Top 10 Hello Bonsai Alternatives of 2024: Pros & Cons

Hello Bonsai is a great solution for freelancers and small businesses. But what happens when your business needs grow?

This article will discuss the best Hello Bonsai alternatives, including robust project management tools, simple and affordable task management tools, and more.

Productive is a powerful tool with a wide range of features for managing agency workflows.

While you won’t be able to run client surveys or sign contracts with Productive, you’ll get more robust agency management features.

This helps business owners get better insights into their financial performance and profitability, so they can optimize processes and make informed decisions for business sustainability and growth.

Some of the key benefits of Productive include:

Let’s explore these key features in more detail:

Bonsai offers three main project views for managing project progress: Board view, List view, and Gantt view.

Compared to this, Productive offers as many as seven customizable views, some of which are fully unique ways to track your tasks and employee availability. For example:

Additionally, with its Sales CRM feature, Productive helps you customize your sales pipeline, track deals, send quotes/proposals to potential clients, and improve your overall customer relationship management.

In Productive, you can easily collaborate both with team members and clients.

Users of Bonsai state that:

Source: Capterra

Clients that are invited to Productive from the Client Portal can be added to specific projects. This will allow them to: see tasks and task lists, open new tasks, comment on tasks, close tasks, and filter tasks.

This helps keep collaboration and feedback in one place, instead of scattered across chat apps and email.

Additionally, you can allow clients to view information on time entries logged on projects, as well as budgeting information.

For more granular control of who can see and do what on the platform, you can use the custom Permission Builder.

Productive offers multiple ways to simplify your time tracking.

The Time Tracking feature includes:

Project managers can get more control over timesheets by setting up a a lock schedule.

You can define timesheets to be locked at the end of each day, week, or monthly (timesheets can be manually unlocked for individual employees).

Additionally, by approving entries individually or in bulk, project managers can control which ones are billable and will count for invoicing, and which ones are not.

With Productive’s Budgeting, business owners can define their employee cost rates, billable rates, create agency rate cards, and then visualize and monitor budgets throughout the project management process.

Productive supports T&M, fixed-price, retainer, and complex budgets (that can be split up into multiple phases for easier money management).

A big benefit of Productive is its overhead and expense management.

Overhead is calculated by hour, applying it to employee cost rates, which helps business owners get insights into their true profitability per project.

For expense tracking, expenses can be logged against specific projects and marked for reimbursement.

For Billing, you can access budgeting information, customize, create and send invoices to clients. There’s also a Xero and QuickBooks integration if you want to copy your invoices and continue your processes from these tools.

Productive’s Resource Planning feature offers a more robust planner that provides full control over how your agency manages their resources.

The resource planner includes information on your employee working hours, time off, and holidays.

Project managers can build schedules with this information, which also includes a handy overview of many hours have already been booked for each employee.

With the color-coded capacity indicators, project managers can make easier decisions on who can work more, or who is already overbooked.

Productive includes tentative bookings and placeholders to account for unconfirmed projects, as well as external or to-be-hired staff.

Utilization and forecasted utilization can be managed either through the resource planner, or Productive’s Reporting.

The Forecasting feature is another unique functionality of Productive.

You can view your current budget information, including budgeting, profitability, and revenue. This is generated from cost rates, billable rates, and billable hours tracked (and optionally overhead and expenses).

However, if you use the Resource Planning feature to schedule employee time, you can turn on the Forecasting charts to view key financial metrics for future periods.

This can help you manage risk factors such as unprofitable margins or significant budget burn, and reallocate employees and shift schedules to avoid losses or delays.

Utilization can also be forecasted to help guide your hiring and other HRM decisions.

Reporting includes more than 50+ agency focused templates that can be used to visualize data from various platform activities, including budgeting, time tracking, sales, resourcing, and more.

Reports can also be created fully from scratch and customized with data filtering and grouping, custom fields, and even custom formulas.

You can also choose from a couple of different layouts to visualize data, such as Donut, Column, Line, and other charts.

To share reports, create dashboards and add various widgets, or use Productive’s Pulse to automate sending to email or Slack.

Additional features include: Time Off Management, Automations, Revenue Recognition, Docs, Productive AI

Productive offers various integrations with HR, accounting, and collaboration tools.

