17Hats Vs HoneyBook: Frozen In Time & The One That’s Not

By now, you may be questioning if we’re not celebrating groundhog day here, constantly reviewing similar software.

But trust us, they always surprise us. 👀

Even if they superficially seem the same, just like the two software that constitute the main topic of this article, 17Hats vs HoneyBook.

Both are project management software with similar features and functionality covered.

However, there’s one huge difference between the two. And that difference is that 17Hats seems to be stuck in the past, with outdated UI leading to an often unintuitive experience.

While HoneyBook, despite being one year older, is as modern as they make them and easy to use at the same time. Especially now that the platform went through a makeover, and is now even more modern.

If we were to choose one or the other, we would definitely go for HoneyBook.

But if you want to read about all the small details that make our decision, read on.

Tl;dr: Table Comparison of 17hats and HoneyBook

For a quick overview of the battle between 17hats and HoneyBook, check out this comparison.

Because both HoneyBook and 17hats offer similar features, it’s the difference in the experience that matters more here:

Introductory Words: 17Hats

17Hats is a project management software that’s been the seasoned campaigner, operating since 2014.

Over a decade ago, Donovan Janus and Rhesa Rozendaal put together software we now know as 17Hats.

17Hats combines features that ease task, project, and client management, as well as invoicing, contracts, proposals, lead capturing, scheduling, automating workflows, secure online payment options, and more.

You can use 17hats to manage your business fully: create and send invoices, share a simple client portal with your customers, track payment statuses, set your availability and set up scheduling, create a lead capture form, to then follow new deals on a pipeline.

🏠 HeadQuarters: Los Angeles, California, US

⭐ G2 rating: 4.6 (114 Reviews)

Introductory Words: HoneyBook

HoneyBook has been on the market even longer than 17Hats, celebrating its 10th birthday in 2023.

HoneyBook is a clientflow management platform, though calling it just “project management software” undersells it at this point.

Beyond proposals, contracts, invoices, task management, scheduling, and automations, it’s now expanded into AI-powered tools and even a full financial suite with a checking account, savings buckets, and expense tracking built in. It’s evolved quite a bit since we first reviewed it.

This platform also focuses more so on collaborations based on whole document flows (hence a huge range of beautiful templates), rather than booking customers more quickly and simply managing the projects inside the platform.

🏠 HeadQuarters: San Francisco, California, US

⭐ G2 rating: 4.5 (210 reviews)

Pricing Comparison: The Hard Choice

17Hats and HoneyBook are not only similar in date of origin or functionality they cover, they’re also very similar in terms of the costs.

Overall, 17Hats is slightly cheaper than HoneyBook.

Prices is where things have changed quite a bit since we last revisited these two.

17hats made a bold move and collapsed everything into a single all-inclusive plan. $60/month, or $600/year, or $800 for two years. That’s it. No tiers, no “you need to upgrade to unlock that” moments. Everything is in, from day one.

On one hand, that’s genuinely refreshing compared to the old model where the client portal and advanced workflows were locked behind the most expensive plan. On the other hand, $60/month is the entry point now, with no cheaper option to start small.

Full details about 17hats pricing can be found in our dedicated article: 17Hats’ pricing.

HoneyBook went the opposite direction and still runs three clearly defined tiers, just at a more expensive rate than when we first visited the platform writing this piece.

Currently, the Starter at $36/month gives you the core stuff—unlimited clients and projects, invoices, proposals, contracts, and the client portal.

Essentials bumps to $50.15/month with a discount or $59 for a regular price and adds scheduling, automations, QuickBooks integration, and up to 2 team members.

Premium is $109.65/month with a discount or $129 without one for unlimited team members, priority support, and advanced reporting.

So which is more cost-efficient?

It depends on what you actually need. If you’re a solo operator or small team who wants everything without thinking about tiers, 17hats’ flat model is clean and predictable.

But if you’re just starting out and don’t need automation yet, HoneyBook’s Starter at $36/month is a much lower barrier to entry.

For most growing businesses that need automations and scheduling: HoneyBook Essentials at ~$50/month gives you more for slightly less than 17hats’ flat $60. And HoneyBook discounts pop up frequently enough to tip the scale further.

