The Tools I Actually Use Every Day
My real marketing stack as a solo operator in 2026 — what stays, what goes, and what I'd recommend.
Every “best tools” article I read is either a thinly disguised affiliate play or a list of enterprise software that nobody running a small business would actually use. So here’s something different: the actual tools I use every day as a solo fractional marketing director, with honest opinions about each one.
No affiliate links. No sponsored mentions. Just what’s on my screen at 8am on a Tuesday.
The AI layer
Let’s start with the obvious one. I use AI constantly, and I think anyone in marketing who isn’t at this point is leaving time on the table.
Claude is my primary AI tool. I use it for strategic thinking, drafting, analysis, and increasingly as an operating system for my business. It handles everything from synthesising meeting notes into action items to helping me think through a client’s positioning. The reason I prefer Claude over ChatGPT for most work is that it’s better at nuanced, longer-form thinking — the kind of work a marketing director actually does. It doesn’t try to be clever. It tries to be useful.
ChatGPT still gets used for specific things — quick image generation, certain research tasks where its web browsing is stronger, and the occasional conversation where I want a different perspective. I don’t think you need to pick one and ignore the other. They have different strengths.
Wispr Flow is the tool I’d miss most if it disappeared. It’s a voice-to-text tool that runs system-wide on my Mac. I hold a key, speak naturally, and it transcribes directly into whatever app I’m using — email, Asana, documents, Slack. My rough estimate is that it’s made me about 30% faster at written communication. For anyone who thinks faster than they type, it’s transformative.
Project and task management
Asana runs my entire delivery operation. Every client has a project. Every task has a due date and an owner (usually me). I use it for my own task management and as the backbone for client delivery tracking. It’s not exciting software, but it’s reliable, and the API is excellent — which matters when you start automating things.
I’ve tried Notion, Monday, ClickUp, and various others over the years. They all work. Asana stuck because it does the basics well without trying to be everything. It’s a task manager that’s good at being a task manager.
CRM
This is where I have a split recommendation.
For my own business, I track client relationships in Asana and a simple spreadsheet. When you have five clients on retainer, you don’t need a CRM. You need a good memory and a calendar.
For clients, I usually recommend HubSpot (free tier or Starter) for businesses that are just getting organised, and Pipedrive for sales-heavy teams that want something lean and focused. HubSpot does more but has a steeper learning curve and gets expensive quickly once you outgrow the free tier. Pipedrive does less but does the sales pipeline piece really well.
The honest truth about CRMs: the tool matters far less than the discipline. A team that consistently logs their conversations in a spreadsheet will outperform a team with a $50,000 CRM that nobody updates. Pick one that your team will actually use, and don’t let anyone sell you features you don’t need yet.
Meeting intelligence
Fireflies.ai records and transcribes all my meetings. After every call, I get a transcript, a summary, and extracted action items. This has genuinely changed how I work. I take almost no notes during meetings now, which means I’m actually listening instead of typing.
The transcription quality is good enough — maybe 90-95% accurate. The AI summaries are useful as a starting point but I always review them. Where it really pays off is searchability. When a client says “didn’t we discuss that in March?” I can search every conversation I’ve had in seconds.
The one downside is the privacy conversation. Not everyone is comfortable being recorded, and you need to be upfront about it. I always mention it at the start of a call, and I’ve had exactly one person ask me to turn it off in two years of using it.
Design
Canva for quick, functional design work — social media graphics, simple presentations, diagrams. It’s gotten remarkably good. For 80% of the design work that crosses my desk, Canva handles it.
Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo for anything that needs more precision. I made the switch from Adobe a few years ago and haven’t looked back. One-time purchase, no subscription, and the tools are genuinely professional-grade. For anyone tired of paying Adobe $80 a month, Affinity is the answer.
I should be honest: I’m not a designer. I can produce competent work, and I know enough to brief a designer effectively. For anything that really matters visually — a brand identity, a major campaign — I bring in a specialist. Knowing the limits of your own skill set is part of the job.
What’s notably absent
I don’t use a dedicated social media scheduling tool. Most of my clients post infrequently enough that scheduling in-platform works fine. If a client needed daily multi-platform posting, I’d look at Buffer or Later, but I haven’t needed to.
I don’t use a dedicated SEO tool with a paid subscription for my own business. For client work, I’ll use free tools and AI-assisted analysis. The paid SEO tool market is expensive and most of what SMBs need can be gathered from Google Search Console and some focused AI analysis.
I don’t use a dedicated email marketing platform for my own business. For clients, it depends on their needs — Mailchimp for simple newsletters, HubSpot for anything that needs automation.
The principle behind the stack
If there’s a pattern here, it’s this: I use as few tools as possible, and I try to make each one do multiple jobs. Every new tool is a login to remember, an interface to learn, a subscription to manage, and a potential point of failure. The best stack is the smallest stack that gets the job done.
When clients ask me what tools they should use, I always start with the same question: what are you actually trying to do? The tool should follow the workflow, not the other way around.
What does your current stack look like? I’m always curious what other people have landed on — especially if you’ve found something that replaced two or three other tools at once.