UPDATED May 31, 2020, to reflect new features since the original publishing date!

I don’t know about you, but I started my business to make a difference for my clients, not to do a ton of admin work. Sometimes it feels like 95% of what we do in business is paperwork! (Even if it is digital.)

Finding ways to automate the drudgery of the business back-end is tops on my list, so when I was choosing a CRM (client relationship management) program last year, I did some research to decide which was best for me. Not every program is going to be the best for every person or business, but here’s what I found!

A lot of fellow entrepreneurs talk about 17hats and I have at least one client who uses it, so I figured it was worth looking into. I had also been starting to hear about Dubsado, which was a relatively new entry in the CRM world at that point. (UPDATE: Since then, they’ve ended up leading by example, leaving others like 17hats and Honeybook scrambling to implement similar features!) I’ve used trials of both programs and I’ll be comparing their key features and sharing a Big Picture overview of both 17hats and Dubsado, so feel free to skip to the parts that matter most to YOU!

TL;DR:  In the end, I chose Dubsado, after trial periods of both Dubsado and 17hats.  If you don’t want to get the down-low on WHY and want to just take my word (though I strongly suggest reading on!), then use the referral code celab to get 30% off when you join!  You can do a trial and still get the 30% off afterward, as long as you use the referral code when you sign up for the trial.  You’re welcome!

Dubsado vs. 17hats’ Interfaces

Both 17hats and Dubsado have pretty basic user interfaces, though 17hats‘ dashboard has some extra ‘widget’ style boxes (see above). Dubsado’s dashboard allows you to set a financial goal (and change it whenever you want!), see how much money is sitting in open invoices, and even see whether your business revenue is trending up or down! You’ll also see if you have any current action items and tasks, scheduled business appointments, as well as a rolling income, expenses, and profit comparison. The simplicity of both of these dashboards lets you focus on your work, which is great!

Proposals (Quotes) and Contracts in Dubsado vs. 17hats

A Dubsado document

A 17hats document

Contracts and proposals (aka quotes in 17hats) are a cornerstone for entrepreneurs and freelancers. PLEASE tell me that you’re using contracts in your business; if you’re not, you need to start ASAP! Both Dubsado and 17hats have contract and proposal capabilities, so there’s no excuse not to use them.

The following applies to both Dubsado and 17hats: You can set up both proposals and contracts with smart fields so that the system can auto-fill these documents with your client and project info. This saves you loads of time! You can also set up a proposal to automatically generate a contract and invoice once the proposal is accepted, allowing your client to smoothly complete all of the necessary steps to start their project. Your client can digitally sign their documents and you can counter-sign them as well so that all of your legal protection is checked off.

Here are a few places where they differ: first, the signature line on their contracts. Currently (as of May 2020), you can only have one client signature on a Dubsado contract, while you can add related contacts to a 17hats contract, allowing you to require multiple signatures. This could be useful if, say you’re a wedding photographer and you need both the bride and groom to sign, or if you’re an artist and you need both the gallery owner and a third party to sign the contract.

17hats DOES allow you to buy pre-made templates, though, which is pretty cool! Again, you’re not changing the look of the document (whether it be a quote or a contract), but you can buy the verbiage templates to create your own questionnaires, canned emails, contracts, and even workflows directly within 17hats. Dubsado has a template marketplace feature planned, but it hasn’t been released yet.

Another thing that differentiates 17hats vs. Dubsado is that you have the option to put the effort in to make Dubsado’s quotes and contracts look prettier. Unfortunately, you’re pretty limited with 17hats. You can change the verbiage and add your logo, but that’s about it. I know it may be nit-picky, but I want my clients to like the look of everything in their project. You can customize everything about your proposals in Dubsado, complete with images to draw attention to important sections, like the example to the right. To me, it just looks more professional and allows you to brand these documents to your business, but that’s my personal opinion. It may not matter for your business, so take that into consideration if it does matter to you.

