Last month I sat down with a founder who was paying for Slack, Asana, Notion, Google Docs, ChatGPT Team, Loom, and Miro. Seven tools, seven invoices, and a Slack notification sound that haunted her dreams.
"We added them one at a time," she said. "Each one made sense on its own."
That's exactly how tool sprawl works. No single decision is wrong. But stack enough reasonable decisions on top of each other and you end up with a workspace that fights against the people trying to use it.
If your team is running on five, eight, twelve different platforms and you're starting to feel the drag, this guide is for you. Not theory. Not a framework someone dreamed up in a slide deck. Just a practical process you can start this afternoon.
Step 1: Audit what you're actually using
You can't consolidate what you can't see. So the first move is getting everything on paper.
Open a spreadsheet and create five columns: Tool, Monthly Cost, Who Uses It, How Often, and What For. Then fill it in. Every single tool your team touches. Don't forget the ones buried in someone's browser bookmarks or the app that auto-renews on a personal card and gets expensed.
A few tips for making this honest:
- Check your company card statements going back six months. You will find subscriptions you forgot about.
- Ask each team directly. Engineering knows about tools that marketing has never heard of, and the other way around.
- Be honest about frequency. There's a big difference between "we use this daily" and "three people logged in last quarter."
Zylo's SaaS management data puts it at about 33% of software spend wasted on underused or redundant licenses. A third. That's real money leaving every month for tools collecting dust.
The finished audit will probably make you wince. Good. That means it's working.
Step 2: Find the overlap
Now look at your list and start drawing lines between tools that do similar things.
Most teams discover they have two or three apps serving the same basic function. A project management tool and a to-do app. Google Docs and Notion both handling documentation. Slack threads and email both carrying conversations that should be in one place.
The pattern I see most often:
- Chat, email, and comment threads all carrying the same team conversations
- Two project trackers (one the team chose, one that management mandated)
- Docs scattered across Google Drive, Notion, and random shared folders
- AI sitting in a separate browser tab, completely disconnected from everything else
Circle the overlaps. These are your consolidation targets. You don't need three communication channels. You don't need two places to track tasks. And you definitely don't need your AI assistant living in a browser tab that knows nothing about what your team is working on.
Step 3: Define your non-negotiables
Before you start cutting tools or shopping for replacements, figure out what you actually need. Not what's nice to have. What your team would mutiny over if you took away.
Talk to people. Not managers, the people who use these tools eight hours a day. Ask them:
- What do you use daily that you'd genuinely miss?
- What feature would you refuse to give up?
- What do you wish worked better?
You'll hear patterns. Somebody needs Kanban boards. Somebody else will riot without real-time chat. The design team needs something visual. Your non-negotiables list should reflect how your team actually works, not how you think they should work.
Write them down. Keep the list short. If everything is non-negotiable, nothing is.
Step 4: Evaluate unified workspace options
This is where you shop. And the criteria matter more than the brand names.
Ask these questions about every platform you evaluate:
Does it cover the core workflows? Chat, tasks, docs, and file storage are the baseline. If a platform can't handle all four, you'll bolt on extra tools and land right back where you started.
Is AI built in, or bolted on? There's a real difference. A platform where AI has access to your tasks, conversations, and documents can actually help in context. AI that lives in a separate tool means you're still copying and pasting between windows.
How's the pricing? Consolidation should save money, not just rearrange where you spend it. Compare the combined cost of what you'd replace against the new platform's per-seat price. Run the numbers for your actual team size.
Can it import your existing data? If you can't bring your task history, docs, and conversations over, you're starting from scratch. That's a hard sell to a team already tired of switching tools.
Does it scale? You need something that works today and doesn't fall apart when you double in size next year.
A few names worth looking at: Notion has expanded well beyond docs. ClickUp is trying to cover everything. Trilo puts tasks, chat, docs, and AI coworkers in one workspace so the AI actually has context on what you're working on. They each do different things well, so match them against your non-negotiables list.
Don't just read feature pages. Run a real pilot with a small group. Marketing copy can't tell you how a tool feels at 3pm on a Wednesday when you're trying to find a document someone shared last week.
Step 5: Migrate in phases (not all at once)
This is where most consolidation efforts crash. Someone gets excited, announces "we're switching everything on Monday," and the team revolts.
Don't do that.
Pick one team or one workflow to migrate first. Maybe it's moving your project management into the new platform while keeping Slack for another month. Maybe it's starting with docs and expanding from there.
A phased approach looks like this:
- Week 1-2: Pilot team moves their primary workflow (tasks or chat, pick one)
- Week 3-4: Gather feedback, fix friction, customize the setup
- Month 2: Expand to a second workflow or a second team
- Month 3: Full rollout with the kinks already worked out
The pilot team should include at least one skeptic. If you only test with enthusiasts, you won't find the real problems until it's too late.
Set a firm date to turn off the old tools. "Use whichever you prefer" sounds flexible, but in practice it means nobody fully commits to the new system and you end up maintaining both.
Step 6: Measure what changed
Consolidation only works if you can prove it worked. Track these things:
Cost reduction. Compare your old combined software spend against the new platform. Easy math.
Time saved. Survey your team after 30 and 90 days. How much time do they spend looking for information? How many apps do they open in a typical morning? RescueTime or similar tracking tools can give you hard numbers if your team is comfortable with that.
Team satisfaction. Run a quick anonymous survey. Do people feel less scattered? Are they finding things faster? Has the daily frustration dropped?
If the numbers look good, you have a case study for the next round of consolidation. If they don't, you caught the problem early enough to adjust.
Tools you can probably replace (a checklist)
Run through this list and check off what applies to your team:
- Separate chat app (Slack, Teams) -- replaced by in-platform messaging
- Standalone project manager (Asana, Monday, Jira) -- replaced by built-in tasks
- Docs tool (Notion, Google Docs, Confluence) -- replaced by integrated docs
- AI assistant (ChatGPT, Claude in a separate tab) -- replaced by in-context AI
- File storage (Dropbox, Google Drive) -- replaced by built-in storage
- Meeting notes tool (Otter, Fireflies) -- replaced by AI summaries
- Wiki / knowledge base (Notion, Guru, Slite) -- replaced by searchable workspace docs
Every box you check is one less login and one less place your team's knowledge gets fragmented.
Start this week
You don't need a committee. You don't need executive buy-in for step one. Open that spreadsheet, list your tools, and see what you find. The audit alone tends to pay for itself. Most teams discover at least one tool they're paying for that nobody uses.
The goal isn't zero tools. It's fewer seams between the ones you keep. When your conversations, tasks, and docs share the same space, you stop spending your day reconstructing context across browser tabs. You just work.
Tired of managing a dozen logins? We built Trilo to put your whole workflow in one place. Take a look, or drop us a line at hello@trilo.chat.
