36 content creation tools every creator should try in 2025

Creating engaging content that captures attention and inspires action is the holy grail for modern creators. However, navigating a sea of software and platforms can be overwhelming and leave you confused about what tool can best serve your needs. 

In this blog post, we'll explore the 36 essential content creation tools every creator should try in 2025. From graphic design apps to intuitive video editing software, we've handpicked various resources guaranteed to enhance your workflow, creativity, and engagement.

We'll also examine how you can transform your designs into customized products with Gelato's local production and global reach.

• There are many effective content creator tools for 2025, covering graphic design, video editing, photo enhancement, social media management, writing, collaboration, and research. 

• These tools streamline workflows, enhance creativity, and improve engagement. They offer features like real-time collaboration, AI content creation tools, and advanced analytics.

• A strategic approach to choosing the right tools involves assessing goals, testing multiple platforms, focusing on scalability, and considering budget.

• Gelato is a key resource for transforming digital creations into custom merchandise, highlighting its global reach and sustainable local production.

Content creation tools are software applications or platforms that assist creators in producing, editing, and managing digital content ideas. They optimize workflows by providing necessary functionalities for tasks like designing graphics, editing videos, enhancing photos, scheduling social media posts, writing, and analyzing content performance. These tools enhance creativity, improve engagement with the target audience, and help you create content that is of high quality.

Let's begin by exploring the top visual content creation tools to enhance your project's imagery and design elements.

1. Gelato

Gelato is a powerful design and print on demand platform that enables creators to design, customize, and sell products effortlessly. With its online design maker, users can create personalized merchandise like t-shirts, phone cases, and posters using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface—no advanced design skills are needed. Once a design is ready, Gelato’s global print network ensures local production in 34 countries, reducing shipping times and costs. Seamlessly integrating with platforms like Shopify and Etsy, Gelato helps creators bring their products to market faster while eliminating inventory hassles.

2. Canva

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design platform ideal for both beginners and professionals. It offers a vast library of templates, images, and fonts, enabling users to effortlessly create stunning visuals for social media channels, presentations, and marketing materials. 

3. Adobe Illustrator

This tool excels in creating detailed illustrations, logos, and scalable artwork, ensuring high-quality results for both print and digital media. Illustrator offers advanced tools such as the Pen tool, Shape Builder, and extensive typography options, allowing for precise and creative designs. 

4. Figma

Figma is a leading interface design tool that revolutionizes collaborative design workflows. It operates entirely in the browser for real-time collaboration among team members regardless of their location. It is perfect for designing user interfaces, wireframes, and prototypes. 

5. Unsplash

This is a premier source for high-quality, royalty-free images catering to various creative projects. It offers an extensive library of photos contributed by a global community of photographers, ensuring diverse and authentic visual content. 

6. Shutterstock

Shutterstock is a comprehensive marketplace for premium stock images, videos, and music, serving creative professionals across various industries. It boasts a vast collection of millions of assets, ensuring that users can find high-quality content to enhance their projects.

Next comes the best video content creation tools to help you enhance your storytelling and streamline editing.

7. Adobe Premiere Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro is a professional-grade video editing software for filmmakers and content creators. It offers a comprehensive suite of tools for editing, color correction, and audio enhancement, ensuring high-quality productions. 

8. Final Cut Pro

This is Apple’s flagship video editing software, renowned for its intuitive interface and robust performance. Final Cut Pro offers advanced features like magnetic timeline, multi-cam editing, and powerful color grading tools. 

9. CapCut

CapCut is a versatile, user-friendly video editing app popular among social media enthusiasts and creators. Available on both mobile and desktop platforms, it provides a wide array of features, including trimming, cutting, and merging clips and adding transitions, effects, and music.

10. Descript

This tool revolutionizes video editing with its unique approach, combining transcription and editing into a single platform. Descript offers features such as multi-track editing, screen recording, and overdub for creating voiceovers. 

11. Animoto

Animoto is a cloud-based video creation platform designed for businesses and marketers to produce professional-quality videos with ease. It offers a range of customizable templates, allowing users to create engaging marketing videos, social media content, and presentations without extensive editing.