Invoicing and Payments in Dubsado vs. 17hats

Invoices are one of the most important parts of any business. After all, if you don’t send out invoices, it’s a whole lot harder to get paid! 17hats’ invoices are relatively basic. Straight text, no customization, aside from changing the button color within brand settings. Dubsado’s templates are also relatively basic too, though you can add a bit of formatting. Given the relative simplicity of both CRMs, I think this one is more personal preference, to be honest.

Dubsado invoice example

17hats invoice example

The payment processing aspects of these two programs work pretty similarly. You can set Dubsado up with Stripe, Square, and PayPal, and you can enable or disable credit cards and/or bank transfers (enabling these saves you money on processing fees!) universally AND on individual invoices. So maybe you, like me, don’t normally accept PayPal, but you have a client who needs to use it for whatever reason. You can have PayPal hooked up to Dubsado and disabled universally but turn PayPal on for that individual invoice. Pretty spiffy!

17hats also integrates with Stripe, Square, and PayPal, and in addition, you can use Authorize.net. (The latter is aimed at high-volume providers, so this may or may not even make a difference for you, but hey, it’s there if you need it!) You can only have one merchant account active at any given time and as far as I was able to find, you CANNOT disable or enable any payment options within 17hats, though. If you like the ability to turn off credit card payments on bigger invoices, which can save you a LOT of money (there’s a $5 maximum processing fee on bank transfers/eChecks, whereas credit cards are 2.9% + $0.30 on each transaction, so any transaction over about $160 will cost you a lot more if a client pays via credit card), this might be a downside for you.

SIDE NOTE: If you use Square, you can process $1,000 of payments fee-free for every person you refer. Since credit card fees are a cost of doing business these days, this could save you $29 per referral and save your referrals $29 too! You can process your first $1,000 of payments you receive through Square for free by using my referral link: https://squareup.com/i/EC3D3EB5 And yes, you’ll still be able to get even more fee-free processing after that first $1k for referrals that you send to Square too.

Both Dubsado and 17hats also offer payment schedules, which allow you to have the system automatically send out payment reminders based on criteria that you set. Neither system lets you automatically add late fees at the moment, but the reminders often eliminate or reduce the need for late fees. (Before adding those fees yourself, don’t forget to check your local regulations!) Dubsado’s payment schedules are simple to use, flexible, and allow you to make template payment schedules that you can apply automatically. So say you usually require 50% upfront and 50% on project completion. You can set up a standard payment schedule that reflects this. You can also customize your standard payment schedules per project if needed.

In 17hats, you have to set up a payment schedule for each individual project. Their payment schedules are flexible, but they aren’t as straightforward as in Dubsado. In 17hats, you can either set the payment schedule to be a set number of equal payments (e.g. 2 payments, with the second sending after a month) or you have to select the number of payments, overall due date, and the individual payment percentages and due dates. You can also add a message to send along with the payment schedule in 17hats.

If you offer discounts or specials, you should know that both Dubsado and 17hats allow you to add discount line items in invoices, too. Both systems have the ability to accept deposits/retainer fees on invoices through the payment schedule tools. Whoot! Dubsado also lets you create discount codes, making it even easier to manage promotions for your business since clients can add the discount code themselves.

Oh, before I forget: DUBSADO LETS YOU ACCEPT TIPS (AKA GRATUITY). Yep, you heard me right: your clients can reward you for doing a stellar job. I’ve been tipped and I’ve heard from so many others about their awesome surprise gratuity from happy clients in Dubsado. 17hats doesn’t have a built-in tool for this, and while it’s often not a deal breaker for everyone, it’s some nice icing on the cake.

Client Management in Dubsado vs. 17hats

You’ve gotta know what’s going on with your clients in order to best serve them, right? That makes client management essential and that’s where Dubsado and 17hats come into play. You want to create a simple, consistent, and straightforward system to make it easy for you AND your clients.

17hats and Dubsado have similar approaches to many aspects of client management. One of my favorites is the client portal. Enabling this gives you and your client a central place to access project emails, documents (i.e. contracts, proposals, invoices, files), and client information (so they can update it if needed). We’ll talk more about client portals in the next section, though.