Integrations include Slack, Google Calendar, and Outlook for scheduling and updates; Xero and QuickBooks for accounting; BambooHR, Breathe, Humaans.io for HRM; Memtime for time tracking; and more

FreshBooks is a good accounting tool for freelancers, but it’s not a stand-in for a business management software solution.

Key features:

Pros: FreshBooks is a solid option for freelancers and smaller businesses due to its integrated accounting and project management capabilities.

Cons: FreshBooks isn’t robust enough to cover business management needs in mid-sized to larger companies. In that sense, it might be best to consider more popular cloud-based accounting software such as QuickBooks or Xero.

You can also check out our list of the best business budgeting software.

Bloom is a client relationships management alternative focused on small businesses, but can be too limited as an all-in-one business process management software solution.

Key features:

Pros: Bloom can be a good alternative if you’re looking for a tool similar to Bonsai, due to its contract signing and form building features. Its image galleries can make it useful as production company software.

Cons: The software might be too expensive to use for freelancers or small businesses, but it’s also not as robust as some available CRM for agencies.

Source: G2

Asana is a good Bonsai alternative for businesses that want more advanced features for collaboration and task management, but it lacks budgeting and invoicing capabilities.

Key features:

Pros: Asana is a middle-ground option for task management and collaboration — it’s not as simple as something like Trello, but it’s still fairly easy to pick up and use.

Cons: If you’re looking to switch from Bonsai to some more advanced business management tools, you’re better off considering some Asana alternatives.

We also have a more in-depth review of Asana vs Trello vs ClickUp vs Monday.

ClickUp provides flexible and customizable project management capabilities, but is often criticized for lacking financial features and being buggy.

Key features:

Pros: Users often praise ClickUp for its customization options for layouts and automations. There are also some useful features for web management.

Cons: Like Asana, ClickUp doesn’t provide features for financial tracking.
Additionally, reviewers frequently mention issues with bugs and performance.

You can find out more in our comparison of ClickUp vs Monday vs Asana. You can also go to our ClickUp alternatives page to find some similar options.

ManyRequests’s client portal project management software can be a great pick for design and creative agencies, but its pricing can be steep for some businesses.

Key features:

Pros: ManyRequests offers features such as integrated file annotations and comments and a white-label portal, which make it a good pick for creative agency software.

Cons: The tool can be a little pricey, even when it comes to the most basic plan. Additionally, there are almost no customer reviews online to support your decision-making process.

Copilot is a great alternative for businesses looking primarily for a client management platform, but it’s less suitable for project and task management.

Key features:

Pros: Copilot can be a great cloud-based software alternative for businesses that want to focus on their client communications and document management.

Cons: There are no project management features, so you’ll need to implement an extra tool to manage team workflows.

Monday.com is a popular work management solution with customizable templates for personalized workflows, but similarly to Asana or ClickUp, it lacks advanced features for finances.

Key features:

Pros: Monday.com is a flexible option for work management, and it can be suitable for various types of business workflows.

Cons: Monday work OS doesn’t offer much in the way of project budgeting and billing. We explore this in more depth in our Trello or Asana or Monday comparison.

Source: G2

Accelo is a good professional services automation software alternative to Bonsai, but can have a steep learning curve for less experienced teams.

Key features:

Pros: Accelo offers a wide range of features for managing professional services workflows from start to finish.

Cons: It can be difficult to learn to use due to its specific terminology and comprehensiveness.

Source: Capterra

Additionally, Accelo was acquired in 2024, which may impact further development.

Find out more in our article on the top Accelo alternatives.

Trello is a great Bonsai alternative for teams interested in a user-friendly interface, but it’s features are limited to collaboration and task management.

Key features:

Pros: Teams usually enjoy using Trello due to its simplicity and streamlined interface. It also offers various templates for managing unique workflows.

Cons: Trello is really only a task management platform, so it’s a significant step down in complexity to something like Bonsai or Productive.

Learn more in our review of Trello vs Jira vs Asana.

Hello Bonsai, or Bonsai, is a CRM software designed for small businesses.

Its main features include contract signing and custom forms, time tracking and task management, client portal, financial management and invoicing.

While Hello Bonsai is fairly well reviewed on both G2 and Capterra, users list the following main downsides:

Overall, Bonsai has a great suite of features for freelancers or small businesses that need an online software for client work, but users may soon outgrow its capabilities:

Source: Capterra

In this article, we’ve explored some of the most popular tools that can be a great Hello Bonsai alternative.

To summarize:

Book a demo with Productive today to learn more.