Google Tools: Best Apps for Work, AI, Business and More

Google is probably best known for its namesake search engine, but it has also developed a massive ecosystem of products and services spanning productivity, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and advertising. From Google Drive to Gemini, the tech giant offers hundreds of tools designed for developers, marketers, educators, businesses and everyday people.

Many of these tools are free to use, while others are part of paid subscriptions, such as Google Workspace and Google Cloud. Together, they help users create documents, analyze data, run advertising campaigns, build applications, manage their online businesses and much more. Let’s dive in.

Google Productivity Tools

Google’s productivity tools allow users to create, communicate and collaborate. They’re free for all Google users, but teams that pay for Google Workspace gain access to premium features and expanded storage.

Google Docs 

Google Docs is a cloud-based word processor that allows users to create, edit and collaborate on documents in real time, and all changes are automatically saved in the cloud. Users can leave comments, track suggestions and revisit previous versions of the draft as well. Docs also integrates with Google’s AI assistant Gemini, allowing users to write drafts and make changes with the help of artificial intelligence.

Google Sheets 

Google Sheets is a collaborative, cloud-based spreadsheet application comparable to Microsoft Excel. It allows users to organize data, create formulas and build charts. Sheets also connects to Google Analytics, Google Forms, Looker Studio and other third-party applications.

Google Slides

Google Slides is comparable to a browser-based version of PowerPoint, allowing users to create slideshow presentations with templates, layouts and other design elements. The platform also integrates with videoconferencing service Google Meets, making it easier for teams to share presentations.

Google Drive

Google Drive is the cloud storage layer that underpins Docs, Sheets and Slides, allowing teams to co-edit, save and share files with each other. Google Drive provides personal users with 15 gigabytes of free storage, but heavy users and teams will probably need to upgrade to Google One or Google Workspace, respectively, which can cost anywhere from $1.99 a month to $200 a month.

Gmail

Gmail is Google’s email platform, which integrates with other tools like Google Calendar and Google Meet. The platform offers spam protection, search functionality and AI features that can help users draft emails. Businesses that use Gmail through Google Workspace can create email addresses with custom domain names, as well as access additional administrative controls.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is a shareable online calendar that allows users to create events, manage their schedule and share their availability with one another. Because it integrates with other Google tools, users can incorporate Gmail plans to their calendar, add Google Meets videoconferencing to a meeting and add Docs, Sheets and Slides to calendar items.

Google Meet

Google Meet is Google’s video conferencing platform, similar to Zoom or Microsoft Teams. It integrates with Gmail and Calendar, but users don’t need to download software or create a Google account to join a meeting. Meets offers live subtitles and transcription services, and premium users can record meetings, minimize background noises and use interactive features, such as polls and breakout rooms.

Google Chat

Google Chat is a messaging platform inside Google Workspace that allows teams to communicate across channels and direct messages. Because it integrates with Drive, users can easily share Docs, Sheets and Slides in their conversations as well.

Google Keep

Google Keep is a note-taking app that syncs across devices. Notes can be labeled, color-coded and pinned, and they can include images, audio and checklists.

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Google Tools for SEO and Web Performance

Google’s search and web performance tools give site owners visibility into how their pages appear in search results, how much traffic they receive and how the pages load.

Google Search Console 

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps website owners to monitor and optimize their site’s presence in Google Search. It can provide reports that measure search traffic, keyword performance and indexing status, allowing users to see which queries bring visitors to the site. Owners can review how Google crawls their website, submit updated sitemaps for indexing and receive alerts about security issues and other technical problems that could affect their site’s visibility.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics helps website owners know not only how many people visited their site, but also how they arrived, which pages they viewed and whether they took any actions, such as making a purchase. The current version, Google Analytics 4, tracks interactions across websites and apps using an event-based measurement system.

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights evaluates the speed and performance of websites on both mobile and desktop. These metrics, called core web vitals, feed directly into Google’s page experience ranking signals. This tool also provides recommendations for improving loading times, accessibility and technical performance.
 

Google Tools for Marketing and Advertising

Google’s large ecosystem of advertising tools help companies reach customers through search, display advertising, video and shopping platforms.

Google Ads

Google Ads enables businesses to buy search ads, display ads, YouTube ads, shopping ads and app campaigns. In most cases, businesses pay each time a user clicks on their ad, but they may pay for each view on YouTube, or for each lead on local ads. Plus, with Google Performance Max (PMax), businesses can use AI to optimize their ad strategy across various platforms. 

Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center allows retailers to upload and manage their product listings so they can appear organically on Google Shopping, Search, Images, Maps and YouTube. They can also create paid ads to promote the items in their online store.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a free tool within Google Ads that provides search volume estimates and keyword suggestions. It was designed for planning paid advertising campaigns, but SEO practitioners also use it to gauge search demand as well. 

Google Tag Manager

Google Tag Manager is a platform where businesses can add marketing and analytics tags to their website without manually editing the site’s underlying code. These tags can help businesses track marketing campaigns, conversions and site analytics.

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Google AI Tools

Google’s consumer-facing AI products are increasingly organized under the Gemini brand. The three tools below each serve a distinct function — text and reasoning, image generation and video generation — though all are accessible through the Gemini app or Google AI Studio.

Gemini

Gemini is the name of Google’s AI chatbot, as well as the underlying models powering it. Gemini can answer questions, summarize information, generate text, analyze images and assist with coding. It can be freely accessed through the chatbot itself, but it is also integrated into Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Slides for Workspace users. 

Nano Banana

Nano Banana is an image generation and editing tool built on the Gemini family of AI models. Available through Gemini and Google AI Studio, it can create original visuals from text prompts and edit existing images through natural language instructions. 

Gemini Omni

Gemini Omni is Google’s multimodal AI model for generating and editing videos based on text, visual and audio inputs. Designed as the video counterpart to Nano Banana, Gemini Omni supports conversational editing, allowing users to refine clips through successive natural-language prompts while maintaining scene consistency. And it powers video creation experiences in Gemini and Google AI Studio.

 

Google Tools for Developers

Google offers hundreds of developer tools. Below are a few of the most popular ones used for app development, data engineering and AI model deployment.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google Cloud Platform is a suite of cloud infrastructure services, and the foundation on which most of Google’s other developer tools run. GCP provides computing power, storage, networking, data warehousing and security infrastructure. It is also home to many important developer tools, such as BigQuery, a serverless data warehouse, and Vertex AI, which allows users to build, train and deploy their own machine learning models and generative AI applications.

Firebase

Firebase is Google’s app development platform, providing pre-built backend infrastructure for mobile and web developers. It offers a real-time database, user authentication, hosting, cloud storage and crash reporting, covering most of what an app needs without configuring server infrastructure from scratch.

Google AI Studio

Google AI Studio is where developers build and test applications powered by Gemini AI models. Users can prototype prompts, experiment with multimodal inputs, generate API keys and quickly build AI-powered applications without having to manage complex infrastructure. Google AI Studio is often the starting point for teams exploring Gemini before deploying production workloads on Vertex AI.

Google Antigravity

Google Antigravity is an agentic software development platform, similar to Claude Code or Cursor. Powered by Gemini models, it combines an AI-powered integrated development environment (IDE), command-line tools and agent management capabilities that allow developers to automate coding, debugging, testing and other software engineering tasks across multiple projects.

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Google Tools for Education and Research

Google’s education products are used across K-12, higher education and independent research. 

Google Classroom

Google Classroom is a learning management system (LMS) that allows teachers to distribute coursework, grade student submissions and send direct feedback within a single platform. It integrates with other Google tools like Google Drive and Google Meet, and it’s free for institutions using Google Workspace for Education.

Google Scholar

Google Scholar is a search engine dedicated to finding peer-reviewed literature, academic journals, dissertations and legal opinions. It helps researchers track citation metrics, locate full-text PDF links and discover relevant scholarly articles across a wide range of disciplines. 

Gemini Notebook

Gemini Notebook, previously known as NotebookLM, is an AI-powered research tool that grounds its responses in documents the user themself uploads, rather than drawing on a general training corpus. Users can input PDFs, websites, YouTube videos and audio files, and then ask questions about the content they uploaded or digest the material through audio overviews and visual study guides.

Google Arts & Culture

Google Arts & Culture is an educational portal offering high-resolution access to worldwide artworks and cultural heritage sites. It partners with top museums to deliver 360-degree virtual tours, historical interactive timelines and detailed artifact archives. Educators use the platform to immerse their students in visual arts and history through interactive virtual experiences.

 

Google Tools for Businesses

Businesses will likely find any number of Google’s tools helpful in their day-to-day operations, but Google Business Profile was made specifically for them. 

Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile is a free tool that allows businesses to control how they appear in Google Search and Google Maps. Owners can upload photos, list their products and services, and update their operating hours, website, address and phone number. They can also respond to Google reviews and flag any reviews that violate Google’s policies.

Frequently Asked Questions