The essential tools for remote development teams cover six jobs: holding and reviewing the code, tracking the work, written conversation, calls, shared documents and diagrams, and security. A team needs one tool for each job and no more. Which product fills each slot matters less than three things the business controls: the accounts belong to the company, every login is protected by a second step, and everyone knows which tool is the record for which kind of information.
This article is for the person paying for or managing a development team, in-house or at a supplier, whose members are not in one room.
How we chose these tools
Every product named here was checked on its maker’s own website in October 2026 and is on sale and under active development. They are in wide use among development teams, which matters when hiring, because new people are likely to know them already. The list is by job, not by rank, and nobody has paid to be included.
If the business already pays for Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, look at what is included before buying anything else. Fewer suppliers means fewer accounts to secure and fewer bills.
| Job | Tools to consider |
|---|---|
| Code and code review | GitHub, Azure DevOps, GitLab |
| Tracking work | Jira, Azure Boards, GitHub Issues, Linear |
| Written conversation | Slack, Microsoft Teams |
| Calls and recorded video | Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Loom |
| Documents and diagrams | Confluence, Notion, Miro, Lucidchart |
| Security | A password manager such as 1Password or Bitwarden, and single sign-on |
Code and code review
The source code is the one thing a remote team cannot work without, and it is the main asset the business owns. It lives in a repository: a store that records every change, who made it and why.
GitHub is the most widely recognised home for repositories and is owned by Microsoft. It includes pull requests, which are the way one developer proposes a change and another reviews it before it is accepted. It also offers Codespaces, development environments hosted in the cloud, which let a new team member start work without spending days setting up a laptop.
Azure DevOps, also from Microsoft, combines repositories with work tracking, automated builds and test management. Microsoft’s documentation says the basic features are free for up to five users. It is a natural fit for teams building on Microsoft technology.
GitLab offers a comparable all-in-one platform.
Whichever you use, the organisation account should be registered to your company, with at least two administrators. This applies with particular force when a supplier writes the code. Our article on why code reviews matter explains the review step, which does more for a remote team than for one sharing an office, because it is where knowledge passes between people who never overhear each other.
Tracking the work
A remote team has no wall of sticky notes, so the list of work has to be somewhere everyone can see it.
Jira, from Atlassian, remains the best-known tracker for software teams and can be configured for almost any process, which is both its strength and the usual complaint about it. Atlassian has announced that the self-hosted Data Center editions of Jira and Confluence reach end of life on 28 March 2029, and stopped selling them to new customers in March 2026. A team choosing Jira now is choosing the cloud version.
Azure Boards and GitHub Issues come with the code platforms above, and using the tracker that sits beside the code saves an integration. Linear is a newer tracker built specifically for software teams.
The test of any tracker is whether you, as the person paying, can open it and see what is being worked on this week without asking anyone. Our article on tools for agile teams looks at trackers and boards in more detail.
Conversation and calls
Slack, now part of Salesforce, and Microsoft Teams are the two usual choices for written conversation. Both organise messages into channels by subject, and both connect to code platforms and trackers so that events such as a failed build appear where the team is talking. Pick whichever the rest of the business already uses. Running both divides attention.
For calls, Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Meet all do the job, and all allow screen sharing, which is how most remote teams work on a problem together. Skype, which earlier versions of this article mentioned, was retired by Microsoft in May 2025. Microsoft’s Live Share, a tool for two developers to edit the same code at once, is now in maintenance mode with no new features planned, so we have left it out.
Loom, part of Atlassian, records a short video of your screen with narration. For teams spread across time zones, a five-minute recording that explains a change often replaces a meeting nobody could schedule.
Chat is a poor place to keep anything. A decision made in a channel should be copied to the tracker or the documentation the same day, or in six months nobody will find it.
Documents and diagrams
Remote teams depend on writing things down, because nobody can lean across a desk to ask.
Confluence, from Atlassian, and Notion are both widely used for team documentation. The code platforms also include a wiki, and many teams keep technical documentation as plain text files inside the repository, where it is versioned along with the code it describes. For the business, the important documents are the ones that would let a different team take the system over: how to build it, how to release it, where it runs and who holds which account. Our software takeover checklist lists them.
For drawing, Miro is an online whiteboard for workshops and rough planning, and Lucidchart is a diagramming tool suited to more formal diagrams of systems and data. A diagram that explains how the system fits together is worth keeping. A whiteboard from a workshop usually is not, so save the conclusions in the documentation.
Security for a team that is not in one building
A remote team’s tools are reachable from anywhere, by design. That makes the login the thing to protect.
- Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere. This means a second step after the password, such as a code from an app. Before adopting any tool, check that it offers this, either directly or through single sign-on.
- Use single sign-on where you can. People then log in to each tool with their company account, and removing that one account removes their access to everything. Businesses on Microsoft 365 already have Microsoft Entra ID, which can provide this.
- Use a password manager for the secrets that cannot sit behind single sign-on. 1Password and Bitwarden both have business plans. Passwords sent in chat messages are the common failure here.
- Have a leavers’ process. When someone leaves the team or a supplier relationship ends, access is removed from every tool on the same day.
- Decide who may see live data. Most development can be done with test data.
The National Cyber Security Centre publishes free guidance on home working and securing devices, which is a sensible starting point. CodeFirst does not carry out penetration testing or compliance certification, and a business with particular obligations should take specialist advice.
A check to make this week
List every tool the team uses. Against each, write down who owns the account, who the administrators are, whether multi-factor authentication is enforced and what would happen to your access if the supplier or a key person left. If the answer for the code repository is that someone else owns it, fix that first. Our page on what to do when a developer has left shows how hard the alternative is.