One of the key facets of client management is the information gathering process. Both Dubsado and 17hats let you create lead capture forms that can be embedded on your website or sent via a link to prospective clients. When someone fills out a lead capture form, their information is automatically added to the address book in Dubsado or 17hats. You can also hook up a lead capture form to a workflow, enabling you to automate the process of lead → client.

Another neat feature of both Dubsado and 17hats is the ability to connect your business email address directly with the CRM program. That means you’ll be able to send emails through Dubsado or 17hats as yourself, not as Dubsado or 17hats. This makes the client experience much more seamless and keeps them from getting confused as to why they’re getting an email from a program they may not have heard of.

Job Management in Dubsado vs. 17hats

This is where the big guns come out! Job management can take up a lot of your time as an entrepreneur or freelancer, so you have to make sure you choose a CRM program that’s a good fit for your job management needs. Just because a program is a good fit for me or Jimmy doesn’t mean it’s the right one for you.

17hats client portal example

17hats’ client portal is pretty simple. You can filter documents based on their type (invoices, quotes, and contracts), which is nice if you have a retainer or returning client and they want to see just their contracts and not their recurring invoices. Event Details shows any appointments that have been scheduled within the project. The My Information tab is where the client can view their personal and/or company information and make sure it’s correct (e.g. email address and billing address).

As you can see in the above screenshot, the 17hats client portal is almost exclusively text. I could have made the portal header image more interesting by doing some graphics editing in GIMP or Photoshop or something, but that was just about the only thing I could change. I do like 17hats’ ability to turn on or off invoices, contracts, quotes, and questionnaires within the portal. You can disable/enable each of these individually. You can also turn on or off the client’s ability to edit their own information within the portal. Personally, I usually prefer to let clients edit their own information, but there are some instances where you don’t want them touching anything, so this might be useful for you.

17hats also allows you to track time directly within the program so that you can apply it to invoices for billing purposes or to prove time (you know, if you have one of Those Clients). You can also add up to 5 team members and assign them specific areas that they can view. I like the flexible customization this gives you. For example, if you don’t want your VA to view your financials, you could restrict them from viewing bookkeeping, contracts, invoices, and quotes, but allow them access to everything else.

Dubsado client portal example

Within the Dubsado client portal, it’s easy for the client to see at a glance what they have outstanding (e.g. unread emails and incomplete forms) and what they still need to pay (open invoices). The rest of it is pretty similar to 17hats: Documents houses all of the contracts, proposals, invoices, etc.; Emails obviously shows the emails you and the client have exchanged; Profile is where the client’s information is displayed.

Like 17hats, Dubsado offers time tracking and additional user accounts. You get three additional users (plus you) at no additional cost and you can set different pre-defined permission levels. The permissions in Dubsado are not as flexible as in 17hats, unfortunately (you can only restrict a basic user’s view of contracts, invoices, and templates inside of Dubsado), but you can assign them to specific jobs as opposed to the entirety of your open jobs. If you need a lot of additional users, note that 17hats’ 5 user limit (4 users + you) seems to be a hard cap as of the original post’s latest update (May 2020), though 17hats says they have plans to let you upgrade to additional users in the future for $5/month per user. Right now, Dubsado lets you add additional users for $25/month (up to 10 users), $45/month (up to 20 users), or $60/month (up to 30 users) as of May 2020.

In Dubsado, you can also add an additional brand for $10/month, rather than needing to pay for a full-price additional account. For example, I have a Dubsado account for The Creative Entrepreneurs L.A.B. and I added a brand for Virtual Summit Search, which saves me loads of money! If you have multiple brands or creative businesses, this could be a lifesaver… or at least a wallet-saver.

Both Dubsado and 17hats also offer todo (aka task) lists as well. In 17hats’, you can add tasks to a list, but… that’s about it. You can add a due date and time, assign the task to a user and calendar, and add a note. If you want simple, though, this will fit the bill and still help you stay on top of your to-do list.

