Top 11 HoneyBook Alternatives in 2024

HoneyBook is a great option for freelancers and small businesses.

However, if you want more advanced collaboration and business insights, you’ll need to consider these HoneyBook alternatives.

Productive is a software solution designed specifically for the needs of professional services companies.

It offers comprehensive features for managing end-to-end business operations, including project management tools, budgeting, and resourcing.

While it might be too complex for freelancers, Productive is one of the best HoneyBook alternatives for businesses that want more control over their profitability and finances.

So, if your business is growing and you’re noticing gaps in your processes, it might be the right time to switch to an all-in-one solution.

Let’s explore Productive’s features in more detail:

While HoneyBook has some essential features for project and task management, Productive offers more advanced features for team collaboration and workflows.

For project management, project managers and their teams can choose between multiple customizable workspaces. This includes: Gantt, Kanban, List, Calendar, Workload view, and others.

Within each view, teams can manage their tasks, assign team members, and add various details through custom fields.

You can also use Productive’s Automation feature to get more efficient workflows.

For example, if you want to notify a team member of a task update in Slack, you can set up an automation to streamline this action and other repetitive tasks.

With the Client Portal, you can invite clients to your project workspaces.

You can collaborate on tasks to streamline client communication, and provide them with access to budgeting and time tracking information.

Productive’s Time Tracking offers several time tracking methods: an integrated timer, manual entry, automatic time tracking.

You can also track time directly from tasks to associate it with a specific project, or use a widget to run your timer from the desktop.

Project managers can get more control over their timesheets by setting them to be locked after a certain period of time. They can also view each entry, approve or reject them individually or in bulk.

Productive also offers a Google Calendar integration for associating events with specific projects.

With Productive’s Budgeting, you can get in-depth insights into your agency’s financial performance.

You’ll set up your employee cost rates, billable rates, and set up your rate cards.

Rate card data is used to build budgets of various types: fixed-price, hourly, retainer, and hybrid.

You can visualize and monitor your budget burn according to billable rates and hours billed.

Productive also includes integrated Billing. Your budgeting data is used to create client invoices, which you can send from the platform.

You can also create an automatic email sequence for late payments.

Productive also offers built-in QuickBooks and Xero integrations to finalize your invoicing process.

With Resource Planning, agencies can get more control over their business resources, including employees and financials.

You can schedule employees according to their working hours, holidays, and scheduled time off.

When you’re allocating their time, you’ll also be able to see their current capacity, or how many of their hours have already been allocated.

You can also visualize and forecast your utilization.

Resource Planning also enables advanced financial perfomance insights with Forecasting. Productive uses your resource scheduling data to predict your budget burn, revenue, and profit margins up until the end of the project.

You also also create schedules for uncomfirmed projects (tentative bookings) and to-be-hired team members (placeholders).

Finally, Productive’s Reporting uses all your project activities and data to help you make informed decisions.

You can get advanced insights on time tracking, resourcing, budgeting, and much more by using Productive’s customizable templates or creating reports from scratch.

Productive’s reports include various customization option, such as different visualizations, custom fields and formulas, grouping and filtering options.

For sharing your reports, you can create custom dashboards or schedule your reporting to Slack or email with Productive’s Pulse.

Additional features: Sales CRM, Docs, Productive AI, Revenue Recognition, Purchase Orders

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.

You can also check out Productive’s 14-day free trial before committing to a paid plan.

Bonsai can be a great option for businesses looking for a client management tool, but it lacks advanced collaboration and financial management features.

Key features:

Pros: Bonsai provides some some additional features in comparison to HoneyBook, which can make it more suitable for businesses that want to moderately scale up their software’s complexity.

Cons: On the other hand, Bonsai is still not the best option for agency management, as project management and reporting are not its focus. Additionally, users often comment that the Client Portal should offer more client interactions:

Source: Capterra

ClickUp is a work management software with customizable workflows for client projects, but it doesn’t offer budgeting and advanced analytics features.

Key features:

Pros: With ClickUp, you’ll get a good software solution for creating custom workflows for your client projects.

Cons: ClickUp is not the best option for freelancers, but it’s also slightly underfeatured for businesses that want to invest in a software that provides a 360-degree view of operations.

Additionally, there are some issues with ClickUp’s performance.

