Four tools we’re comfortable pointing small businesses at, and an honest note about which ones pay us. Managed clients get enterprise versions of most of this, so this list is really for everyone else.
Disclosure: the NordVPN links on this page are affiliate links, so we earn a commission if you buy through one. It costs you nothing extra and it has no bearing on whether a tool made the list. We don’t accept payment for placement, and nothing here got added because it pays well.
Best general purpose VPN for a small business or a team that travels.
If your staff work from hotels, coffee shops or client sites, a VPN is worth the money. Not because public wifi is the boogeyman it was in 2015, most things are encrypted now anyway, but because it’s a cheap consistent layer and NordVPN’s business tier gives you dedicated IPs and central account management, which matters when you want to lock a cloud app down to one address.
The consumer plan is fine for one or two people. Once you’re past about five, look at NordLayer, their business product, because managing individual consumer accounts across a team turns into a mess quickly. Fair warning though: any VPN adds a little latency and creates one more thing to troubleshoot when someone can’t reach a network printer.
Data recovery when something is already gone, plus a decent backup product.
EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard is the tool we most often tell people to try before they spend money on a lab. If a drive is healthy and someone just deleted the wrong folder or formatted the wrong volume, it recovers a lot. The free tier lets you see what’s recoverable before paying, which is the part we like.
What it won’t do is save a drive that’s physically failing. If you hear clicking, stop, power it off and call somebody. Running recovery software on a dying drive can turn a recoverable situation into an unrecoverable one, and we’ve seen that happen more than once.
Set it and mostly forget it imaging for a single machine or a small server.
For a one machine shop or a workstation holding something important, AOMEI does full disk images on a schedule without a lot of fuss. The interface is dated and the free version nags, but it works and the restore actually restores, which is more than we can say for a few better looking products.
This isn’t a substitute for a real backup strategy at a business with a server and staff. It’s a good answer for the person who has one critical computer and no backup at all, which is a situation we run into constantly. If you’re past that stage, read the backup and recovery page instead.
Cleanup and maintenance utilities, with a caveat.
Abelssoft makes a bundle of small Windows utilities for cleanup, startup management and uninstalling software properly. They’re reasonable, and unlike most of this category they aren’t scareware that invents 4,000 registry errors to sell you a fix.
The caveat: no cleanup tool will fix a computer that’s slow because it has 8GB of RAM and a spinning hard drive in 2026. We’d rather sell you nothing and tell you the machine needs an SSD. If a tune up utility is the thing standing between you and a usable computer, the computer is the problem.
This page is software only. For physical kit, the small business IT equipment list covers the gateway, switch, NAS and UPS we recommend, and the IT technician tools page is the gear and licences for the techs themselves.
That’s the first filter and it eliminates most of what’s out there. Plenty of software pays well and we still wouldn’t install it.
Suites that promise to do everything usually do none of it well. Each of these has a job.
All four have a free tier or trial that shows you whether it’ll work in your situation before money changes hands.
All four pay a commission, so the ordering can’t be about that. NordVPN is first because it’s the one small businesses ask about most. The highest paying program we’re in isn’t on this page at all.
Yes, on all four. We’ve said so at the top of the page because you should be able to weigh that yourself. It doesn’t change what you pay, and we left off plenty of software that pays better than any of these.
No. Managed clients run business grade tooling we manage centrally: monitored endpoint protection, backups we test, patching we verify. This page is for businesses handling their own IT, or for the personal machines of people who aren’t clients.
Because the honest answer for most people is that Microsoft Defender is fine, and it’s already installed and free. Paid antivirus for a home or single office machine is mostly a subscription you don’t need. Business endpoint protection is a different conversation and involves monitoring somebody actually watches, which is a service, not a download.
No, and anyone selling it that way is stretching. Ransomware arrives through unpatched software, stolen logins and email. A VPN protects traffic in transit. Useful, but a different problem. Patching and MFA do far more, and both are free.
Sure, that’s billable work at our normal rates, or it’s included if you’re on a managed plan. Most of it you can do yourself in an afternoon, and we’d tell you so.
When something stops being worth recommending, or when we start using something better. It isn’t a top ten list padded out to hit a word count, so it stays short.
We handle security, patching and backups for small businesses across Fort Myers, Cape Coral, Estero, Bonita Springs and North Naples. Free assessment, no obligation.