Top 18 'Virtual-Headquarters' Productivity Apps to Explore for Grounding Your Fully-Remote Team This Year
The great remote work experiment is over. What started as a temporary solution has become a permanent reality for millions, and the novelty of working from your couch has given way to a new challenge: How do you build a thriving, connected, and productive team when you're not sharing the same physical space? The initial scramble to just "make it work" with a patchwork of tools is no longer enough. Now, it's about making remote work better.
The biggest casualty of the remote shift has been the office itself—not the commute or the cubicles, but the ambient awareness and serendipitous connection that a shared space provides. We've lost the spontaneous brainstorms by the coffee machine, the quick "can you look at this?" desk-side chats, and the simple feeling of being part of a collective, moving toward a common goal. While tools like Zoom and Slack are essential for communication, they don't replicate the presence of a headquarters.
Enter the rise of the "virtual headquarters." These aren't just single-function apps; they are digital ecosystems designed to be the central hub for your team's work, communication, and culture. They aim to restore that sense of place and make remote work feel less like a series of isolated tasks and more like a shared journey. From 2D pixel-art offices to all-in-one productivity hubs, these platforms are grounding distributed teams in a new, digital-first reality. Here are 18 of the best to explore this year.
1. Gather
Gather (often called Gather.town) transforms your remote office into a charming 2D world with pixel-art avatars. You walk around a customizable virtual space and, when you get close to a colleague's avatar, your video and audio fade in, perfectly mimicking a real-life conversation. This spatial chat model brings back the serendipity that's often lost in scheduled Zoom calls.
The magic of Gather lies in its customizability. You can design your office with private offices, collaborative project rooms, a water cooler for casual chats, and even a rooftop for virtual happy hours. This creates a strong sense of place and culture. Teams use it for everything from daily co-working, where you can "see" who's at their desk, to hosting company-wide events and onboarding new hires in a way that feels interactive and fun.
Pro-Tip: Create a dedicated "focus zone" in your Gather office with proximity chat disabled. This allows team members to signal they are in deep work mode while still remaining visually present in the shared space.
2. Teamflow
If Gather is the fun, creative startup office, Teamflow is its sleek, corporate counterpart. It offers a 2D virtual office layout but with a more professional aesthetic. The focus is less on the game-like experience and more on seamless productivity. You can see your teammates' screens (with their permission), jump into "rooms" for instant meetings, and collaborate on built-in whiteboards.
Teamflow excels at making remote collaboration feel fluid and instantaneous. Instead of scheduling a meeting to share a screen, you can simply "walk" over to a colleague's desk and start a conversation. It integrates apps like Google Docs and Figma directly into the workspace, turning your virtual office into a true command center for projects. It's built for teams who want the benefits of spatial chat without the whimsy.
Pro-Tip: Use Teamflow's "Portal" feature to embed key project dashboards (like a Jira board or a Notion page) directly into a project room. This keeps all relevant information in one contextually relevant place.
3. Around
Around rethinks video calls entirely. Instead of a grid of giant faces taking over your screen, Around puts your teammates in small, floating "bubbles" that stay out of the way. It’s designed for working sessions, not just meetings. The AI-powered camera automatically crops and centers your face, and features like noise cancellation (which can even mute a vacuum cleaner) are best-in-class.
This minimalist approach makes video collaboration feel lightweight and persistent. You can keep an Around call open all day with your core team while you work in other apps, creating a sense of a shared, open-line "war room." It's perfect for pair programming, design reviews, or any task that requires tight, continuous collaboration without the fatigue of a traditional video conference.
Pro-Tip: Use Around's "Echo" mode for quick, asynchronous audio notes. It's a faster, more personal way to leave feedback than typing out a long Slack message.
4. Notion
While not a virtual office in the spatial sense, Notion has become the definitive "single source of truth" for thousands of remote companies, serving as their intellectual headquarters. It's a powerful, all-in-one workspace that combines documents, databases, project management boards, and team wikis into a single, interconnected system.
