteboard
If your team is still trying to brainstorm by sharing a screen on a PowerPoint slide, please stop. Miro is a vast, collaborative online whiteboard that acts as a shared brain for your entire team. It's a free-form canvas where you can add sticky notes, draw diagrams, embed documents, and map out complex user flows in real-time. It’s the closest digital equivalent to being in a war room with a wall-sized whiteboard and an unlimited supply of markers.
What sets Miro apart is its sheer versatility and robust template library. Need to run a retrospective? There’s a template for that. Kicking off a brand sprint? There’s a template for that, too. This structure prevents the "blank page" paralysis that can stifle virtual brainstorming. It guides your team's creative energy, ensuring that your sessions are both expansive and productive. Here at Goh Ling Yong's consultancy, we've found it invaluable for mapping out complex client strategies visually, turning abstract ideas into a tangible plan everyone can see and contribute to.
Pro Tip: Use Miro's "voting" feature to democratize decision-making. After a brainstorming session where everyone has added their ideas on digital sticky notes, give each team member a set number of votes. This quickly surfaces the most popular ideas and creates buy-in without a lengthy debate.
2. FigJam
The Fun, Frictionless Whiteboard for Design Teams
While Miro is an all-purpose powerhouse, FigJam, from the creators of Figma, is its fun, design-focused cousin. If your team is already living in Figma for UI/UX design, adopting FigJam is a no-brainer. The integration is seamless, allowing you to move components and ideas between your design files and your brainstorming space effortlessly. But even for non-design teams, FigJam's charm is undeniable.
FigJam is built for speed and engagement. It’s packed with delightful little features like stamps, emotes, and "washi tape" that make collaboration feel less like work and more like play. This playful environment is crucial for creativity, as it lowers inhibitions and encourages wilder, more innovative ideas. The interface is intentionally simpler than Miro's, making it incredibly easy for anyone, regardless of their tech-savviness, to jump in and start contributing immediately.
Pro Tip: Use FigJam's "Sections" to organize your brainstorming session. Create a section for "Icebreaker," another for "Idea Generation," and a third for "Action Items." This keeps the board tidy and guides the team through a structured creative process.
3. Loom
The Meeting Killer: Asynchronous Video Messaging
How many hours have you wasted in meetings just to explain a simple process or give feedback on a design? Loom is the antidote. It's a tool that lets you record your screen, camera, and microphone simultaneously to create instantly shareable video messages. Instead of scheduling a 30-minute call to walk someone through a new feature, you can send a 5-minute Loom video they can watch on their own time.
This is a game-changer for creative feedback. Trying to explain a visual change over text is clunky and often misunderstood. With Loom, you can pull up the design, point to specific elements with your cursor, and articulate your thoughts clearly and with the right tone. It preserves the nuance of verbal communication without the tyranny of a synchronized schedule, making it a cornerstone of effective asynchronous collaboration.
Pro Tip: Create a shared team library of Loom videos for onboarding new members. Record short tutorials on key processes, software walkthroughs, and team norms. This saves immense time and ensures everyone gets consistent, high-quality information.
4. Gather
The Virtual Office That Doesn't Suck
Zoom fatigue is partly caused by the lack of agency. You're just a face in a box, summoned from one grid to the next. Gather (also known as Gather Town) flips this dynamic by creating a 2D virtual space that your team can inhabit. You create a little pixel-art avatar and walk around a custom-designed office, campus, or even a pirate ship. When your avatar gets close to a colleague's, your video and audio fade in, creating a spontaneous "water cooler" conversation.
This sense of presence and serendipity is what’s missing from most remote setups. In Gather, you can "walk over" to a designer's desk to ask a quick question, or huddle with a small group on a virtual sofa for an impromptu brainstorm. It brings back the organic, unplanned interactions that so often spark the best ideas. It’s perfect for team social events, co-working sessions, or full-time virtual offices.
Pro Tip: Designate specific "zones" in your Gather office. Have a "Quiet Library" for deep focus work, a "Project War Room" with embedded Miro boards for collaboration, and a "Rec Room" with games for social breaks.
5. Notion
The All-in-One Digital Workspace
If your team's knowledge is scattered across Google Docs, Trello, and a dozen random spreadsheets, Notion is the unified command center you need. It's a uniquely flexible tool that blends documents, databases, and project management into one clean interface. You can build anything from a simple team wiki to a complex content calendar or a detailed product roadmap.
For creative teams, Notion's power lies in its ability to connect disparate pieces of information. You can have a project brief that links directly to the underlying research in a database, the associated tasks on a Kanban board, and the meeting notes from the kickoff call. This single source of truth eliminates confusion and gives everyone the full context they need to do their best creative work. It's less a tool and more a custom-built digital headquarters for your team's brain.