Again, you can dive into HoneyBook’s pricing head full in a separate article dedicated to the costs of investing in this software.

Feature To Feature

Putting the costs aside, let’s examine both tools more closely, comparing their specific features.

We’ll focus on the ease of use and intuitiveness, but also on the effectiveness of both software platforms in question.

Project + Task Management

If you want to forget about the uncomfortable combo of Excel sheets, Google Docs, and Asana to manage your projects, HoneyBook and 17Hats may both be a life-saver.

17Hats: Simplicity For The Win

First, the simpler solution.

17Hats doesn’t play around with any extreme complexity, deciding not to add up to the already complicated business matters. Instead, it gives us simple project management that we’re not even mad about.

We get our projects presented in a clear block or list view, which we can sort using different parameters, like clients, leads, archived, or by their alphabetical order.

Specific projects contain all the essential information in one place, storing documents, emails, notes, to-dos, events, activity, and more.

We didn’t have any trouble with this part of 17Hats, and we definitely find it effective, even though it falls on the more simple side.

The task management follows the same principle, combining simplicity with effectiveness.

We can manage our to-dos directly from within projects or using a separate To-Do tab. What we particularly love is that both tabs work in synchronization. Adding a task in a project, means there’s a new task in the overall To-Do tab, and vice versa.

That’s something not all software platforms grasp, creating features that work together smoothly, instead of being independent entities thrown in together.

The New Pipeline & Tag-Management Focus

One thing that’s changed in 17Hats since we last dug deep into it: there’s now a pipeline feature, and it’s a solid addition.

You can create up to 10 pipelines with five stages each, assign custom hex colors to each stage, and get a clear visual overview of where every lead or client stands in your process. It’s heavily tag-based, which makes it flexible once set up and works reliably in practice.

That said, while the functionality is solid, the design still feels a bit dated compared to more modern CRM tools (especially HoneyBook). So the experience is more practical than visually polished—which is kind of 17Hats in a nutshell, honestly.

HoneyBook: More Complexity, The Same Ease

HoneyBook’s project management features are the more complex option, but does it mean they’re no longer easy to use?

Well, no.

HoneyBook’s projects are based on a customizable pipeline (similar to the one 17hats recently added) that you can modify to fit your specific processes. You can add new stages, rename existing stages, and easily change their order. The whole pipeline is even more modern and easy to use now in 2026.

It gives us a great overview of everything we have currently going on in our business, making it easy to plan our next move, organize our work, and get everything done right on time.

But, it’s when we head to a specific project is when the fun actually starts.

That’s the place to check on the project’s details, files, notes, add to-dos, check on payments, or client’s activity.

But most importantly, that’s also the space we can share with our clients being our client portal section, and with our team for team collaboration and communication.

We love the looks and the feel of HoneyBook’s client portal, especially because it’s directly pinned to specific projects, instead of being a separate, unrelated page.

One thing that’s still in need of polishing is the messaging.

We’ve talked about it quite a few times recently, for example here and here. And revisiting the platform in 2026, it still hasn’t improved (guess it’s just not the focus of the platform).

The main flaw of this solution is that it creates unhealthy long threads to go through, with no possibility of deleting our messages once sent and creating a spammy outcome in ours and client’s inboxes with every new message.

And as was the case with 17Hats, HoneyBooks also doesn’t disappoint with their tasks and projects working in harmony. You can add tasks within projects and the separate Tasks tab. But no matter where you add them, the tasks will show up in both places.

Scheduling: Same Destination, Very Different Road

Both tools let you set availability, share a booking link, sync with Google Calendar, and send automatic confirmation and reminder emails.

On the surface, that sounds like a tie. But it isn’t.

17hats keeps scheduling fairly contained. You get two automatic reminder emails—one the day before, one the day of (sent one to two hours before the session), plus the ability to trigger a workflow on booking if you want more.

Contacts can answer questions and pay upon booking, which is genuinely useful. Notifications go to you immediately, and it shows up on your dashboard and mobile app. Clean enough.

One thing worth flagging though: if a booking gets rescheduled, you get notified, but your client doesn’t. That notification has to be sent manually. Which is exactly the kind of small friction that adds up.

