Bonsai Review: Is it worth it?

Top Features, Pros, Cons & User Reviews

Bonsai wants to help you set up your team and freelancers with the best place to host and manage everything. But does it do a good job as an all-in-one business hub?

What is Bonsai App?

Bonsai is a unified platform designed for small businesses, freelancers and agencies. Think of it as a platform built solely to manage the three stages of your business - organizing with clients, organizing your own workload internally and then the financial sealing of the deal.

Who uses Bonsai?

• It is best for freelancers, small teams and service businesses.

• It is popular with businesses who have active clients and want to track finances/projects with them.

Best Features

There's a lot of features in Bonsai and here's what we think was best in this app:

• Tracking Time - This worked very well across the apps and on Web, allowing you to get accurate measurements on your time spent. We liked how it popped up in the corner to help you see what time you are on, serving as a good project tracker and accountability for team members.

• Finance Tracking - One of the things we liked is that you don't have to plugin in your QuickBooks or Xero necessarily, you can track client billing and invoices to see financial forecasts manually. This makes it more appealing to those who want to keep an eye on spending input per input.

• Funneled Forms & Scheduling - For new client prospectives, you can use Forms and Scheduling to make life a lot easier. Maybe you're a wedding planner, you could use this to automate an email reply, or have a link on your site, for them to book a meeting with you. Each time the form is fired you can help set-up deals and pipelines too, to help collect client information and bring them into your pipeline for success management.

• Project Management - Whilst it won't replace ClickUp, it does a good job of helping you to collect up tasks, associate them to clients, track time and Kanbanize your day. A lot of people say this works well for smaller teams that want to be able to move quickly and keep track of how a project relates to a client, CRM data and things like time tracking, without the pressure to keep up an advanced system like other project management software.

Pros

Things we liked about it:

• Easy to use and approachable design.

• Handled the typical process of proposal to success.

• Helps you handle invoices, estimates, updates on client portals & more.

• Comes with automations to help automate simple steps like what gets sent to clients first.

• You can connect up invoices with Bonsai payments for collecting money faster.

Cons

What we didn't like during our tests:

• No AI features or lack of awareness of them.

• Competitors like Honeybook had AI features to use instantly.

• The "basic" plan doesn't include client billing, or any iOS, Android or Mac app.

• Whilst automations are good, they can be very basic and limited to the ones created by their team.

Pricing Breakdowns

Here's how much Bonsai costs and how to consider it:

How much does Bonsai cost per month?

• Bonsai is not free to use.

• Bonsai starts from $15 per month for Basic

• Essentials starts from $25 per month.

• Pricing is cheaper and they give you 4 months free.

Is Bonsai worth it?

If you're a team that works with clients, yes.

You could re-create a system like this in apps like Notion, or maybe Coda, but the set-up of this might take a long time, and you get all the features out of the box. A lot of freelancers, agencies and those who work closely with clients like this all in one housed environment and we don't blame them. The issue with Bonsai is that it lacks innovative features, if you compare it to competitor Honeybook, it doesn't do AI features - Honeybook has AI note-taker, an AI assistant and all for a similar price per month than Bonsai.

Bonsai is great for collecting clients, managing them and the team around you. But it does lack in some areas, AI features and automations aren't as good as what other competitors offers. The automations feel basic compared to other features they have like Reports, which is fantastic.

All-in-all, Bonsai will serve you well, and help you and the team get things going. It is robust and we had no issues in our testing.