Pro Tip: Use Notion's "database templates" feature to standardize your creative briefs. Create a template with all the necessary fields—goals, target audience, key message, deliverables—to ensure every project kicks off with complete clarity.
6. Butter
For Workshops That People Actually Enjoy
Running an engaging, interactive workshop over Zoom can feel like trying to host a party in a library. Butter is a video conferencing platform built from the ground up specifically for facilitating workshops and training sessions. It takes the core functionality of Zoom and adds a suite of tools designed to maximize participation and energy.
Butter includes a built-in agenda, polls, a question queue, and timed breakout rooms that are a breeze to manage. The standout feature is the "Toolbox," which lets you pre-load all your activities—Miro boards, Google Docs, YouTube videos—and launch them with a single click. No more fumbling for links in the chat. It keeps the session flowing smoothly and the energy high, which is essential for creative breakthroughs.
Pro Tip: Use Butter's built-in sound effects and reactions to create a fun, high-energy atmosphere. A well-timed round of applause or a celebratory soundbite can make a huge difference in keeping participants engaged.
7. Coda
The Doc That Does More
At first glance, Coda might look like another document editor, but it’s so much more. Coda docs are modular, allowing you to embed powerful elements called "Packs" that connect to apps you already use, like Slack, Jira, and Google Calendar. It blends the simplicity of a document with the power of a spreadsheet and the functionality of an app.
Imagine a project plan where you can see live data from your analytics dashboard, assign tasks that sync with your project management tool, and automatically poll your team for feedback via Slack—all from within a single document. This is Coda's magic. It brings all the relevant context for a creative project into one place, turning a static document into a dynamic, interactive workspace.
Pro Tip: Use Coda's "Buttons" feature to automate routine tasks. You could create a button in your weekly meeting notes doc that, when clicked, automatically creates a new project page from a template and pings the relevant team members in Slack.
8. Tandem
The Virtual Office for Spontaneous Talk
If Gather's video-game aesthetic isn't for you, Tandem offers a more minimalist but equally powerful approach to the virtual office. It lives as a small desktop app that shows you what apps your teammates are working in (with privacy controls, of course). This ambient awareness helps you know who's available for a quick chat and who's in deep focus mode.
Tandem's superpower is frictionless audio. With one click, you can start a conversation with a colleague, no links or scheduling required. It's like a walkie-talkie for your team. This is brilliant for creative pairs who need to collaborate closely, like a writer and a designer. It recreates the feeling of being in the same room, allowing for the rapid back-and-forth that is so often necessary to refine an idea.
Pro Tip: Set up a permanent "room" in Tandem for each project team. Team members can drop in and out of the room throughout the day to co-work, ask questions, and collaborate without having to schedule a formal meeting.
9. Whimsical
For Speed-of-Thought Visuals
Sometimes, you just need to sketch out a flowchart or a mind map without getting bogged down in a feature-heavy application. Whimsical is designed for exactly this. It's a suite of four beautifully simple tools—Flowcharts, Wireframes, Mind Maps, and Docs—that work together seamlessly. The interface is lightning-fast and intuitive, allowing you to get your ideas out of your head and onto the canvas with zero friction.
Whimsical shines in the early, messy stages of the creative process. It’s perfect for mapping out a user journey, storyboarding a video, or structuring a blog post. The limited but well-chosen set of styling options prevents you from wasting time on aesthetics and keeps the focus purely on the structure and flow of your ideas.
Pro Tip: Use Whimsical's Mind Map tool for a "braindump" at the start of a project. Start with the central topic and rapidly add every related idea, question, and concept that comes to mind. This is a fantastic way to quickly explore the full scope of a creative challenge.
10. Slite
The Knowledge Base That Fosters Calm
In a remote team, clear documentation isn't a "nice-to-have"; it's a necessity. Slite is a beautifully designed knowledge management tool that focuses on helping teams make decisions and share information asynchronously. It's cleaner and more opinionated than Notion, pushing teams toward clarity and away from clutter.
Slite’s standout feature is its emphasis on decisions. You can create a "Decision" doc to outline a problem, discuss potential solutions in the comments, and then formalize the final choice. This creates a searchable, permanent record of why decisions were made, which is invaluable for long-term alignment and onboarding new team members. It’s the perfect tool for building a calm, asynchronous company culture.
Pro Tip: Start every new project in Slite with a "Project Hub" document. Use it to outline the project's goals, link to all relevant docs and designs, and post weekly updates. This becomes the central, stable source of truth that anyone can refer to at any time.
11. Pitch
Collaborative Presentations That Don't Look Like PowerPoint
Death by PowerPoint is real, and it’s even more painful over a video call. Pitch is a modern presentation tool built for real-time collaboration. It has a stunningly beautiful interface and a gallery of designer-made templates that make it easy to create presentations that look professional and engaging.