Dubsado’s task boards are pretty cool, in my book. Since you can share task boards with clients through their portal, you can choose to make a task private so the client can’t see it. You can also set up your tasks in a Trello-style board so that you can move tasks through different project phases or however you manage projects. Your upcoming tasks also show up in your Dubsado dashboard so you can see at a glance what you need to do. Oh, and you can’t see it in the image below, but once you’ve actually added a task to your list or to a board, you can then edit that task and add files if needed. This is one of my favorite things because if there’s a related image or another file, I can attach it right there and not go looking for it again later. Booyah!

Dubsado also has a built-in scheduling tool!! This is one of my favorite of Dubsado’s relatively new features. I had been using Calendly before they released this and now that it’s built-in, it means I can ditch the extra cost and hassle of trying to coordinate an outside scheduling tool. As of May 2020, Dubsado is working on integrating their scheduler tool with Zoom, as well, so if you have client video meetings, it’ll be even easier to streamline that process. Inside of the Dubsado Scheduler, I personally have scheduling tools for everything from podcast guests to coffee chats to client meetings. If you’ve used something like Calendly or Acuity in the past, you’ll find this tool works very similarly to them, so the learning curve is short.

17hats also has a built-in scheduling tool. Theirs is a little different and may fit some use cases better. In 17hats, you’ll turn on the scheduling tool from within your account settings page. Once you’ve done that, you add a service. For example, if you’re a photographer, you could create a service within the scheduler to allow clients to book their sessions online. You can set the location, same as in Dubsado, set the appointment duration and buffer time before and after (so you have time to prep and/or get to the location without scheduling conflicts), and can even set it to require payment before booking, just like Dubsado. There’s an option for requiring them to agree to your terms of service and to customize the confirmation message. You’ll also find some little ext

The thing I love most about having the Dubsado Scheduler tool built-in is that it allows you to integrate it into your workflows. You can base workflow actions off of when an event is scheduled, which makes things SO much easier. Before, you had to manually re-activate a workflow after an appointment that was scheduled in an outside tool, but now Dubsado can automatically send follow-ups or whatever else you need based on the event date! It’s completely revolutionized my workflows. Speaking of workflows…

The biggest job management time saver in Dubsado is probably workflows.  What are Dubsado workflows, you ask?  Oh man, let me tell you!  They’re pretty much the bomb dot com. (Did I date myself?) With workflows, you can automate all sorts of areas of your business. For example, if you have a set process for new clients, you could take them from lead capture form → proposal → contract → down payment → questionnaire to get the requisite project information and on from there.

Dubsado’s workflow action options

I especially love that Dubsado allows you to require approval before completing many of these actions, as well. I use this feature in workflows like my podcast guest applications so that I can review the applications and customize the response email before approving it to send and continue the workflow. It’s incredibly useful and versatile!

17hats also has workflow abilities, though they are a little bit more limited than Dubsado’s options:

17hats workflow action options

Within those actions, they do have more options, such as waiting for your approval before continuing, similar to the example I presented above. Sometimes simplicity can be good, so preferences between the Dubsado vs. 17hats workflows might be just that – preferences!

Oh, and just for kicks and giggles: you can create canned emails in both Dubsado and 17hats.  That means you can select a pre-written email, tweak it if needed, and send it to the client from your own email address. Saves even more of your precious time and do things you enjoy WAY more than writing emails!

Finally, Dubsado vs. 17hats Pricing and Trials

One of the first questions most of us ask when considering a new piece of software is “How much is it going to cost me?” Both Dubsado and 17hats offer trial periods before you actually have to pay, but… uh, 17hats doesn’t really hold a candle in the trial department. I highly recommend taking them both for a trial run, though, since you may just find that one person liking something doesn’t = you liking something.

Okay, so I said that I don’t like 17hats17hats‘ trial, right? Here’s why: it’s only SEVEN DAYS LONG. 7 days is not enough time (in my opinion, at least) to get a good feel for something you may be paying $45/month for! (Make sure to check their pricing page for current pricing info; this is accurate as of May 2019.) You can get a hefty discount when you pre-pay for a year or three years, but you’ll want to make sure it’s the right fit before locking yourself into a long-term plan. The 17hats trial used to be 17 days (which was cute and fun, at least), but since reducing the trial to 7 days, they have made the concession to include a 30-day money-back guarantee, which makes it a little bit less of a risk.