There’s also a known Google Calendar quirk. Events marked as “Free” in Google still block booking slots in 17hats, because 17hats can only see that an event exists, not its status. So if you use “Free” events for reminders or placeholders, expect unexpected blocked time.

HoneyBook’s scheduling is built around session types instead. Each with its own duration, format (in-person or video), availability window, and instructions.

Starter plan gets one session type, Essentials and Premium get unlimited.

That structure alone makes it more flexible for businesses juggling different kinds of meetings.

But the real differentiator is how scheduling plugs into everything else.

You can drop a scheduler block directly into a smart file: meaning a client can receive a proposal, sign a contract, pay an invoice, and book a call all from one document.

You can also add a scheduler block to a lead form, so someone books straight from your website without ever going through a separate page. 17hats doesn’t do either of these.

When sharing a direct link though, be aware they may look like a cat ran across the keyboard.

Overall, 17hats scheduling works fine for straightforward use cases. HoneyBook scheduling works better when it’s part of a larger client flow, which, for most people reading this, it probably is.

Documents Signpost Moment

Documents is where the paths of 17Hats and HoneyBook diverge and the abyss between their UIs really starts to show.

Despite both offering the possibility to create quotes, invoices, contracts, and combine them together to ease your customer’s journey and create whole flows, the process to get there, and the end result could not be more different.

17Hats: Striking For Good Enough

We’ll start with the good enough option, 17Hats.

In 17hats, you start with a quote and attach a contract and/or invoice to it. The client sees it in tabs: quote first, then contract (visible but locked until the quote is accepted), then invoice (only generated once the contract is signed).

It’s sequential, which is actually good for keeping clients on track.

There’s one thing to watch out for though.

If email reminders are enabled and a client hasn’t completed a step, the reminder can let them jump ahead and sign or pay out of order, even before the previous document is done.

17hats’ own documentation flags this and recommends using a workflow to send documents individually if you want to guarantee the sequence holds.

Which is a bit of a “the workaround is the feature” situation.

Editing a combined document after a client has already accepted the quote is also painful. They have to re-accept the quote and re-sign the contract. So get it right before sending.

In this software, you also get a separate Documents tab where you can easily preview all documents. However, despite our intuition leading us to think that this is also the place to create new documents, that’s not the case.

New document templates are created in 17Hats settings, which luckily, we get directed to if our Documents tab is empty. Once in the settings, we can add invoice, contract, quote, and questionnaire templates, as well as work on the emails delivering those documents.

We’ve decided to create a flow of quote → contract → invoice, which proved to be rather easy. We just add the items we want to include in each document and work on our contract’s content.

Once added, we can share the created flow with our clients via email who get a clean enough flow for their quote, contract, and invoice, all in one place.

Source: https://help.17hats.com/en/articles/3250522-how-to-send-a-document

HoneyBook: Document Flow Mastery

HoneyBook took a trip to Shaolin to master the document flows and it shows. The templates it gives us, the editor we can use, and the end result go beyond any expectations.

There are no tabs. Everything—service selection, contract, invoice, scheduler, intake questions, images, videos, welcome text—lives in one designed flow that the client moves through as a single experience.

You build it visually, with your brand colors, custom fonts, and layouts. It ends up looking less like a document and more like a dedicated landing page for that client.

The scope is also just much bigger.

Smart files aren’t only for transactional flows. You can use them for welcome packets, mood boards, proofing sign-offs, offboarding docs, service brochures, basically anything client-facing gets built here.

17hats doesn’t have an equivalent.

If your work revolves around clean, professional proposals that double as a full client experience, HoneyBook is the clear winner here.

If you just need a quote → contract → invoice to work reliably without fuss, 17hats does the job; just be aware of the sequencing quirk.

Plus, a sweet topping we get from the HoneyBook’s team is the fact that we can ask them to recreate our usual documents into HoneyBook’s templates, for free.

Chapeau bas, HoneyBook!

17Hats Vs HoneyBook In Workflows

When we first compared these two, 17hats held its own on automation. Simple, yes, but reliable. That’s still true.

But HoneyBook has moved far enough ahead that “simple but reliable” is starting to feel like a polite way of saying limited.

