Its been a game changer and it helped me scale my bsuiness.

Bonsai is easy to get started, and I was up and running in no time. I like how easily I am able to create and send invoices to my clients.

I wish there were a chat widget feature that I could install on my website similar to Sharpspring or HubSpot. Perhaps some collaboration with Webflow.

Bonsai has been very essential to my freelance career when I was part time to now being a full time freelancer. When starting out, I just needed the essential tools - invoicing, accounting, time tracking, contracts and proposals - which Bonsai offered immediately. Down the line, they added new features that boosted what I can also add to my workflow management such as forms, scheduling and now a cool project board view besides the generic list view! It allowed me to have a business debit account while major banks require small businesses to be active for a certain amount of time before qualifying for a business account. Overall - NO FRILLS, but still A GEM.

Very straightforward, simple and user-friendly. Everything a freelancer or contractor needs to keep their small business financially organized is in Bonsai.

I hope the mobile and desktop app would be expanded. The browser app is cool, but I would love to just click onto an app icon to access my dashboard without having to get on Chrome. Might also be great to have a client be able to access and view their mini portal on Bonsai without creating an account - this way they can view the active project I'm working on with them and access invoices.

Nothing likable about this brand or product.

Bonsai / Hello Bonsai is absolutely terrible. They charge ridiculous transaction fees and then hold your money up for weeks after the payment has been made. Absolutely infuriating, they have massively screwed up my business. I wish I had known this before signing up with them. I pay nearly $500 a year for their basic business services, and they charged me an additional $300 in transaction fees for my first two transactions and would not let me access the fund for over two weeks. I canceled my account with them as soon as I learned about their predatory practices. Literally, any other service would be better than Bonsai. In addition, Bonsai support is practically non-existent. I have never paid so much for a service and not been able to get an actual person on the phone to try to resolve even the most basic issues.

Before Bonsai I was using many programs for proposals, CRM, invoicing, and contracts. Since switching to Bonsai I honestly have to say that I have saved several thousand dollars per year and my life has been much easier and more organized. Bonsai has systems that have automation so if a customer does one particular item the Bonsai system will automatically send an email with a form that I would like my customer to submit. Bonsai is definitely a game changer and I would highly recommend any business owner to look at their system and hopefully see the benefits that they can receive by using Bonsai.

Bonsai makes everything extremely streamlined and very easy and user-friendly. From the time I input a lead to creating the proposal to invoicing the customer and finalizing the project, Bonsai makes everything hassle-free and extremely easy.

The only suggestion I would have or like to see for Bonsai would be for them to allow me as the business owner to arrange the look and feel of how my customer dashboard is arranged.

I've experimented with various business apps such as Bonsai, but none of them compare to its CRM and invoicing capabilities. Its combination of reasonable pricing and comprehensive features makes it unbeatable. Additionally, its customer service is exceptional.

I wish there was a better portal for clients, where we can have conversations within the portal, upload specific files within the portal, assign tasks, etc. As it is now, there's no reason for my clients to even log into the portal because everything just goes to their email. but emails can get messy so i'd prefer the alternative.

What's NOT the most impactful LOL! I use Bonsai for EVERY PART OF MY PROJECT ( well that, and the Google Drive). From storing client information, to creating projects, invoices, time tracking, invoices, contracts et all... Bonsai has really streamlined the administration side of my small business. They are also SUPER quick to respond with support when needed. Huge Fan of Bonsai and happy I chose them over everyone else <3

I would love to be able to add my accountant to the accounting area without having to add her as a partner... and I love the idea of the cash feature and envelopes just wish you could make this work with an external bank as I prefer to run my business account separate to the Bonsai system

If you’re a freelancer looking for something to get started very quickly, then Bonsai will be great. If you are growing beyond that, I would consider looking elsewhere. They are not scaling to support that type of customer, and it’s too easy for them to find new ways to grab more money for the same or fewer features, some of which don’t work.

Bonsai makes it easy to get started as a freelancer. Proposals, contracts, and payment processing is made easy.

In the 5 years I’ve been using Bonsai, they have introduced only two net new product features. One of which is Bonsai Payments, which is a competitor to Stripe, which they already supported. The second, Bonsai Tax, which stripped some existing and included functionality from the original offering and turned it into an add on feature for an extra $100/year. They have revamped some existing features, but they lack execution, and there are very obvious gaps in product requirements that have yet to be filled. I report a new bug almost every single time I log in, and every single time it’s confirmed by the product team. They’ve raised prices by >150% in only a few years and not improved the platform enough to warrant that.

Before Bonsai, it was often difficult to get paid by clients. With Bonsai's flexible online payment options and professional appearance, I usually get paid immediately on sending invoices. Same with proposals: clients love that they can pick and choose from the options I present to them and then we can revisit options later.

