Looking for a Bonsai alternative?

The Contractor Codex vs Bonsai, at a glance

Both tools cover the basics. The differences sit in price, workflow shape, and which kind of service business each was built for.

Bonsai pricing read from their public pricing page on August 11, 2026. Published prices change often, so check theirs before you decide.

The pricing shape is the whole comparison

Bonsai's list price looks close to ours until you notice two multipliers. First, it is per user: every person you add pays again, every month. Second, the features most people are shopping for sit above the entry tier. Invoicing, proposals, contracts, and the client portal start at Essentials, $25/user/month or $19 billed annually. Removing Bonsai's own branding from what your client sees needs Premium, $39/user/month or $29 annually. So a three-person studio that wants an unbranded client portal is paying $117/month month-to-month, or $87 billed annually. The Contractor Codex is $15/month, full stop, with unlimited internal users and every feature on both plans. Our $35/month Pro plan does not unlock anything; it only lowers the service fee on payments. That fee is the one cost to add back on our side: 0.8% on Standard and 0.1% on Pro, charged on top of Stripe's normal processing rates.

Six ways to bill a job, not one

This is where the products diverge in substance rather than price. A quote here carries a billing mode, and there are six. Deposit only, for recurring work with a setup fee. Bill in full now, for small jobs paid before the work. Draft for completion, for time and materials where the total is not known yet. Deposit plus draft, the standard project shape. Deposit plus progress payments, for staged jobs where money should arrive as the work moves. And a named milestone schedule, where the stages and amounts are printed on the quote so accepting it means agreeing to every stage; each one bills as the work reaches it, in any order, and the last stage settles the balance to the cent. On top of that, quote lines can be one-time, monthly, or annual, and a recurring line can be marked as a provider cost the client pays directly. Bonsai invoices, recurs, and takes partial payments, which covers the common cases but not the staged and mixed ones.

The part that protects you: hours, caps, and approvals

Both tools track time. The difference is what the time is allowed to do. Here a project carries a budget, and billable work stops at 100% of it until the client approves more. At 80% the portal raises the request and emails them; the client types the amount they are approving themselves, so they can approve less than you asked. Retainer clients have an allowance of included hours, and when it runs out the same thing happens: an overage request, a pause on billable work, and the client picks which project to prioritize when they top up. A service plan holds the standing terms once, including after-hours, overnight, and weekend rate multipliers, the minimum time increment, and an auto-approve ceiling so small overages do not need a round trip, and the client gets a plain-language Billing Terms document explaining all of it. If you have ever eaten twenty unbilled hours because nobody wanted to have the conversation, that is the machinery that prevents it.

Email that is actually email

Most client portals have messaging, which means your client has to log in to talk to you and you have to log in to answer. This has a real email layer instead. You send from your own domain, so nothing your client receives comes from our address. Replies carry a token in the reply-to address, so when the client hits reply in Gmail the message threads back into the portal against the right client and also lands in your normal mailbox. You can answer from either side. There is a full inbox with folders, conversation view, and drafts. It sounds mundane next to an AI feature list, and in daily use it is the thing that stops the portal from becoming another place you have to remember to check.

What Bonsai does better, plainly

A native mobile app on iOS and Android, where we are responsive web only. QuickBooks and Xero integrations on their higher tiers, where we export rather than sync. A deals pipeline, Gantt view, workload management, and timesheet locking, which matter once a team is large enough to need resource planning. And a longer track record with a bigger template library and community behind it. If you are a solo freelancer who wants time tracking and a CRM and nothing else, Bonsai Basic at $9 a year-billed seat is cheaper than us and you should take it.

Switching from Bonsai

Export your client list and any service or template library from Bonsai, then re-create the records here or bulk-load them with the create_client and save_to_catalog tools through an AI agent. Your Bonsai proposal and contract templates will not transfer, so rebuild them as Contract Templates and Quote Library entries; the 240-item starter library across 24 industries covers most of the common lines before you type anything. Time entries stay in Bonsai as history and new sessions start here. The piece that needs real thought rather than an import is recurring work: a Bonsai retainer invoice is a charge, and a retainer here is an allowance of hours with approval gating, so decide what each client's included time should be before you migrate them. Running both for a billing cycle is the usual approach.

FAQ: The Contractor Codex vs Bonsai