Now let’s explore the top photo editing and enhancement tools to elevate your visual storytelling and bring your images to life. 

12. Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is the industry-standard photo editing software renowned for its powerful features and versatility. It offers advanced tools for image manipulation, retouching, and compositing, allowing users to create stunning visuals from scratch or enhance existing photos. 

13. Lightroom

This is a comprehensive photo management and editing tool designed for photographers. It excels in organizing large photo libraries with intuitive tagging and categorization features. It offers robust editing capabilities, including exposure adjustments, color correction, and advanced retouching. 

14. Luminar Neo

Luminar Neo by Skylum is a modern photo editing software that combines powerful AI-driven tools with a user-friendly interface. It offers features like sky replacement, portrait enhancement, and creative filters, enabling users to achieve professional results with minimal effort. 

15. Snapseed

Snapseed, developed by Google, is a free and intuitive photo editing app for mobile and desktop users. It offers a wide range of tools, including selective adjustments, healing brushes, and various filters, allowing users to fine-tune their images precisely. 

16. Affinity Photo

This tool by Serif is professional-grade photo editing software that offers a cost-effective alternative to other industry leaders. It provides comprehensive image retouching, compositing, and color grading tools. It boasts high performance with support for large files and real-time editing. 

Up next are social media scheduling and analytics tools to boost your online presence and manage your digital footprint effortlessly. 

17. Buffer

This user-friendly social media scheduling tool allows businesses to plan and publish posts across multiple platforms. Its intuitive interface makes it easy to schedule content in advance, ensuring a consistent online presence. Buffer also offers robust analytics. 

18. Hootsuite

This is a comprehensive social media management platform designed to streamline the process of scheduling, monitoring, and analyzing social media activities. It supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, allowing users to manage all their accounts from a single dashboard.

19. Later

Later is a specialized social media scheduling tool primarily focused on visual platforms like Instagram, but it also supports Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. It offers a drag-and-drop calendar interface, making planning and arranging posts easy and carrying out detailed analytics to track performance. 

20. Sprout Social

This powerful tool is tailored for businesses seeking to enhance their social media strategy. It offers scheduling capabilities, allowing users to plan and publish content across multiple platforms. Its advanced analytics provides in-depth insights into audience engagement and campaign performance.

21. CoSchedule

CoSchedule is an all-in-one marketing calendar that integrates social media scheduling with broader marketing efforts. It allows users to plan, organize, and execute their social media campaigns alongside content marketing, email marketing, and other promotional activities. 

Let's now explore the best writing and optimization tools to ensure your work resonates, is error-free, and ranks higher in search engines.

22. Grammarly

Grammarly is a comprehensive writing assistant that helps users enhance their writing by detecting grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors. Beyond basic corrections, it offers style and tone suggestions to improve clarity and engagement. 

23. Jasper

This AI-powered content creation tool is designed to streamline the writing process for marketers, bloggers, and businesses. It leverages advanced machine learning algorithms to generate high-quality content quickly, including blog posts, social media updates, and types of marketing copy. 

24. Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is a powerful optimization tool that helps users improve their website’s search engine rankings through data-driven strategies. It analyzes top-performing pages for specific keywords and provides actionable insights on content structure, keyword density, and backlink opportunities. 

25. ChatGPT

This popular tool is an advanced language model developed by OpenAI, designed to assist with a wide range of writing and content creation tasks. It can generate coherent and contextually relevant text based on user prompts, making it ideal for drafting articles and brainstorming ideas.

26. Hemingway App

This app is a user-friendly tool aimed at improving the readability and clarity of your writing. It highlights complex sentences, passive voice usage, and adverbs, encouraging more concise language. By providing a readability score, writers ensure their content is accessible to a broader global audience.

Now comes the top collaboration and productivity tools, making working together easier than ever to streamline your productivity.

27. Notion

This versatile, all-in-one workspace combines notes, tasks, databases, and collaboration tools. Its flexible interface allows teams to customize pages to fit their workflow, making it ideal for project management, documentation, and knowledge sharing. 

28. Google Docs

Google Docs is a cloud-based word-processing tool that facilitates real-time collaboration and document sharing. Its intuitive interface allows multiple users to edit documents simultaneously, making it perfect for team projects, reports, and content creation. 

29. Trello

This visual project management tool uses boards, lists, and cards to organize tasks and workflows. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes prioritizing and tracking progress on various projects easy. Teams can collaborate by assigning tasks, setting deadlines, and adding comments or attachments.

30. Slack

Slack is a powerful messaging platform designed to enhance team communication and collaboration. It organizes conversations into channels based on projects, departments, or topics, allowing for streamlined and organized discussions. 

31. AirTable

This dynamic database and spreadsheet hybrid offers powerful organization and collaboration capabilities. Its user-friendly interface allows teams to create customizable tables, views, and forms to manage various projects and data. 

Last comes the top content research tools to uncover trending topics and understand audience preferences, which are key to successful content creation. 

32. Google Trends

Google Trends is a powerful tool for analyzing the popularity of search queries over time. It allows content creators to identify trending topics, seasonal patterns, and regional interests, helping to inform content strategy. By comparing multiple keywords, users can discover emerging trends. 

33. BuzzSumo

This comprehensive content research tool helps users discover the most shared and engaging content across various platforms. By analyzing social media shares, backlinks, and content performance, BuzzSumo identifies popular topics and influential creators in any niche. 

34. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic visualizes search queries and questions that people are asking around specific keywords. This tool generates a comprehensive list of potential content topics based on user queries, providing valuable insights into audience needs and interests. 

35. Semrush Keyword Magic Tool

Semrush's Keyword Magic Tool is an advanced keyword research tool offering an extensive keyword database for SEO and content marketing. It allows users to generate various keyword suggestions and analyze search volume, keyword difficulty, and trends. 

36. AlsoAsked.com

This tool leverages data from search engines' "People Also Ask" section to reveal common questions related to specific keywords. It helps content creators understand the questions and topics their audience is interested in, enabling the creation of comprehensive and informative content. 

With all the tools at your disposal, let's discuss how to make sure you're equipped with the knowledge to pick the perfect tools.

Assess your goals

Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, engage with your audience, or drive sales? Understanding your goals helps identify the necessary tools that align with your strategy. For example, if video content is crucial, prioritize platforms with robust video editing and distribution features. 

Test multiple platforms

Experiment with various platforms to determine which fits your workflow and content style best. Testing multiple platforms helps you compare usability, functionality, and integration capabilities. Gather feedback from your team and consider how each tool handles your specific content types. 

Focus on scalability

Your tools should accommodate increased demand and complexity as your audience expands and your content strategy evolves. Look for solutions that offer flexible pricing plans, additional features, and easy integration with other software. 

Consider your budget

Factor in the initial purchase price and any ongoing subscription fees, training costs, and upgrades. Prioritize tools that offer the best value by providing essential features without unnecessary extras. Consider the ROI—tools that enhance productivity and improve content quality can justify higher costs.

With the knowledge of all 35 tools, you can now craft captivating designs, edit videos like a pro, and even strategize your social media presence. But when it comes to turning those fabulous creations into tangible products, look no further than Gelato. 

As a leading print on demand service, Gelato empowers creators with the ability to design custom merchandise and custom products, all while leveraging local production that reaches a global audience. 

Gelato offers easy integration for creators looking to diversify their offerings, allowing them to transform their vision into a wide range of products, from apparel to art prints. With a network covering 34 countries, Gelato ensures fast and sustainable delivery, reducing carbon footprints significantly. 

Sign up for Gelato today!

What is the best content creation software to use?

The best software depends on your specific needs. Adobe Creative Cloud offers comprehensive design and video editing tools, while Canva is ideal for easy graphic creation. Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere are top choices for video editing. WordPress excels at content management. 

What tools do you need throughout the content creation process?

Essential tools include content planning platforms like Trello or Asana, writing and editing software like Google Docs or Grammarly, design tools like Canva or Adobe Suite, video editing programs like Adobe Premiere, collaboration tools like Slack, and analytics tools like Google Analytics.

What equipment do you need for content creation?

Key equipment includes a reliable computer, a high-quality camera or smartphone, good lighting (like softboxes or ring lights), a clear microphone for audio files, a stable tripod, and video editing hardware/software.