Essential Resources for Content Creators in 2025

7th February 2025

Are you creating content in 2025? If so, you’re not alone.

There are an estimated 207 million active content creators worldwide, producing output for the likes of Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, and this number is expected to double by 2027.

The democratisation of content creation, thanks to the proliferation of social media and smartphones boasting high quality camera technology, has meant it’s never been easier to create digital content for your business or personal brand—but what resources and tools are content creators using in 2025?

Let’s take a look at some of the best subscriptions (and free) content creation tools available right now.

Must-have tools for content creators

We’ve broken down these tools into a few key categories:

1. Tools for generating ideas
2. Content planning tools
3. Design and video creation
4. Content storage solutions

Note that for this article we’re just looking at tools for helping you create visual and video content. We’re not considering tools for creating written content like blog posts or web service pages.

To find out more about that specific use case, check out our previous blog on developing an AI content strategy.

Tools for generating ideas

Even the most creative minds need help sometimes, and these tools are great at getting the ideas flowing.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a powerful, free-to-access tool for content ideation, helping creators identify trending topics and audience interests in real time. 

By analysing search trends, you can uncover emerging themes, seasonal spikes and regional variations in interest, allowing you to tailor content to what people are actively searching for. Comparing different keywords can also reveal which terms are growing in popularity, helping you to refine your content strategy. 

What’s more, Google Trends can highlight topics where search interest is falling, helping you to avoid wasting time creating content for subjects that are no longer driving traffic.

Note that although we’re talking about Google search data here, which still primarily returns articles in search results, this is still very useful information for visual content creators.

Answer the Public

Similar to Google Trends, Answer the Public is an invaluable tool for content ideation, providing insights into the questions and topics people are actively searching for online by analysing autocomplete data from search engines. 

Answer the Public generates visual maps of related queries, helping you understand audience intent and allowing you to create content that directly answers common questions.

However, unlike Google Trends, a free Answer the Public account only offers three daily searches. Sole content creators can pay £11/month to access 100 searches per day, while a Pro account unlocks unlimited searches for up to three users..

ChatGPT

Although ChatGPT can be used to write content from scratch, we think it’s best for content ideation. Simply ask questions about various topics and iterate your prompts to improve the outputs you receive. The advantage of ChatGPT over Google Trends and Answer the Public is that you can ‘talk’ to it, helping you to gain more contextual insight. It’s more like a research assistant than a simple search tool.

Although ChatGPT 4 requires a paid account, you can still access ChatGPT 3 for free with a Google account.

Content planning tools

After deciding on the subject of the content and the specific questions you should answer, you need to plan the content production. These tools are great at developing that initial seed of an idea.

xTiles

xTiles is an excellent resource for planning your visual content, as well as brainstorming collaboratively.

The platform’s ‘infinite’ canvas functionality allows you to lay out your notes, links, images and ideas how you want, while its drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to rearrange content individually or as part of a team.

Whether you’re creating a brand mood board, planning a new video series or collaboratively developing a strategy, this digital whiteboard is the ideal solution. What’s more, xTiles is incredibly affordable. There’s a free plan that includes the basic features (although storage and template access is limited), but the Plus Plan is just $8.25 per user, per month.

AudioPen

Do you like to brainstorm new content ideas out loud, rather than write them down? AudioPen converts spoken ideas into structured text that’s easy to share and develop.

AudioPen is powered by AI and goes beyond simple audio transcription, polishing your spoken notes as if you’d written them down from scratch.

You can try AudioPen out for free with ten stored notes, or pay $99 to access unlimited storage, as well as additional features, for a year.

Design and video creation tools

If you’re already creating visual content then you probably have your favourite tools already, but it’s also worth considering adding these to your tech stack.

Canva

The Adobe Suite might be the gold standard of visual content creation, but there are lots of strong competitors for people or teams working to a smaller budget or that aren’t experienced designers.

Canva is a great example of this, allowing you to create professional-looking designs without the need for expert design skills.

The free version of Canva offers quite a lot of functionality to get started with, but Canva Pro isn’t prohibitively expensive for independent content creators, setting you back £100 for a year. This opens up unlimited premium design templates, 1000 brand kits, over 20 AI tools and more.

READ MORE: The 5 best Adobe InDesign alternatives

Descript

Another great tool for editing video and audio is Descript, an AI-powered solution that can streamline the production process for content creators of all skill levels.

One of Descript’s tag lines is ‘if you can edit text, you can edit videos’, and the easy-to-use interface allows you to edit media quickly and easily. One particular exciting feature is ‘Overdub’, an AI-driven function that allows you to create a text-to-speech model of your voice which can then generate new content or make edits to audio content without the need to re-record it.

You can get started with Descript for free, with paid plans starting from $12/month.

Pixlr

If you’re looking for something similar to Adobe Photoshop but don’t have the budget, Pixlr is an excellent alternative.

The interface and functionality takes a lot of inspiration from Adobe, and the free version is fairly unrestricted, albeit limiting you to three file downloads per day. Pixlr is also browser-based, so you don’t need to download any software to run it.

While the free version is great, paid plans start from just $1.49/month, which removes ads, allows for unlimited saves and includes 80 AI credits per month.

Content storage solutions

Do you rely on social media platforms for your content storage? Your social profiles host the finished content, but what about all of the raw files? What’s more, you need to know you’ve got your content backed up in the event of your profiles getting hacked—something which isn’t uncommon for established content creators.

Digital Asset Management (DAM)

If you want to be a successful content creator you’re going to be generating a large amount of imagery, audio and video media—but do you have a plan for where to store it?

A file storage solution like Google Drive or Box (formerly Dropbox) might be your first thought, not least because they offer a large amount of storage for free. For example, you can store 15gb of media in Google Drive before you have to purchase additional space.

However, while they might be great for storing media, that’s about all they’re designed for. By contrast, Digital Asset Management (DAM) solutions like ResourceSpace are not only intended to store your media, but also make it more searchable, shareable and secure, while also integrating with your entire tech stack.

READ MORE: What's the difference between a DAM and Google Drive?

What’s more, ResourceSpace also offers 10GB of storage completely free, but without any restrictions on the DAM functionality. This includes all of the metadata tagging (both manual and AI-powered) that’s at the heart of Digital Asset Management, third-party sharing, security and integrations. Although 10GB of free storage won’t be enough forever, it’s a great solution to help content creators get started with DAM—especially compared to the alternatives that only offer free trials and restricted freemium versions.

To find out more about the benefit of ResourceSpace to content creators in 2025, why not book a free, no obligation demo of the platform below? Alternatively, you can launch your own free DAM platform within minutes.