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This is a guide to categories, not products. Which jobs need a tool at all is a question you can answer today; which specific tool is best is a question that depends on you.
What almost every team needs
Email and shared files. Usually one purchase, since the main office suites bundle both. This is the foundation everything else assumes you have.
Somewhere work is tracked. It does not have to be project management software. For a team of three, a shared document often beats a tool nobody updates. The test is whether everyone can answer "what is everyone working on?" without asking.
Accounting. The one place to spend money early. Bookkeeping done badly is expensive to fix later, and this is the category where the cheap option usually costs more in accountant hours than it saves.
A password manager. This is the cheapest security decision you will make. The UK's National Cyber Security Centre recommends password managers as a good way to store and use strong, unique passwords, while noting the sensible precautions: protect the manager itself with a strong master password and turn on two-factor authentication. The alternative — credentials in a spreadsheet or reused across services — costs far more than the subscription the first time it goes wrong.
What usually waits
A CRM, until you cannot remember your customers. Before that point a spreadsheet is genuinely better, because it is faster to change while you are still working out what you need to record.
Analytics beyond the basics, until someone has time to act on what it says. Data nobody looks at is a subscription with extra steps.
Automation tools, until you have a process stable enough to be worth automating. Automating something you are about to change wastes the automation and hides the change.
The overlap trap
Most small businesses end up with four tools that each contain a to-do list, three that each store files, and two that both send email campaigns. It happens one sensible decision at a time.
Once a year, write down every tool and next to it the one job it is for. Any job with two tools against it needs a decision. Any tool with no clear job needs cancelling.
How to decide between two candidates
When you do get to picking a specific product, the tie-breaker is rarely features — competing tools converge on the same feature list. It is usually one of: how hard is it to get your data out, how long does support take to answer, and will it still be here in three years.
None of those appear on a comparison table, which is why comparison tables are less useful than they look.