Dubsado’s trial, on the other hand, is based on the number of leads/clients you have. You can use Dubsado for as long as you want until you have three leads or clients (when you add your fourth, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan). When you’re just getting started, it may take you a while to get your first few clients, or you may just want plenty of time to play around and get things set up before you start bringing leads and clients into the system. 30 days (which is what most other CRMs give you) is not always enough time to get a really good feel for the system. Dubsado’s trial lets it grow with YOU, at your own pace, which can be crucial for some folks.

Plus, Dubsado’s customer service is OUT OF THIS WORLD. Example: Before I tested Dubsado out, I wanted to know if team management was in the works (it’s since been released), so I emailed them.  I got a reply back from Becca (one of the Dubsado founders) within hours, asking me to let Becca and Jake know what team management aspects I wanted to see when they release that feature.  Can I just reiterate that Dubsado has AMAZING customer service?!  Becca and her staff are crazy active in the Dubsado Facebook group, where you can ask questions and suggest features.  This is one of the best things about Dubsado, in my opinion.  They’re also completely transparent about what features they’re working on and when they’re anticipating releasing that feature.

UPDATE: I’ve now been a Dubsado customer for over three years (as of May 2020). They’ve consistently grown their customer support team so that they can continue to provide a high caliber of support. Their team responds quickly to any problems or questions and resolves them. A lot of times, when a company grows as quickly as Dubsado has, their customer service suffers, but I can happily say this hasn’t been the case!

I can’t personally speak to 17hats’ customer service very much. My only interaction with them has been through the account of a client who uses 17hats. I’ve made some customer support inquiries to the 17hats team for my client and while they were nice and as helpful as they could be, it wasn’t anything that stood out. (Though that could have just been because of the relatively simple questions we were asking for resolutions to.) If you sign up for a trial with 17hats, test out their customer service response (actually, do this with any trial you get for any system, honestly!). Customer service is a pretty good indicator of how responsive a company will be to customer feedback and such, so it’s good to have an idea of how much they actually care before you give them your money.

As for pricing, this is yet another place where I love Dubsado.  They offer two options: monthly or annual. Dubsado’s pricing is $35/month or $350/year (essentially $29/month) as of May 2020, but check their pricing page to make sure that’s still accurate.  BONUS: When you subscribe to one of Dubsado’s paid plans, you lock in that rate for as long as you stay on that type of plan.  Gotta love not having any surprise price increases! Occasionally (mostly for Dubsado’s birthday celebration), Dubsado will also sell or give away lifetime accounts, so keep an eye out for that if you become a Dubsado customer.

17hats‘ pricing is $45/month if you pay every month; $295 (essentially $25/month) if you pay yearly; and $395 (essentially $17/month) if you pay every 2 years. You can save a lot of money if you do the annual or especially the bi-annual (every 2 years) plans, but the 2-year plan is a much bigger commitment, both in money and in being locked into a system that you’re new to. If you like it during your trial and can afford it, it’s definitely a good deal, though.

Both programs also offer referral programs! Dubsado gives YOU a free month of service for every paid referral you send them and every person who signs up for a paid plan through your affiliate link or code gets 20% off of their own first month OR year. (Yes, you can also get a discount – 30%, actually, rather than the normal 20%! – off your first month or year with Dubsado! Just use celab as your referral code when you sign up.) According to their referral page, 17hats gives you a $50 Amazon gift card when you refer someone and your referral gets 10% off an annual subscription. From what I can tell, it doesn’t look like they get a discount on a monthly plan, unfortunately, unlike Dubsado’s referral program. That makes sense, though, as 17hats incentivizes their annual and 2-year plans.

If you’re ready to give Dubsado a try, use celab as your referral code when you sign up to get 30% off after your trial.  Let me know if you have questions – I’d be happy to answer whatever I can!

Want help determining whether Dubsado or 17hats is a better fit for you? Click here to jump to the quiz!

Do you have any CRM tips or tricks? Got questions about Dubsado, 17hats, or CRMs in general? Drop them in the comments! I’d love to hear from you.