What are Your Favorite Freelancer Apps?

By David Strom, under Make it Work. David Strom is business channels editor at ReadWriteWeb and founding editor-in-chief of Network Computing.

A recent survey at BestVendor found that freelancers are using some expected tools, such as Google Apps and Alerts, Quickbooks and Skitch, among others. But they also found a few others that are a bit unusual, such as Harvest, Expensify, and Remember the Milk, which are used for time and expense tracking and reminders.

They conclude that “freelancers are all about the cloud” and I would tend to agree. The only desktop app that made it into their top 25 was Intuit’s Quickbooks, which offers both cloud and desktop versions. (I still use the desktop version, call me old-fashioned.)

Most of the time, I try to use a cloud-based service if I can, such as Google’s email hosting service for my domain and Box.net for storing documents that I need to share. I just love Skitch, which is great for preparing images that I grab from online sources and making them the right size and format for posting in my stories, although I have started to use Gyazo.com (which is just available for the Mac now) for this purpose as well.

One of my go-to apps is Wistia.com‘s video streaming and analytics service, which is one of the best out there for sharing this kind of content, and it is also cloud-based. I use Mailman for hosting my email list server. While it isn’t strictly cloud-based, I do use it from an Internet hosting provider so that I don’t have to run a Linux/Unix server.

Here is the infographic of Best Vendor’s “up and coming” apps: