Marketing, product marketing and technical writing need tools to help accelerate and guarantee excellent output.

Every tool with a written blurb on this page has earned it through actual use. I've put real time into each one and have genuine opinions about where it fits and where it doesn't.

The directory further down is a different thing entirely. It's a research resource, not a personal endorsement list. I haven't used everything in it, and I'm not pretending otherwise. Think of it as a starting point for your own evaluation, organized by category to make that process faster.

Mermaid is a text-based diagramming language that renders flowcharts, sequence diagrams, ERDs, and more from plain syntax. No drag-and-drop, no artboard, no connector that drifts the moment you stop looking at it. You write the structure, it draws the diagram.

The integration coverage is what makes it genuinely useful at scale. It renders natively across virtually every docs-as-code platform in use today, versions cleanly in Git, and plugs into your IDE so you're seeing results without leaving your environment. When a process changes, you edit a line of text rather than reopening a visual editor and repositioning shapes by hand.

If you prefer working online, the Mermaid Live Editor lets you build and export diagrams as images without any setup. The free tier includes AI assistance with tokens to help you generate syntax when you're not sure how to express something structurally. The learning curve is short, and once it clicks, going back to manual diagramming feels like a genuine step backward.

VEED started as a solid browser-based video editor, clean interface, no install, good enough for quick cuts and captions. Then they added AI, and the gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a video" got a lot shorter.

The vibe coding angle is what changed things for me. You can describe what you want, iterate on it conversationally, and the tool responds like a collaborator rather than a feature menu you have to navigate. For PMMs who need to produce video content without a production cycle, that interaction model matters more than any individual feature.

It handles subtitles, screen recordings, AI avatars, and repurposing long-form content into short clips, all in one place. The output quality is high enough to go straight into sales enablement or social without a design handoff.

For less technical creatives, Veed is a great solution to help you produce the product marketing and marketing content you need, fast.

Webflow's developer mode gives you the visual control of a design tool with the code access of a proper CMS. For someone managing their own site without a dedicated dev, that combination matters. You're not locked into what a template allows, and you're not starting from scratch every time you want to change something structural.

When I use it alongside Claude Code, the workflow closes the loop: Claude handles the logic and the code, Webflow handles the front-end execution, and the output looks like someone who knows what they're doing built it, because technically, something did.

Cal.com is my go-to scheduling tool—open-source, privacy-first, and infinitely customizable. I switched from the usual suspects because I wanted more control over the booking experience (think: custom workflows, team round robins, and Zapier integrations that don’t cost extra). Whether you're managing stakeholder calls, sales demos, or customer research sessions, Cal makes it seamless. Bonus: it plays nice with nearly every calendar and can live on your own domain if you want it to.

Claude Code is Anthropic's command-line tool for agentic coding, and for someone who thinks technically but doesn't code professionally, it fills a gap that used to require either a developer or a very long detour.

What separates it from using Claude in a chat window is that it works directly inside your project. It reads your files, understands your existing structure, and writes code that fits what you're already building. You're not copying and pasting between a browser and an editor and hoping it connects. It connects because it can see the whole picture.

The catch is that getting good output requires the same skill that makes any AI tool work well: knowing how to frame what you need, provide the right context, and recognize when the output needs correction. That's not a developer skill. It's a communication skill, which means technical writers and PMMs are often better positioned to use it effectively than people assume.

When I use it alongside Figma Make and Webflow, the three tools close the loop. Claude Code handles the logic, Webflow handles the front end, Figma Make handles the assets, and the output looks and works the way I intended without a three-day turnaround or a dependency on someone else's calendar.

Napkin.ai is what happens when your inner systems thinker meets a design co-pilot who actually gets you. If you’ve ever sketched a user flow on a Post-it, narrated a process in Slack, or tried (and failed) to make a diagram look decent in Figma—this is your tool.

You just describe what’s in your head—“onboarding flow with four steps and a decision tree”—and Napkin turns it into a clean, editable diagram. Flows, infographics, concept maps, you name it. I swear I’ve been looking for something like this forever.

Diagramming has always been my Achilles’ heel, but Napkin makes it feel... effortless. Ideal for technical writers, PMMs, and anyone who explains complex systems for a living. It’s fast. It works. And it might just save you from another sad rectangle in Google Slides.

They started by building playful, intuitive tools for kids—and now they’re bringing that same creative spark to business communication. And honestly? It shows.

Most AI notetakers announce themselves. There's a bot that joins your call, a recording notification, an automated summary that lands in someone's inbox before the meeting's even over. Granola does none of that.

It works by enhancing the notes you actually take during the meeting rather than replacing them with an auto-generated transcript nobody reads. There's no recording, no video capture, no bot sitting in the room. You stay present, jot what matters to you, and Granola fills in the gaps. The output is yours, shaped by what you actually paid attention to.

Two things make it stand out for me specifically. First, it identifies individual speakers without requiring a recording, which is genuinely impressive. Second, it handles Hebrew, which tells you something about how seriously the team takes language coverage beyond the obvious markets. If it handles Hebrew well, it almost certainly handles other languages that most notetakers quietly fail at.

For anyone who takes notes for their own use rather than for distribution, Granola fits that workflow without forcing you to adapt to it.

Figma Make is Figma's AI layer that generates UI components, mockups, and design assets from a text prompt. When it works, it's genuinely fast, and when you feed it the right context, the output lands close to your existing branding without you having to manually adjust every element.

The catch is that it requires supervision. Leave it to its own devices and it will make confident decisions you didn't ask for, as anyone who's seen a CEO's face reconstructed from a stock image can confirm. But paired with good prompting and a clear reference, it compresses the distance between "I need a visual" and something presentable from hours to minutes.

For PMMs and technical writers who need to move fast on assets without pulling in a designer for every request, it earns its place in the workflow, provided you review before you publish.

Whether you're running discovery calls, customer interviews, or internal syncs, AI notetakers are quietly becoming a PMM’s secret weapon. They transcribe, summarize, and highlight key moments—without you lifting a finger. Tools like Zoom AI Companion, Fathom, Fireflies, Otter, and Jamie all do some version of this, and their freemium tiers are shockingly useful.

Most of these tools don’t replace platforms like Gong or Salesloft—especially when you're scaling enablement or need centralized deal intelligence. But they do fill in the gaps: for teams that can’t afford licenses for every stakeholder, for ad-hoc interviews and research calls, and for solo PMMs who just need one reliable, free notetaker to stay sharp.

If you’ve ever missed a quote or lost track of action items mid-meeting, this category of tools will change the game.

Arcade lets you build interactive product demos from screen recordings, the kind where users click through the actual flow rather than watch someone else do it. For PMMs, this closes a gap that's been annoying for a long time. You no longer need a live environment, a sales engineer, or a perfectly timed demo call to show someone how your product works.

The editing experience is fast. You capture the flow, trim what doesn't need to be there, add annotations where context matters, and publish. The output embeds anywhere.

What's newer and worth knowing about: Arcade now supports video creation with AI generation built on content you've already published in your space. It pulls from existing material, handles light editing, and maintains brand alignment throughout, which means your demo library and your video assets can grow from the same source without starting from scratch each time. For technical writers using Arcade to guide users through complex workflows, that addition makes it a more complete content platform than it was even a year ago.

I've evaluated the competition in this space directly, and Arcade wins on both price and usability. That combination is rarer than it should be.

I keep three notebooks running at all times, and each one holds the sources I'm actively building from for a specific project or domain.

What makes NotebookLM different from every other research tool I've tested is that it doesn't just store your sources. It lets you interrogate them. You upload documents, articles, transcripts, and reports, and then you can ask questions across all of them at once. The AI pulls answers directly from your materials and cites exactly where each claim comes from, so you're never guessing whether something is from the Q3 earnings call or the competitor teardown you uploaded last Tuesday.

For someone who builds GTM positioning and technical content across cybersecurity, computer vision, and defense, this changes the research phase completely. I used to keep sprawling Google Docs with pasted excerpts and color-coded highlights, and I'd still lose track of where a specific proof point originated. NotebookLM compresses that entire process. I upload my source stack, ask it to surface every mention of a specific capability or objection pattern, and get grounded answers with citations in seconds.

The audio overview feature is genuinely useful for processing dense material when you need a different mode of intake. I've used it to listen through technical documentation while reviewing something else, which sounds minor but adds up when you're working across multiple product lines.

Where it falls short is collaboration. Right now it's essentially a single-player tool, so I can't share a notebook with a colleague and have them add sources or query the same stack. And the source limit means you have to be selective about what goes in, which forces a useful discipline but can feel constraining on larger research projects. For individual deep research and content development, though, nothing else I've found comes close to this workflow.

This is a research resource, not a personal endorsement list. I haven't used everything here, and I'm not pretending otherwise. The directory is organized by category to make your own evaluation faster, and empty rows are tools I'm actively looking into. It's a living document.

Why I Made This Directory

I have tried at least one, and in most cases more than 1, platform in every single category included in this directory. Typically, when I try a new tool, I also research what their competition is, if I didn't already know. While it's true that AI accelerates the research today, it still can be time consuming, and so I started keeping notes ... until one day it started taking the form of a directory. So here we are! 

You're looking for:

• a specific feature in a category. Search the Features column
• understanding why you should pick one over the other. Read the info in the Wins column, online input columns, and the Primary Use Cases column 
• initial understanding of available options. Search your keywords to find relevant vendors and competitors

• Columns for "online" = what users are saying about the platform anywhere across the internet and/or inside forums that I participate in
• Use this in combination with G2 and Peerspot - not instead of - I've collected input from elsewhere + the G2 score, but G2 itself hosts additional and far more detailed UGC insights that can be important!! Same for Peerspot.
  
• Search with Ctrl+F (temporary - filters coming soon)
• Keep in mind that not all columns are relevant for all tools 
• Not all tools have (yet) been researched as deeply as others 
• Product categories in some cases are AI generated only and have not been 100% vetted yet
• Got suggestions? Want to see a specific tool? Coming soon: requests and feedback!