We're a very small shop, but Bonsai makes us look as professional as our larger competitors and helps us manage our proposal development, time tracking and online invoicing without a huge time investment in learning the software.

When I'm setting up new clients and developing proposals, I don't want to enter the client's real email address initially and accidentally send them something that's not ready for them yet, so I have to go out and create fake email addresses that I use temporarily. Would be great if there were an option to not have to enter emails initially, or if there were a fake email address option built into Bonsai.

So far it's going great. I'm moving my operation to Bonsai.

Ease of use, definitely. Everything is right there, intuitive.

I wish I could add one member for free, instead of 9 usd. I'd like to have a ticketing system. But I'll use a form for it, for now.I wish I could create proposals by just adding the services I've already added to the "Services" tab.

I am only one month into my new business and I'm glad I've starting using Bonsai from the beginning. My clients signed my contracts immediately when I sent them using the electronic signature as opposed to waiting for them to sign my initial paper contract. I have yet to sent my first invoice, but it looks to be very simple. I've connected my bank so I can see all my expenses in a single app.

The interface is very clean and intuitive and is a breeze to use. The feature that puts it above all the rest of similar products is the accounting features. For a small, simple business, I don't need to invest in another accounting product like QuickBooks. It saves on costs and keeps everything in one plane of glass.

The only item that I find lacking in Bonsai is there is no Kanban board or other visual way to track tasks and projects.

I'm glad to have found this platform, have appreciated the ways it streamlined some of my business and remain excited about its potential. I've looked at many industry specific platforms for my service industry and they all were clunky or extremely expensive. I don't need industry-specific software though, I just need a clean, easy to use project / client management platform where I can send invoices/contracts and schedule client appointments. Bonsai has some stand-out features, among the best are its scheduling and client portal (to allow clients to view an invoice or uploaded files). Bonsai works great with apple/mac/iphone OS calendar and is very useful for client onboarding / invoicing. I would love to see Bonsai develop additional features for growing businesses, even if that involved a modest add-on fee (so long as the add-on fee didn't get carried away,)

There is a lot to appreciate with Bonsai starting with a very nice graphical interface. Most features are super easy to roll out (with the notable exception that incoming payments are frozen for the first 2 weeks plus). The online scheduler works excellently and plays very nicely with macs. The client portal is very attractive and an easy way to share invoices / files. There are lots of great starts to automate common tasks (e.g., when a client signs a contract, send the invoice) I felt like Bonsai is a 10/10 (or close) for a very small solo just getting started. If you have a handful of clients / projects a month and work alone, this will justifiably wow and make things beautifully smooth.

Solo / freelancers are Bonsai's target. Many features just don't seem to work for or consider a small business with any employees. It also doesn't seem to have features suitable to handle businesses with high volume of anything (no way to track/run reports) Although there are options to add "team" members for a monthly fee, Bonsai doesn't really recognize that a business owner might need to set user permissions or have employees involved in some but not every aspect of a business. For example, users can only be designated "partners" with access to every financial detail or "collaborators" who can do next to nothing in the platform besides view an already created project. I need an assistant to create projects, send out contracts and invoices but not be given a key to the company's entire financials. Currently there is no way to do this. Contracts cannot be sent without a company signature and the signature cannot be pre-populated. We're still trying to work around these limitations. Bookkeping automatically logs processing fees as expenses and can track other manually inputted expenses but cannot track multiple bank accounts / check writing, payroll, etc.

Overall good! Happy to have my business admin simplified.

Being able to have my contracts, invoicing and scheduling all in one place has really helped to streamline the backend parts of my business.

The initial payout for the invoicing was over two weeks. I understand that it is in place to ensure security, however that amount of time can feel like forever to a small business.

Having all timing and billing information in the dashboard has made me aware of my ongoing projects, unpaid invoices, and expenses at a glance.

Bonsai's user experience is very intuitive, and well designed. My main uses are time-tracking and invoicing. For a pretty practical price, I can do all my business management needs in one place.

One feature I would love to see improved is the Desktop Time Tracker. Currently is doesn't allow you to save your time for specific tasks within a project. Sometimes, I need to invoice tasks separately and right now the desktop app lumps them into one project.

I like being able to streamline proposal creation and manage proposals, contracts, invoices, and tasks in one app.

Initially, setting up tasks and adding in custom hours worked (vs recording them) was a little unclear, but I figured it out.

Best thing they did for me was to connect me to Stripe.

It does it all. Really. Does it all. Seems to be wonderful features and all that.

I was based in Romania and they charged me a currency conversion fee for a currency conversion that did not happen. I took dollars and wanted to leave it as dollars. Nowhere did they mark this as a fee. I understand you have to take a cut. But this was unannounced. I will not use Bonsai again.