A well-organized Notion workspace acts as your team's collective brain. You can house everything from your company's mission and values to detailed project specs, meeting notes, and employee directories. Its flexibility allows you to build custom workflows that perfectly match your team's needs, eliminating the need to jump between a dozen different apps. In my experience consulting with teams, as Goh Ling Yong often emphasizes, the most successful remote setups are those that centralize information to reduce friction, and Notion is a masterclass in this.
Pro-Tip: Create a "Company Home" dashboard in Notion that serves as the first page every employee sees. Link to key resources: the team directory, the project roadmap, upcoming holidays, and a "wins of the week" section to boost morale.
5. Slack
The original king of remote communication, Slack is still the foundational layer of many virtual HQs. While it can be a source of distraction if not managed well, its power lies in its ability to organize communication into dedicated channels, which function like virtual rooms for different projects, teams, or topics.
To use Slack as a true HQ, you need to be intentional. Features like Huddles offer instant, lightweight audio (and now video) conversations right within a channel, perfect for quick questions. Workflows can automate routine tasks, like welcoming new team members or requesting IT support. And its massive library of integrations means you can pipe in updates from almost any other tool, making Slack your central notification hub.
Pro-Tip: Establish clear channel naming conventions (e.g., #proj-website-redesign, #team-marketing, #fun-random) to keep conversations organized and searchable. Also, encourage the use of threads to keep the main channel clean.
6. Miro
Every great office has a whiteboard, and Miro is the infinite, digital version for your remote team. It's a visual collaboration platform that allows teams to brainstorm, plan, and create together in real time. It goes far beyond simple drawing, with templates for mind maps, user story maps, retrospectives, and complex diagrams.
Miro serves as the collaborative heart of a virtual HQ, the space where messy, creative ideas take shape. It's essential for workshops, strategic planning sessions, and design sprints. Seeing everyone's cursors move around the board, adding sticky notes and connecting ideas, creates a powerful sense of shared creation that can be difficult to achieve remotely.
Pro-Tip: After a brainstorming session, don't just leave the Miro board as-is. Use the "frames" feature to organize the final ideas into a clean presentation, then share a link to the board as a visual record of the meeting's outcomes.
7. Kumospace
Kumospace strikes a balance between the fun of Gather and the professional polish of a real-world event space. It offers immersive 3D virtual spaces with spatial audio, designed to feel more like a sophisticated lounge or office than a video game. It's particularly popular for hosting virtual mixers, team-building events, and company all-hands.
What sets Kumospace apart are its interactive elements. You can play virtual chess, drop YouTube videos onto "screens" in the room, and customize the background music in different areas. This makes it an excellent tool for building social connections and combating the isolation that can creep into remote work. It helps you bring back the informal "happy hour" culture that strengthens team bonds.
Pro-Tip: Use Kumospace for your weekly all-hands meeting. Start with a 15-minute "mingle" period where people can chat in small groups before moving to the main "stage" area for the formal presentation.
8. ClickUp
Like Notion, ClickUp aims to be the app to replace all others. It's a hyper-customizable project management platform that acts as the operational headquarters for your team's work. It brings tasks, documents, goals, chats, and whiteboards into a single, unified view, providing clarity on who is doing what, by when.
ClickUp's strength is its versatility. You can view your projects as a simple list, a Kanban board, a Gantt chart, or a calendar. This allows different teams (and even different individuals) to work in the way that suits them best, while all the data feeds into one centralized system. For remote teams, this unified view of work is critical for maintaining alignment and momentum without constant check-in meetings.
Pro-Tip: Utilize ClickUp's "Goals" feature to set high-level company objectives (OKRs) and then link specific tasks and projects to those goals. This provides every team member with a clear line of sight from their daily work to the company's biggest priorities.
9. Loom
Loom is the champion of asynchronous video and the ultimate tool for "show, don't tell." It allows you to quickly record your screen, camera, and microphone to create instant, shareable videos. This is a game-changer for remote teams, drastically reducing the need for synchronous meetings.