17Hats: Two Actions, Efficient Results

17hats gives you three building blocks: a to-do, an action, or a pause.

Actions cover the useful stuff, like sending an email, a quote, a contract, an invoice, a questionnaire, or kicking off a new workflow.

You can set timing relative to a base date (which is automatically set to the booking date if triggered from scheduling, handy). And the tasks and workflow steps do work in sync, which we’ve always liked about 17hats.

But that’s genuinely where it stops.

No branching. No conditional logic. No “if they don’t reply in 3 days, send a follow-up.” Just a regular: “wait three days → send another email” kinda thing.

No way to notify more than one email address when a document is completed. And all your templates need to be fully built before you can use them in a workflow, which means setup has to happen in the right order or you’re going back and forth between settings tabs.

It works. It just doesn’t adapt to 2026 (at least not as much as HoneyBook did).

HoneyBook: AI Workflows (Act Like You’re Surprised)

HoneyBook’s Automations 2.0 is now a different product entirely, although in the past the workflows were very similar to those of 17hats.

Now, trigger-based, conditional, project-type aware, with manual approval gates if you want a human check before something goes out.

You can build logic like: start when a lead form is submitted, send an email and questionnaire, wait for a reply, and if there’s no reply after three days, send a follow-up automatically.

And then there’s the AI automations builder, which is new enough that it wasn’t part of the picture when we first wrote this comparison.

You describe your process in plain language, HoneyBook’s AI builds the workflow structure, shows you a preview for approval, and then generates the full automation in your account.

You still need to attach your templates and activate it manually, but the heavy lifting of figuring out triggers and timing is done for you.

For someone who finds workflow setup intimidating, that’s a meaningful difference.

For someone who just wants a simple sequence of send-this-then-that, 17hats is perfect (its workflows are actually one of the best features of the entire platform). But if your processes have more conditional complexity, HoneyBook is a better option between these two.

The Client Portals Trial

Neither of these tools has a client portal that’ll make you go wow. But there’s still a meaningful difference between them.

17Hats: Stuck in 2009

First things first, following many similar software platforms, 17Hats decided to hide such a core feature in its vast settings. That’s the place where we can customize the looks of our client portal, which includes a background image, a welcome message, or which documents we want to share with our clients.

Since the client portal in 17Hats is a separate landing page, we can also set a password for each of our clients, to make the client portal protected and feel safer for clients sharing their information, and for us to share any important documents.

The final result is not the most modern thing in the world, but suffices basic needs.

Now, 17hats creates a portal automatically for every contact you add.

Clients can log in and find all their sent documents across all active projects in one place: quotes to accept, contracts to sign, invoices to pay, questionnaires to fill out, event details to view.

Filtered by project if they need. Up to 100 most recent documents. Optional PIN protection if you want it.

That sounds reasonable until you look at what’s missing. Clients cannot upload anything to the portal. Files attached to their project don’t show up there at all; if you want to share a file, you have to host it somewhere else (Google Drive, for example) and paste a link into a welcome message.

Email correspondence is completely absent from the portal and only lives inside your 17hats backend. So the client’s portal experience is purely transactional: here are your documents, here is nothing else.

And if you haven’t sent them anything yet… The portal looks awkwardly empty. Similarly to platforms like vcita.

There’s no structure holding it together without content to fill it.

The branding options exist but they’re global only. You set it once for everyone, not per client or per project.

HoneyBook: Different Approach

HoneyBook’s portal is tied to individual projects rather than the overall contact.

Each project gets its own portal space where clients can see their activity, access files, review and act on documents, and communicate (somewhat).

You can share it via a direct link or toggle it to automatically appear in every file and email you send. You can also disable it per project or turn it off company-wide if you don’t want to use it at all. Branding is customizable too.

It’s more functional, more complete, and more modern than 17hats’.

But it’s still project-level, not account-level, so if a client has multiple projects with you, each one is its own separate portal experience. And the email thread problem we’ve flagged repeatedly is still there. Every message creates threads that land in both inboxes, which gets messy over time.

