Studies of soft particle production play an important role in understanding the physics of heavy-ion collisions. Measurements of hadron yields are well described by grand-canonical thermal models in heavy-ion collisions, while an enhancement of strangeness production is observed in smaller collision systems. Several species of hadronic resonances are observed to be suppressed in central nucleus-nucleus collisions, likely due to scattering effects in the hadronic phase. The production mechanisms of nuclei can be studied through measurements of their yields, flow, and coalescence parameters. Hadron transverse-momentum spectra can be shaped by various effects, including radial flow and recombination; studies of the pT spectra of identified hadrons with different masses and quark content can help to gauge the importance of such effects for different system sizes. Recent measurements by the ALICE Collaboration related to these topics will be presented for a wide range of system sizes in pp, p–Pb, Pb–Pb, and Xe–Xe collisions at LHC energies.