Instead of scheduling a 30-minute call to explain a bug, you can send a 2-minute Loom video demonstrating the issue. Instead of writing a long email to give feedback on a design, you can record yourself talking through your comments directly on the mockup. Here at the Goh Ling Yong blog, we find it invaluable for providing clear, contextual feedback. Loom serves as the asynchronous communication hub, saving countless hours and providing a richer, more personal form of communication.
Pro-Tip: Create a team library of Loom videos for onboarding new hires. Record short tutorials on how to use key software, explain company processes, and introduce team members. This makes onboarding scalable and consistent.
10. Range
Range tackles one of the biggest challenges in remote work: staying aligned and connected without succumbing to meeting fatigue or micromanagement. It's an asynchronous check-in tool that prompts team members to share what they're working on and how they're feeling each day.
It integrates with tools like Jira, Asana, and GitHub to automatically pull in activity, making updates easy to write. But its secret weapon is the "mood sharing" feature, which uses a simple traffic light system (green, yellow, red) and emojis to help build psychological safety and emotional awareness. Range acts as the daily pulse of your virtual HQ, fostering a culture of transparency and empathy.
Pro-Tip: Use the weekly team summary generated by Range as the agenda for your weekly sync-up meeting. This ensures the meeting is focused on unblocking issues and strategic discussion, not just status updates.
11. Tandem
Tandem is built for speed and spontaneity. It's a virtual office that lives in your menu bar, showing you who's online, what app they're working in (e.g., Figma, VS Code), and if they're available to talk. With one click, you can start an instant audio conversation, much like tapping a colleague on the shoulder.
Unlike more immersive platforms, Tandem is lightweight and focused purely on communication. It's for teams that value quick, frictionless collaboration above all else. It also has "virtual rooms" for specific projects, so you can see who is working on what and jump in to help. It's the digital equivalent of an open-plan office, but with a "do not disturb" button that actually works.
Pro-Tip: Integrate Tandem with your calendar. It will automatically set your status to "in a meeting," letting your team know you're unavailable without you having to do a thing.
12. Microsoft Teams
For organizations embedded in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Microsoft Teams is the undeniable virtual headquarters. It combines persistent chat, video meetings, file storage (via SharePoint and OneDrive), and application integration into a single, powerful platform.
Its biggest advantage is its deep integration with apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, allowing for real-time co-authoring of documents directly within the Teams interface. This creates a seamless workflow where communication and creation happen in the same place. While it can feel more formal than some rivals, for enterprise-level remote work, its security and all-in-one nature are hard to beat.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Wiki" tab in each channel to create a persistent knowledge base for that specific project or team. This prevents important information from getting lost in the chat history.
13. Donut
Culture isn't built in meetings; it's built in the spaces in between. Donut is a simple but brilliant Slack app designed to facilitate those crucial non-work interactions. It automatically pairs up team members for virtual coffee chats, peer-to-peer mentoring, or just random "get to know you" conversations.
Donut is a dedicated tool for the "water cooler" part of your virtual HQ. By systematically encouraging personal connections, it helps combat loneliness and builds the trust and rapport that are essential for effective collaboration. You can set up different Donut channels for different purposes, like pairing new hires with "onboarding buddies" or connecting engineers across different teams.
Pro-Tip: Create a dedicated #donut-buddies channel and encourage people to post a selfie or a summary of their chat. This makes the connections more visible and encourages others to participate.
14. Mural
A direct competitor to Miro, Mural is another top-tier digital whiteboard platform that excels in facilitating structured collaboration. While Miro is often seen as an infinite canvas for creators, Mural is built with facilitators in mind, offering powerful tools for running engaging and productive remote workshops.
Mural includes features like a timer, private "thinking" modes, and a voting system that makes it easy to guide a group through a structured process. It has a vast library of templates designed by experts for activities like icebreakers, retrospectives, and strategic planning. If your remote work involves a lot of structured, collaborative sessions, Mural can serve as your dedicated workshop space.