So: 17hats gives you a document filing cabinet with a login screen. HoneyBook gives you a project room. Neither gives you what a tool like Zendo gives you—a proper account-level client hub where everything lives together and clients can actually self-serve. But between these two, HoneyBook is the less frustrating option.

Time Tracking: Not Good Or None At All

Neither of these tools handles time tracking well, and it’s worth saying that plainly.

17hats has basic time tracking.

PS, if you’re on the legacy 17hats plan, you have to pay $5/month extra for it.

Once you have it, it logs hours at the project level, which is better than nothing. But tracked hours don’t flow into invoices automatically… you still have to manually pull the totals and enter them. For anyone billing 20+ hours a week, that manual transfer adds up fast.

HoneyBook has no time tracking at all. Zero. If you bill hourly, you can use a third-party tool, and then copy the numbers into invoices by hand.

Neither tool solves this well. It’s one of the cleaner reasons to look at alternatives if hourly billing is core to how you work.

Team Collaboration Without Collaboration?

This is one of those areas where both 17hats and HoneyBook technically support teams… but the experience around collaboration feels very different once you actually start working with other people daily.

17Hats: Functional, But Very Permission-Heavy

17hats approaches collaboration from a permissions-first angle.

You get three user levels: Owner, Admin, and Team Member. Team Members can then be granted access to very specific areas like contacts, projects, invoices, quotes, calendars, bookkeeping, pipelines, and emails.

On paper, that level of control is genuinely useful. Especially for businesses that want tight visibility restrictions.

You can decide exactly who sees invoices, who has access to bookkeeping, who can manage templates, or who can view project emails. Even the Documents tab itself can be hidden to avoid exposing revenue snapshots to staff members.

But there’s a catch.

Managing collaboration inside 17hats often feels like configuring permissions in old-school business software rather than naturally working together as a team.

For example, team members only see pipelines if they’re specifically granted Contacts/Projects access. Calendars and to-dos are also heavily permission-dependent. If not enabled, users essentially operate in their own isolated mini-version of the account.

There’s also very little emphasis on collaborative communication itself.

Yes, multiple people can access projects, tasks, calendars, and documents. But the platform still feels primarily built around one account owner managing operations, with everyone else added afterward as supporting users.

HoneyBook: Actually Built Around Shared Workspaces

HoneyBook feels much more modern in the way it handles teams.

Instead of simply deciding who can see which tabs, the whole system revolves around shared workspaces, project participation, and role-based collaboration.

The role structure is also more developed:

Basic Team Members → Moderators → Admins → Super Admins → Owner.

That sounds corporate at first glance. But in practice, it creates a smoother balance between visibility and collaboration.

One thing HoneyBook handles particularly well is project participation.

Team members can be added directly into projects, where they can collaborate on files, notes, tasks. Permissions are tied much more closely to actual collaboration contexts instead of just broad account visibility.

But similarly to 17hats, what suffers is the actual communication.

The platform is much stronger operationally than conversationally.

Teams can absolutely collaborate inside projects. HoneyBook’s permissions system allows team members to participate in shared workspaces, manage files, oversee pipelines, add notes, and take action inside projects together.

But not necessarily chat in the most straightforward of ways.

17Hats Vs HoneyBook: Pros & Cons

Having gone through the different features, we get a nice feel of both software, and can confidently draw a list of pros and cons for both software.

17Hats

17Hats’ Pros

• combines useful features together,
• efficient project and task management,
• efficient email templates & scheduling,
• simple, but efficient workflows,
• features work in unity, aren’t separate entities,
• single flat plan, no feature gating,
• niche marketplace for creatives,
• pipeline feature now included.

17Hats’ Cons

• can be unintuitive due to outdated design,
• has a steep learning curve,
• offers a short free trial of only 7 days,
• lack of proper branding customization,
• mostly serves working on the basis of proposals → projects → contracts → invoices,
• very weak and outdated client portal,
• $60/month flat with no lower entry point,
• client file uploads not supported in portal, files from projects don’t appear there either,
• rescheduling notifications don’t reach clients automatically,
• no conditional logic in automations.

