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PaloWorks

Bonsai alternative for freelancers — PaloWorks vs Bonsai

An honest comparison for freelancers. Bonsai carries the accounting and tax side; PaloWorks counts revision rounds, prices change orders, and pays into your own Stripe account.

Written by the people who build PaloWorks, so read it with that in mind. The rule we hold ourselves to is that everything said about Bonsai has to be something you could check, and everything said about PaloWorks has to be true of the product today.

Where Bonsai is better

Bonsai runs the bookkeeping half of a freelance business as well as the client half — expense tracking, income and expense reporting, and tax tooling aimed at US self-employment. PaloWorks has none of that. It stops at the invoice and assumes your books live somewhere else. If you want one login covering both the client workflow and your accounting, Bonsai is the better buy and it is not close. It also carries proposals, tasks, and a client CRM in the same suite, which is a wider surface than the four objects PaloWorks gives you.

Where PaloWorks is better

  • Revision rounds are a counted object, not a sentence in a proposal. The scope sells a number of rounds, each round is logged against it, and the dashboard flags the project the moment it goes past what it sold.
  • Extra work becomes a change order with its own description, price, and extra rounds, approved by the client typing their name. Drafts and unanswered orders are held separately from approved ones, so pending work never inflates what you think you are owed.
  • Nothing your client touches needs an account. Intake, scope, contract, invoice, statement, and the project portal are each an unguessable share link — no password, no app, no sign-up wall between them and paying you.
  • Card payments are a direct charge on your own Stripe account. The money never sits in a PaloWorks balance waiting on a payout schedule.
  • Your data leaves as CSV whenever you want. Clients, invoices, payments, and time entries each have their own export.

Side by side

These are the dimensions freelancers actually decide on — not feature counts.

PaloWorks compared with Bonsai across setup, client friction, payments, scope changes, revisions, signing, learning curve, and pricing model.
DimensionPaloWorksBonsai
Setup before your first client linkOne workspace, no template library to build first. The guided first run is aimed at a real client link going out in about five minutes, and sample data is kept separate so loading the demo never ticks the checklist for you.More to configure, because there is more product — proposal and contract templates, project and task defaults, and the accounting side if you turn it on.
What the client has to doOpen a link. Read the scope, sign by typing their name, pay the invoice. No account at any step.Also link-based for proposals, contracts, and invoices. This is not a real difference between the two — both keep the client out of a sign-up form.
Where the payment money landsYour own Stripe account, as a direct charge. PaloWorks takes no fee on the payment and is never the account of record.As their published documentation describes it, Bonsai connects the payment processor you already use for invoice payments, so funds land in the account you connect. Their processing and platform charges are set out on their own pricing page — read it before switching.
Extra work beyond the scopeA change order: description, price, extra rounds, dated, and approved by name. Only an approved order moves money or adds rounds.Handled by amending the proposal or contract, or by adding a line to the next invoice. Bonsai does not market a separate approved-change-order record; check their current feature list if that is your deciding factor.
Revision roundsSold in the scope, logged per round, and surfaced as risk on the dashboard once a project passes its included rounds.Revision limits are wording inside the contract you send. Counting rounds against that wording is on you unless their feature list says otherwise now.
Contract signingTyped-name signature recorded with the signer's IP, browser, and timestamp, plus a SHA-256 hash of the exact text signed. The document locks the first time the client opens it, so nobody can edit the version they read.E-signature is a core Bonsai feature, and the template library behind it is far larger than ours. If you want contract wording handed to you rather than starting from a small starter set, that is a genuine advantage.
Learning curveOne project holds the brief, the agreement, the plan, the revisions, and the invoices, and the pipeline has six fixed stages. Nothing to configure before it is useful.A suite. More modules to learn, and more it can do for you once you have learned them.
Pricing modelThree plans. Free carries one client and three active projects through intake, scope, revisions, invoicing, and card payments; contracts with e-signature, time tracking, the calendar, and Gantt planning are Pro, one monthly price for unlimited clients and projects. Studio adds three team seats and your branding on client documents.Tiered, with features unlocked as you move up and additional charges for extra seats and add-ons. Price the tier you would actually need, not the entry one.
Switching an existing client list overA CSV importer maps your columns — name, email, phone, company, notes — to ours, previews exactly which rows it will create, and skips anything that already matches an existing client by email, or by name and company. Running the same file twice creates nothing twice.Not something we can verify from outside the product. Check their current import options if a client list is what is holding you back from switching.

On the payments row: No PaloWorks fee on client payments — you pay only Stripe's standard processing fees, and the money goes straight to your Stripe account.

Pricing

The difference worth reasoning about is the model, not the number. Bonsai sells tiers, so the plan you land on is usually not the headline one — features move up a tier and seats and add-ons are charged on top. PaloWorks has three plans and no add-ons: free for your first client, one monthly price for unlimited work, and one higher price when you need team seats and your own branding. This page deliberately quotes no Bonsai figure, because we have no live view of their pricing and a stale number would be worse than none.

This page quotes no Bonsai price. It describes how their pricing is structured, from their public pages as we read them on Aug 26, 2026 — read theirs before deciding, because plans change and nobody tells us when they do.

Test it on one real job

The free plan runs one client and three active projects from brief to paid invoice — intake, scope, revisions, change orders, invoicing, and card payments. Contracts with e-signature, time tracking, and the calendar are on the paid plan. What is free is still enough to find out whether the scope, revision, and change-order records are worth anything to you before you pay for anything or migrate anything.

Start freeSee pricing

Switching from Bonsai

  1. Save your client list as a CSV file. It does not matter what Bonsai or your spreadsheet calls the columns — you match them up in the next step.
  2. In PaloWorks, open Clients and choose “Import clients”. Upload the file or paste the rows, and the preview lists every client it would create before anything is saved.
  3. Name, email, company, and notes are read from the usual column names, and you can pick the columns yourself when yours are named differently. Anyone already in your workspace — same email, or same name and company — is skipped, so importing the same file twice is safe.
  4. On Free the import stops at the plan's 1 client and tells you how many rows did not fit.
  5. With time tracking (Pro), hours exported from a time tracker as CSV import into a project from its Time tab.
  6. Projects, contracts, and invoices are not imported. New work starts in PaloWorks; nothing moves until you import it.

Step by step, with the column names it recognises: Import clients and time from a CSV.

Questions

Can I move my clients from Bonsai to PaloWorks?

Yes, as a CSV file. On the Clients page, “Import clients” previews every row, reads the name, email, company, and notes columns (or the ones you pick), and skips clients you already have. Projects, contracts, and invoices are not imported.

Can I try PaloWorks before leaving Bonsai?

Yes. The free plan runs 1 client and 3 active projects from brief to paid invoice — intake, scope, revisions, change orders, invoicing, and card payments — with no card to start. Contracts with e-signature, time tracking, and the calendar are on Pro.

Does this page quote Bonsai's prices?

No. It compares how the two are priced — the model, not the number — because we have no live view of Bonsai's pricing and it changes. Read their pricing page before you decide.

Other comparisons

Related reading

Bonsai and all other product names on this page are trademarks of their respective owners. PaloWorks is built by Ferrier Industries LLC and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by any company named here. Statements about other products describe our reading of their publicly available documentation on the date shown above and may be out of date; verify anything that matters to your decision with the vendor.