Remote workforce solutions are the services and software that let you hire, pay, manage and support people who don’t work in your office. You need fewer of them than vendors would like. Most teams need one way to find talent, one legal way to employ and pay people wherever they live, one place to talk, one place to track work, and IT that keeps laptops and logins safe. Below are 10 solutions that cover those jobs, and who each one suits.
For this kind of work, the office is now the exception. As of May 2026, 52% of US employees whose jobs can be done remotely work hybrid and 26% work fully remote, according to Gallup. Only 22% are on-site full time, and when Gallup last asked remote-capable employees where they would rather work, just 6% picked on-site.
The software is the easy part to buy. The hard part is choosing a set that doesn’t overlap, so start from the job, not the product. First, our pick for the job no software can do: Zilo AI, for finding the right people.
The 10 solutions at a glance
| # | Solution | The job it does | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zilo AI | IT and data hiring, data annotation and transcription | AI and data teams |
| 2 | Deel | Employer of record, contractor payments, global payroll | Employees and contractors in many countries |
| 3 | Remote | Employer of record through entities it owns | Knowing exactly who employs your people |
| 4 | Rippling | HR, payroll and device management in one system | Onboarding and offboarding without gaps |
| 5 | Asana | Projects, owners and deadlines | Teams split across time zones |
| 6 | Hubstaff | Time tracking, timesheets and payments | Hourly staff and contractors |
| 7 | Slack | Team chat in channels, plus huddles | Everyday conversation |
| 8 | Zoom | Meetings, phone, chat and recorded video updates | Calls, and replacing some of them |
| 9 | Okta | Single sign-on, multi-factor login, access for new hires and leavers | Securing logins |
| 10 | TeamViewer | Remote access, IT support, patching | Fixing laptops you can’t touch |
Remote work solutions for a global workforce
Hiring across borders raises two questions: who finds the person, and who legally employs them. A recruiting partner answers the first. An employer of record (EOR) answers the second: it legally employs your hire on your behalf and runs their local contract, payroll and benefits, so you don’t have to set up a company in their country.
1. Zilo AI
Zilo does the part software can’t: finding the people and, for AI teams, taking a whole workload off your plate. On the hiring side it provides IT staffing, with roles from data engineers and ML engineers to cybersecurity analysts and data scientists. On the data side it produces the training data AI models learn from: text annotation, image annotation and voice annotation, plus audio, video and multilingual transcription. Zilo says more than 1,600 trained annotation and speech recognition experts do that work, and that they have annotated over 10 million data points. The team is based in Bangalore.
Best for: AI and data teams that want specialist hires and labeled training data from one partner. See Zilo’s services.
2. Deel
Deel wants to be the one place you hire, pay and equip people anywhere. Its EOR employs staff in countries where you have no entity, its contractor product hires, manages and pays contractors, and it adds HR software, visa support and equipment shipping on top. Deel’s homepage lists 150+ countries and 40,000+ customers, and its pricing page offers full legal employment through the EOR in 130+ countries. As of September 2026, Deel lists the EOR at $599 per employee per month and contractor management at $49 per contractor per month.
Best for: companies hiring a mix of employees and contractors in many countries.
3. Remote
Remote sells the same core service with a different promise: it says it owns and runs 100% of its entities, with in-house payroll and legal teams and no handoffs to third parties. That is worth checking with any EOR. Remote’s own guide warns that some providers employ your staff through partner companies, which leaves you little oversight of how your people are treated. Its EOR covers 90+ countries and, as of September 2026, is listed at $699 per employee per month, or $599 a month billed annually. It also offers contractor management, global payroll and a PEO for hiring across US states.
Best for: companies that want one accountable employer in each country they hire in.
Remote workforce management software
Once people are hired, you need to know three things without walking the floor: whether they have what they need, what they are working on and, for hourly staff, when they worked.
4. Rippling
Rippling runs HR, payroll, IT and finance on one platform, and for a remote team the useful part is where HR meets IT. Add a new hire and Rippling can buy a laptop, set it up with the right apps and security settings, and ship it to their door. When someone leaves, it can lock and wipe the device at a time you schedule, in step with offboarding. It manages Apple and Windows devices, pays employees and contractors around the world, and connects to 650+ other apps.
Best for: companies that want hiring, payroll and laptops handled in one system.
5. Asana
Across time zones, you can’t find out who is doing what by looking across the room. Asana keeps every task, owner and deadline in one place, and shows the same work as a list, calendar, timeline, Gantt chart or Kanban board. Workload views help you rebalance work before someone is swamped, and goals and portfolios roll projects up for managers.