Pro-Tip: Use Mural's "Facilitator Superpowers" to summon participants to your location on the board, ensuring everyone is looking at the same thing during a presentation or activity.
15. Twist
From the makers of Todoist, Twist is the "anti-Slack." It's a team communication app built for asynchronous, deep work. Instead of a real-time, free-flowing chat, all conversations in Twist are organized into threads, more like an email inbox or a forum.
This structure prevents important discussions from being buried under a mountain of GIFs and casual chatter. It encourages thoughtful, well-articulated communication over rapid-fire responses, making it the perfect HQ for teams that value focus and calm. Twist allows you to catch up on your own time, protecting your attention and creating a more sustainable pace of work.
Pro-Tip: Use Twist for project discussions and formal announcements, and keep a separate, optional chat tool (like a dedicated Slack channel) for real-time, non-essential chatter to get the best of both worlds.
16. Basecamp
A pioneer of remote work, Basecamp is an opinionated, all-in-one project management tool. It bundles everything a team needs to work on a project—to-do lists, a message board, a schedule, a doc repository, and group chat—into a single, self-contained space for each project.
Basecamp's philosophy is "calm productivity." It deliberately avoids features that create a sense of frantic urgency, instead focusing on clarity and organization. The "Hill Charts" feature provides a unique, intuitive way to track progress on tasks, showing whether a team is still figuring things out or is on the downward slope to completion. For teams who feel overwhelmed by the complexity of other tools, Basecamp's simplicity is its greatest strength.
Pro-Tip: Use the "Automatic Check-ins" feature to prompt your team for daily or weekly updates. This automates status reporting and keeps everyone in the loop without adding another meeting to the calendar.
17. Kosmo
A newer player in the virtual office space, Kosmo seeks to blend the best of both worlds: the engaging, spatial environment of Gather with the practical task management of a tool like Asana. It provides a customizable 2D office where you can interact with colleagues, but it also has integrated project boards, to-do lists, and timers.
This combination allows teams to not only communicate but also manage their work within the same platform. You can create a "project room" that contains both the relevant team members and the Kanban board for that project. It's an ambitious attempt to create a truly all-in-one virtual headquarters where presence and productivity coexist.
Pro-Tip: Dedicate different rooms in your Kosmo space to different "work modes." For example, have a library for quiet focus, a workshop for collaborative tasks, and a lounge for social breaks.
18. Tella
Tella is like Loom on steroids, designed for creating polished, collaborative videos. It's a screen and camera recorder that operates right in your browser, but it comes with a full-featured video editor that lets you stitch together clips, customize backgrounds, add zoom effects, and create truly professional-looking content.
For a remote team, Tella can become the hub for high-quality internal communication. Use it to create engaging weekly update videos from leadership, detailed product demos for the sales team, or comprehensive training modules for new hires. It elevates asynchronous video from a quick-and-dirty tool to a primary medium for thoughtful, well-crafted communication.
Pro-Tip: Use Tella's "shared camera" feature to have multiple team members contribute to the same video. It's perfect for creating team-wide project recaps or introduction videos where everyone gets a chance to speak.
Finding Your Team's Digital Home
The perfect virtual headquarters isn't a one-size-fits-all solution. The right choice for your team will depend on your company culture, your primary workflows, and the specific problems you're trying to solve. A creative agency might thrive in the visual, unstructured environment of Miro, while a globally distributed engineering team might prefer the calm, asynchronous nature of Twist.
The goal is not to perfectly replicate your old physical office but to build something better—a more intentional, inclusive, and flexible environment that leverages the unique advantages of being remote. Use this list as a starting point. Experiment with a few options, gather feedback from your team, and thoughtfully choose the platform that will serve as the digital ground for your team to stand on, connect, and do their best work, together.
What does your team use for its virtual headquarters? Did I miss any of your favorite tools? Share your experiences and recommendations 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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