Bonsai Alternatives in 2026 (After the Zoom Deal)
Zoom acquired Bonsai in December 2025. The standalone product is still running, and nothing about the acquisition has broken anything yet. This is simply a sensible moment to know what else exists.
Two notes on method. Every price here traces to a dated record: Bonsai's and Dubsado's ladders were corroborated across independent 2026 round-ups and each vendor's published figures on 23 August 2026, and HoneyBook's was verified on 9 August 2026. Tools we could not verify are named without prices. Verify current pricing on each vendor's own site — hellobonsai.com/pricing for Bonsai — because these move on someone else's schedule. And we build Stria, which appears below.
First, what Bonsai actually costs
Most articles about Bonsai alternatives quote something like "$17 a user". No plan matches that. The published ladder is:
| Plan | Billed monthly | Billed annually | What it includes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | $15/user | $9/user | Time tracking, tasks, projects — no invoicing, proposals or contracts |
| Essentials | $25/user | $19/user | Invoices, proposals, contracts, client portal |
| Premium | $39/user | $29/user | Project insights, pipeline, integrations |
| Elite | $59/user | $49/user | Advanced controls; three-user minimum |
Two consequences worth sitting with.
The cheapest plan cannot send an invoice. If Bonsai is on your list because of contracts and billing, your real entry price is Essentials at $25 a user billed monthly, not the headline $15. That is a third more than most comparison articles tell you.
It is per user on every tier. A VA, a partner, a subcontractor who needs access — each one adds the full plan price again. This is the single most common reason people leave Bonsai, and it has nothing to do with Zoom.
Verified pricing, monthly against monthly
| Platform | Entry paid plan | Monthly | Seats | Standing free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stria | Solo | $19 | 2 included | Yes — one job end to end |
| Bonsai | Essentials (comparable) | $25/user | 1, per user | No |
| Dubsado | Starter | $35 | Not stated | Trial only, 3 clients |
| HoneyBook | Starter | $36 | 1 | No |
"Not stated" means the vendor's own page does not publish a seat inclusion for that plan and secondary sources disagree, so we record none rather than inventing one. We can prove what a page says; we cannot prove what a product includes.
If you are weighing all four rather than looking for a way off Bonsai specifically, HoneyBook vs Dubsado vs Bonsai vs Stria is the same table with each platform's philosophy attached.
Stria — if approvals and margin are what you outgrew
Ours, stated plainly. Stria is closest to Bonsai in that it is opinionated and works without configuration, and it differs in where it spends its attention: everything after the client accepts.
Scope becomes a record, not a memory. You lock a scope baseline — immutable and versioned once locked. Forward a client email and Stria judges the request against it and quotes the clause it relied on. The excerpt is re-sliced from your stored document on the server, so the model points at text rather than producing it and cannot invent a quotation. Out-of-scope requests get priced against your rate card and turn into a signable change order, which folds into a new locked baseline version on signature.
Approvals leave evidence. A sign-off records the verified email a one-time code was sent to and consumed from, the server-observed IP, the timestamp, the consent wording shown, and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the approved version — then closes permanently, because the update and delete triggers refuse for everyone including the table owner. A third party can confirm the certificate on a public page with no account. It is a simple electronic signature under eIDAS, and we do not describe it as more than that.
Money is yours. Invoices charge on your own connected Stripe account with no platform fee. Deposit invoices withhold deliverable files until they clear, enforced where the download link is minted rather than in the page that lists files. Reminders escalate across three messages under your own branding.
On margin, the exact claim: Stria tracks each project's quoted amount against projected and actual cost and derives an effective hourly rate — and leaves all of it blank until you log time and expenses, because a rate it cannot substantiate is worse than no rate. If you will not track hours, ignore this paragraph.
Where Bonsai is the better choice: its contract library and freelance tax tooling are more mature than ours, it is the faster setup of the two, and it has years more polish. If contracts and taxes are the job and approvals were never your problem, Bonsai does that better and switching would cost you something real.
Dubsado — if you outgrew Bonsai's ceiling upward
Dubsado is the depth option: workflow and form builders that go further than anything else in this group. Correct the number you probably have in your head first — it repriced on 1 December 2025, Starter $20 to $35 and Premier $40 to $55, with existing subscribers grandfathered. Starter excludes automated workflows, scheduling and public proposals, so the plan that delivers the reputation is Premier at $55. The learning curve is genuine. More in our Dubsado alternatives guide.
HoneyBook — if the funnel is the problem
HoneyBook Starter is $36 a month for one seat, and it is the strongest lead-capture and CRM product here by a clear margin. Two constraints: it works from a country list rather than everywhere — the US, Canada, the UK and Australia as at 13 September 2026 — and its ~89% Starter increase, which landed in February 2025, not 2026, whatever the round-ups say, makes it the premium choice in this set. See our HoneyBook alternatives comparison.
Named without prices
Plutio, Copilot, 17hats and Assembly are all reasonable shortlist entries — Plutio for modular flexibility, Copilot for client-portal polish, 17hats for guided setup, Assembly for client visibility. We have not verified their current pricing, so we quote none of it.
How to decide
- Is there any urgency? Probably not. Acquisitions take a long time to reach a product. Export your data this week anyway; it is free insurance and it converts a possible emergency into a choice.
- Name the actual reason. Per-user pricing points to seat-inclusive plans. A feature ceiling around approvals or budgeting points to Stria or Dubsado. Wanting a bigger ecosystem points to HoneyBook, if you are in North America.
- Test with one real project. Not a demo, not a sandbox — one job with a real client who will ask for something you did not quote. That is the only test that distinguishes these products.
Try it on the next job
Stria's free plan reaches the whole loop on one project, including AI scope classification, so you can lock a scope, collect a verified sign-off and send an invoice before paying anything. Start a 14-day trial at getstria.com. If you would rather test the idea without an account, paste a real request into the free scope check.
Related reading
- HoneyBook Alternatives in 2026: An Honest Comparison
- Dubsado Alternatives in 2026: Simpler Options
- HoneyBook vs Dubsado vs Bonsai vs Stria (2026)
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