Best for: teams that need a written record of who owns what.
6. Hubstaff
Hubstaff tracks time for people you don’t see. It records hours across devices, turns them into timesheets for approval, and pays people through providers such as Payoneer, Wise, PayPal and Deel. Optional features go further: activity levels, app and URL tracking, screenshots, and GPS clock-ins for field teams. Hubstaff lets you choose what is tracked and who sees it, so decide that, and tell your team, before you switch anything on.
Best for: hourly staff, contractors and teams that bill clients by the hour.
Communication tools for remote teams
7. Slack
Slack, a Salesforce company, organizes team conversation into channels, so discussions stay visible to the people who need them rather than sitting in private email threads. Huddles, its built-in video tool, cover the quick question you would otherwise ask across a desk, with optional AI note-taking. Slack Connect lets you chat with clients and vendors from inside Slack, which helps when part of your workforce sits at an outsourcing partner.
Best for: everyday team conversation.
8. Zoom
Zoom combines meetings, phone and chat on one platform, and two of its features suit distributed teams. Built-in AI summarizes meetings and suggests follow-ups, so whoever missed the call can catch up. And asynchronous video updates let someone in Bangalore brief a colleague in Boston without either of them staying up late.
Best for: teams that need reliable video calls, and a way to skip some of them.
IT solutions for a remote workforce
When laptops live in kitchens and cafes, the office network can’t protect them. You have to secure every login and keep every device’s software up to date, and the second job matters as much as the first. In Verizon’s 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, 31% of breaches started with a software vulnerability, overtaking stolen passwords as the most common way attackers got in.
9. Okta
Okta gives employees, contractors and partners one secure way into all their work apps. Its Workforce Identity platform combines single sign-on, adaptive multi-factor authentication and lifecycle management. That last part syncs with your HR system, so a new hire has app access on day one and a leaver loses it immediately. Okta offers 8,000+ pre-built integrations.
Best for: companies whose staff and contractors use a lot of cloud apps.
10. TeamViewer
When a remote employee’s laptop fails, IT has to fix it from somewhere else. TeamViewer is built for that: IT can connect to a device and take control from anywhere, and the same platform handles endpoint management, asset and patch management, and protection against viruses and ransomware. TeamViewer Remote is aimed at smaller businesses, and TeamViewer Tensor at enterprises.
Best for: IT teams supporting people they may never meet in person.
How to choose remote workforce solutions
Pick by the job, and buy one tool per job.
- Building AI products or hiring data talent: Zilo, for IT and data hires and for annotation and transcription work.
- Hiring abroad for the first time: Deel or Remote. Ask any EOR whether it owns the entity in the country you’re hiring in.
- Hourly staff and contractors: Hubstaff for hours, with Deel or Remote for contractor payments.
- Growing fast with a small IT team: Rippling for laptops and offboarding, Okta for logins, TeamViewer for fixes.
- Spread across time zones: Asana for a written record of who owns what, and Zoom’s recorded updates in place of some meetings.
Before you pay for anything new, check whether your current office suite already covers chat and video. Then run each new tool with one team for a month before rolling it out. For the human side of distributed work, see our ideas for team building for remote workers. If you’re deciding whether to add contractors or hand off a whole function, staff augmentation vs managed services sets out the trade-offs, and our guide to choosing a global hiring agency covers recruiting across borders.
Frequently asked questions
What are remote workforce solutions?
Services and software that let you hire, pay, manage and support people who work outside your office. Most teams need a source of talent, a way to employ and pay people abroad, chat and video, a project tracker, and IT tools for logins and devices.
What IT solutions does a remote workforce need?
Single sign-on with multi-factor authentication, device management that can update, lock and wipe laptops remotely, and a remote support tool so IT can fix problems without being in the room.
What remote work solutions help manage a global workforce?
A recruiting partner finds the people, and an employer of record, such as Deel or Remote, legally employs them in their own country and runs local payroll and benefits. That way you don’t need a company of your own there.
What is the top cloud-based remote workforce software?
No single product covers everything. Rippling comes closest, with HR, payroll and device management on one platform, but you will still want a project tool and an identity tool alongside it.
What does a remote workforce management service provider do?
It runs part of the operation for you instead of selling you software. Zilo, for example, recruits IT and data talent and takes on data annotation and transcription, while an employer of record such as Deel or Remote employs and pays your staff in other countries.