To find out more, check out our list of the best ClickUp alternatives or our in-depth comparison of ClickUp and Teamwork.

Copilot is a good HoneyBook alternative for managing your customer management process, but it’s not suitable as an all-in-one business management platform.

Key features:

Pros: Users enjoy Copilot’s white labeling and integrations options, as well as its easy-to-set up design and user interface.

Cons: While you can manage your client communications with Copilot, there’s no way to handle client collaboration on project tasks. To get the benefits of a comprehensive solution, you’ll need to implement a professional services project management software system.

Táve is a software designed specifically for supporting client management for photographers and studios, but it might not be the best for workflows in other industries.

Key features:

Pros: Táve can be a great option for photographers that want to get basic contact management. Users often enjoy it for its user-friendly interface and automation options for administrative tasks.

Cons: Like HoneyBook, Táve is best for smaller businesses and creative freelancers that want to get basic client management, but you’ll need to switch to a different business management solution at a certain point.

Source: Capterra

Learn all about the most popular creative agency management software.

Zoho CRM is a more advanced CRM for agencies that caters to various industries, but you’ll need to integrate it with Zoho’s project management module to cover all client project activities.

Key features:

Pros: Zoho CRM can help you align sales and marketing teams with more advanced sales automation and workflow features.

Cons: On the other hand, Zoho CRM can be more complex, and certain parts of the platform have a steeper learning curve or require technical knowledge to configure.

For some streamlined solutions with CRM features, go to our list of the best CRM project management software.

Like Copilot or Táve, Dubsado is another solution for managing contracts, invoices, and client forms, but doesn’t provide a comprehensive workspace for advanced business needs.

Key features:

Pros: Users find Dubsado easy to use overall: “I really liked that the interface was beautiful and nicely laid out. I could set up invoices, descriptions payments and contracts easily” (Source: G2).

Cons: Users have some issues with specific features in Dubsado, one that has been specifically underlined is the functionality of linking emails to Dubsado:

Source: Capterra

Trello is known for its user-friendly, Kanban-inspired interface, but isn’t suitable for more complex workflow management or collaboration.

Key features:

Pros: Trello can be suitable for various business needs due to its template library which is supported both by the community and official vendor.

Cons: Trello is a popular tool for user-friendly workflow management, but it won’t be suitable for agencies with more advanced management needs.

Check out our Trello vs Jira vs Asana comparison to learn more.

Plutio offers a wide range of features in a single platform, but according to user reviews, its reporting and accounting features lack some depth.

Key features:

Pros: Users usually praise Plutio’s customer support team and range of useful functionalities for agencies.

Cons: One persistent downside mentioned throughout multiple customer reviews includes bugs, especially those that appear when new features are released.

Learn more about Plutio in our list of the best alternatives to Plutio.

Monday.com, also known as Monday Work OS, is a flexible work management software for various industries, but it can require a lot of initial customization and setting up.

Key features:

Pros: Monday.com is a versatile tool that allows teams to build customized workflows and processes from scratch.

Cons: Monday can be time-consuming to set up, especially for teams looking for an out-of-the-box solution. Additionally, it lacks built-in financial management or advanced project accounting features.

We also have a detailed comparison of some of the most popular project management tools: Monday vs Asana vs Trello vs ClickUp.

Hive is a project management tool that offers an array of features designed for team collaboration and project tracking, but doesn’t offer some essential business management features.

Key features:

Pros: Hive is generally well-reviewed by users, and is often praised for its simple collaboration features and reasonable pricing.

Cons: Hive’s project and task management features aren’t fully developed for more complex needs, or in comparison to some of Hive’s alternatives.

Source: Capterra

HoneyBook is a clientflow management software with end-to-end features for small businesses and freelancers: including contract templates, event scheduling, forms, online payments, and invoices.

HoneyBook has a 4.5 star rating on G2 and a 4.8 star rating on Capterra. When it comes to its downsides, user report the following:

Overall, HoneyBook can be a great integration solution for end-to-end workflows, but growing businesses might want to consider more advanced software options.

To summarize our comparison, here are some of the options you have:

With Productive, you’ll have an all-in-one platform to manage everything from project management to financial insights, resource planning, and client collaboration.

This makes it one of the best HoneyBook alternatives for growing businesses. Book a demo with Productive today.