Last year I was juggling five different tools to run my freelance business.
Notion for tasks. Calendly for bookings. Stripe for payments. DocuSign for contracts. FreshBooks for invoices. Five subscriptions. Five logins. Five monthly charges.
I knew there had to be a better way. So I started testing the big three: HoneyBook, Dubsado, and Bonsai.
I spent two weeks with each one. Not just clicking around — actually sending proposals, signing contracts, and invoicing real clients.
Here's what I found.
The first thing that hit me was the price
I wasn't expecting any of them to be free. But I also wasn't expecting this:
HoneyBook starts at $39 a month. That's $468 a year. For a tool that doesn't even include time tracking.
Dubsado starts at $20 a month. Better. But their "free plan" only lets you work with three clients. That's not a free plan. That's a demo.
Bonsai sits at $21 a month. The most reasonable of the three. But still — that's over $250 a year before you've earned a penny from it.
As a freelancer, every pound matters. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was paying enterprise prices for solo-freelancer problems.
HoneyBook looks beautiful. That's the good news.
I'll give HoneyBook credit. The client experience is polished. Their "Smart Files" bundle a proposal, contract, and payment into one page. When you send it to a client, it looks professional. You feel like you've got your act together.
But behind the scenes? It's a different story.
Setting up my first proposal took longer than I expected. The editor is slick but rigid. I couldn't move things around the way I wanted. And every time I needed to tweak the contract terms, I felt like I was fighting the software instead of using it.
No time tracking. No AI drafting. The 7-day trial barely gave me enough time to import my contacts, let alone test a real workflow.
I kept thinking: this was built for wedding photographers with $10K packages, not freelance developers quoting £500 website fixes.
Dubsado gives you control. Almost too much control.
If HoneyBook is the pretty one, Dubsado is the powerful one.
You can automate everything. Conditional logic in forms. Multi-step workflows triggered by client actions. Custom fields on everything. If you want to build the perfect system, Dubsado lets you.
The problem? I spent the first week just setting it up.
I'm not exaggerating. The learning curve is steep. The interface feels like it was designed in 2018 and never updated. Every time I wanted to do something simple — like change the font on a proposal — I'd end up in a settings menu three layers deep.
I talked to a few other freelancers who use Dubsado. They all said the same thing: "It's amazing once you set it up." But "once you set it up" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.
If you're the kind of person who enjoys building systems, you'll love Dubsado. If you just want to send an invoice and get paid, you'll hate the first month.
Bonsai is the most balanced — but still not quite right
Bonsai felt the closest to what I actually needed.
Invoicing. Contracts. Time tracking. Basic accounting. Tax prep. It's all there. One app. Reasonably priced. No PhD required to set it up.
I liked it. I really did.
But the proposal builder let me down. The templates feel locked. I couldn't customise the layout the way I wanted. And there's no AI assistance — every proposal, every contract, written from a blank page.
In 2026, that feels like it shouldn't be the case.
Bonsai is a solid B+. It does a lot of things well. But nothing made me think, "This is it. This is the tool."
Here's what none of them do
I kept coming back to the same two gaps.
No AI drafting. None of them will write a proposal for you. None of them will generate contract terms from a one-line brief. In a world where AI can write a blog post in 30 seconds, I still had to manually type every proposal. That felt wrong.
No affordable starter plan. The cheapest option across all three is $20 a month. For a freelancer who's just getting started — maybe doing one or two projects a month — that's hard to justify. You end up paying for features you won't use for another year.
So what did I do?
I built my own.
That's the honest truth. I couldn't find the tool I wanted, so I made it. It started as a side project — just something to manage my own clients. Then other freelancers saw it and asked if they could use it too.
That became SoloPad.
I'm not going to pretend I'm unbiased. I built this thing. But I built it because I genuinely couldn't find what I needed in the market. And I think if you're reading this comparison, you might be in the same spot.
How to actually choose
Forget the feature lists for a second. Here's what I'd actually ask yourself:
How much do you want to customise? If the answer is "everything," go with Dubsado. Just block out a week for setup.
How much do you care about client-facing polish? If you need your proposals to look like they came from a design agency, HoneyBook does that well.
Do you need accounting and tax tracking? Bonsai is the only one of the three that includes it.
Are you price-sensitive? All three start at $20+ a month. If that feels steep for where you are right now, you might want to look at lighter alternatives first.
Do you want AI to do the heavy lifting? None of the big three offer this. That's where newer tools are starting to pull ahead.
The freelance tool market is changing
Two years ago, these three were the obvious choices. They still work. They still have loyal users.
But the market is shifting. Freelancers are asking for simpler, cheaper tools with AI built in. The "enterprise-lite" approach — charging $30-40 a month and giving you a tool designed for teams of 20 — doesn't fit anymore.
The best tool for you is the one that matches how you actually work. Not how a landing page says you should work.
Take the free trials. Send a real proposal. Invoice a real client. That's the only way to know.
I built SoloPad for freelancers who want proposals, contracts, invoices, CRM, and AI drafting in one place — starting at £5/mo. If that sounds like what you're looking for, try it free for 30 days. No card needed.