HoneyBook

HoneyBook’s Pros

• combines useful features,
• boasts modern designs,
• is easy to use,
• offers top-notch onboarding,
• all the features work together to create a seamless experience, aren’t just random independent features, thrown into one bucket,
• amazing document templates, great for creating professional flows for clients,
• client portal directly connected with projects,
• good features to costs ratio,
• HoneyBook AI across all plans,
• HoneyBook Finance suite (banking, expense tracking, tax hub) for solo operators.

HoneyBook’s Cons

• limited to US/Canada-based users,
• serves one specific flow (proposal/contract/invoice/payment/project),
• short, 7-day free trial,
• email threads still bleed into inboxes,
• account deletion is unnecessarily painful,
• dummy data testing throws errors,
• Starter plan only gets 1 session type for scheduling, which is limiting.

Rethink Your Processes With Zendo

We’ve gone through two software platforms that operate on the same basis, issuing complex proposals, engaging in back-and-forth with clients, scheduling calls, drafting contracts, to finally be able to create a project, and then deliver it to issue an invoice.

But we want you to stop for a second and think about your processes.

Do they need to be that complex?

How Selling Services Works In Zendo?

If you sell services that don’t actually require complex contracts, workflows, and projects, there are services that your clients order on repeat, or you have been thinking about productization, there is a much easier way to run your business.

We’re especially thinking of small business owners or agencies that unnecessarily mimic big corporations’ processes.

You don’t have to do it the hard way with Zendo.

Zendo is a client portal software that makes selling & delivering productized, custom, and subscription-based services easy. And that’s because it doesn’t force you to work on the complex proposal and contract basis, instead, you can allow your clients to self-serve.

How?

All you have to do is add your services to Zendo and present them on a customizable Service Catalog that your clients can easily access to make orders.

Clients view your Service Catalog, choose the service they’d like, fill out an order form, and get a new request in Zendo. This gives you all the essential information about the client’s order upfront so that you can start working on delivery ASAP.

To complete the whole experience, both you and your client get access to a real-time chat to talk about the project, service delivery, share files, complete payments, or check on the order’s status.

To make it even better, with Zendo you get full team collaboration (including communication!) built-in, with different roles and permissions to ensure everything stays nice and organized.

Collaborate over a  private team chat, right within each service delivery, view projects on favorite views, from Kanban to table to added filtering, customize the workspace for your internal team to make their life easier!

Free Forever

If “I want to break free” has been stuck in your head the whole time you’ve been checking other software’s prices, you can take a breather, because Zendo also offers a free forever plan. 👀

Compared to 17Hats and HoneyBook’s 7 -day free trials, Zendo’s forever plan seems… forever.

You get to take it for a spin with no time limits lurking behind. But you might as well fully use it for service selling, because the free forever plan gives you access to many of the software’s features, including the client portal.

If you’re after some more advanced automations, unlimited access to subscriptions, and advanced white-label options, external apps you can connect, client teams, and more, you can subscribe to Zendo’s Pro plan that costs just $59 per user, per month.

17Hats Vs HoneyBook: Do We Need To Make It Hard For Ourselves?

Everyone has their processes they love to stick to.

And if your processes are all about creating complex proposals, sticking with calls, long email threads, drafting contracts, and managing big custom projects, 17Hats and HoneyBook will be a great choice of Client Relationship Management software.

Choosing between the two, better features to costs ratio, more modern take on UI, far more ease of use, and professional templates should lean you more towards HoneyBook.

And if a client portal is not a must-have for your business, 17hats’ flat $60/month plan is a solid, no-surprises option for keeping things simple.

But if you want to change your processes to save some much-needed time or your processes are already much different from the ones 17Hats and HoneyBook cover, think about switching to Zendo.

With Zendo, you can easily sell productized, custom, mixed, free, and subscription-based services using a customizable Service Catalog. Your clients will order your services, fill out order forms, and complete payments, while you focus on different areas of your business that need taking care of.

You can take advantage of its real-time chat for client & team communication, easy file sharing, invoice and quote issuing, status changes, and more.

And if that didn’t convince you, think about the modern UI, ease of use, the professional client portal your clients get, and the free forever plan for a great starter option.

If you agree that it’s time to rethink your processes, create a free account in Zendo and make selling your services as simple as it should be.

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Frequently Asked Questions: 17Hats Vs HoneyBook