A Bonsai alternative for freelancers and independent consultants

Who this is not for

If you run a small agency, subcontract regularly, need client portals with per-client permissions, or want proposals with interactive pricing, you want the larger product. Flowzivo does not have those things and is not planning to bolt them on, because the moment it does it becomes the thing it was built to avoid.

Being explicit about this is more useful than a feature table that implies parity. Software comparison pages usually pretend the alternative wins on every row, and nobody believes them.

What Flowzivo does differently

It is one page. Invoices, quotes, clients, time, contracts, expenses and reports are views in a single application rather than modules you navigate between, and the whole thing loads once. In practice this means the path from opening the tab to sending an invoice is short enough that you do it rather than putting it off.

It also works without an account. Your workspace lives in your browser; signing in adds sync across devices rather than being the price of entry. You can open the demo right now and see the finished product with example data in it, which is a faster way to judge fit than any comparison page including this one.

Pricing, honestly

Flowzivo is 30 days free, then €9 a month, with no per-invoice fee, no watermark on any plan and no card required to start. Full export is available whether or not your subscription is active.

Bonsai's pricing has several tiers and changes over time, so rather than quote a number that may be wrong by the time you read this, check their pricing page directly and compare it against what you would actually use. The tier most freelancers and consultants end up on is usually not the entry one.

What moving over involves

There is no automated import from Bonsai. For a consultant or freelancer working alone the practical approach is to add your clients — usually fewer than twenty — set your business details and numbering prefix once, and start issuing new documents from Flowzivo while leaving the history where it is. Your old invoices remain valid documents wherever they were made.

If you want the history in one place, export your clients as CSV from the other tool and re-enter the ones you still work with. It is an afternoon, once.

How to actually choose between them

Comparison pages are written by one of the two parties, including this one, so the only reliable method is to run the same real task through both. Take the next invoice you have to send — a genuine one, for a real client, with whatever awkwardness it contains — and produce it in each tool from a standing start. Time it.

What you are measuring is not features. It is how many decisions each tool asked you to make before it let you do the thing you came to do, and how the finished document looks next to your own name. Those two things predict whether you will still be using it in six months better than any feature table.

Flowzivo's demo exists to make that test cost nothing. You do not have to create an account, so the comparison does not begin with you handing over an email address to a company you have not decided about yet.

The case against switching

If your current tool works and you have a year of history in it, the switching cost is real and the gain from a slightly leaner interface probably is not worth it. Migration eats an afternoon, your numbering restarts, and your muscle memory is wrong for a fortnight.

The moment worth switching is the renewal, or the point where you notice you are paying for a tier you took because of one feature. Until then, the honest advice is to leave it alone.

Questions