Where Pitch truly excels is in its workflow. Multiple team members can work on a deck simultaneously, leaving comments, assigning slides, and tracking progress with slide statuses like "To Do" or "Done." This turns presentation-building from a solo, last-minute scramble into a collaborative creative process.
Pro Tip: Use Pitch's "Live Video Collaboration" feature for presentation rehearsals. You can talk face-to-face with your team directly within the Pitch editor, clicking through the slides together and giving feedback in real-time.
12. Yac
Asynchronous Voice Messaging for Quick Check-ins
Sometimes, text is too slow and a video call is too much. Yac fills that gap with asynchronous voice messaging. It's like sending a voicemail, but faster and integrated with your workflow. You can record a quick voice note—up to 2 minutes—and share it with a colleague or a channel. They can listen and respond when they have a moment.
Yac is fantastic for those in-between questions that need a bit more context than a Slack message but don't warrant a full meeting. It’s great for managers giving quick feedback, or for teammates in different time zones to stay connected without having to sync up. Hearing a teammate's voice adds a layer of human connection that is often lost in text-based communication.
Pro Tip: Use Yac for your daily stand-ups. Instead of a synchronous meeting, have each team member post a short Yac message with their updates. This saves time and allows everyone to catch up on their own schedule.
13. Donut
Building Connections, One Conversation at a Time
In an office, team bonding happens naturally. You chat while making coffee or grab lunch together. Remotely, these connections have to be intentionally cultivated. Donut is a Slack app that helps you do just that. It automatically pairs up team members at random for a non-work-related chat, whether it's a virtual coffee, a peer-learning session, or a "lunch lottery."
This might seem like a "soft" tool, but its impact on creativity is profound. Strong personal relationships build psychological safety—the foundation of any high-performing creative team. When team members trust and know each other as people, they're more likely to share half-formed ideas, take creative risks, and give and receive constructive feedback.
Pro Tip: Create different Donut channels for different interest groups. You could have a #donut-book-club, a #donut-gamers, or a #donut-mentors channel to help people connect over shared passions and professional goals.
14. Kona
The Emotional Pulse of Your Remote Team
Burnout is a major threat to creativity, and it's notoriously hard to spot in a remote environment. Kona is a Slack and MS Teams integration that acts as an emotional well-being platform for your team. Each day, it prompts everyone to share how they're feeling using a simple green, yellow, or red heart, with an optional note for context.
This simple daily check-in gives managers an immediate, at-a-glance view of their team's morale. It surfaces issues before they become crises and helps create a culture where it's okay to not be okay. By supporting your team's mental health, you're protecting their most valuable creative asset: their energy and focus. As I, Goh Ling Yong, have always advocated, a healthy team is a creative team.
Pro Tip: Use Kona's "Celebration" prompts to build a culture of recognition. It encourages team members to give shout-outs for great work, which boosts morale and reinforces positive behaviors.
15. Threads
For Focused, Asynchronous Discussions
While Slack is great for real-time chat, it can be a nightmare for deep, thoughtful discussions. Important conversations get buried in a sea of GIFs and random chatter. Threads (the collaboration tool, not the social media app) is an alternative designed specifically for focused, asynchronous work. It organizes conversations into—you guessed it—threads that are easy to follow, share, and revisit.
Each new topic starts a new thread, keeping conversations self-contained and searchable. It encourages more thoughtful, well-articulated communication over rapid-fire messages. This is a fantastic environment for complex creative problem-solving, where multiple people need to weigh in over a period of hours or days without losing the plot.
Pro Tip: Dedicate Threads to your most important, long-running conversations: project planning, strategy discussions, and post-mortems. Continue to use Slack for urgent, real-time communication, giving your team the best of both worlds.
The Future of Work is Creative and Connected
Moving beyond the default remote work toolkit isn't just about finding shiny new apps. It's a strategic shift towards a more intentional, flexible, and human-centric way of working. The right tools can break down the barriers of distance, reduce meeting fatigue, and create the digital spaces necessary for your team's creativity to flourish.
The key is not to adopt all 15 of these tools at once. Instead, identify the biggest friction point in your team’s creative process. Is it brainstorming? Try Miro or FigJam. Is it meeting overload? Introduce Loom or Yac. Is it a lack of connection? Give Donut or Gather a spin. By thoughtfully curating your tech stack, you can build a remote work environment that doesn't just function—it inspires.
Now, it's your turn. What "beyond-the-Zoom-call" tools are you using to unlock creativity in your team? Share your favorites and your success stories in the comments below
About the Author
Goh Ling Yong is a content creator and digital strategist sharing insights across various topics. Connect and follow for more content:
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