Frelo vs HoneyBook
HoneyBook is a client-flow platform aimed at independent professionals and creative service businesses, covering enquiry through proposal, contract, payment and scheduling. It is a larger, more established product than Frelo with a strong following among photographers, planners and designers.
What each one costs
Every HoneyBook figure below is quoted from their own pricing page, read on August 21, 2026. Prices change — check theirs before deciding, and tell us if this page has gone stale.
| Frelo | HoneyBook | |
|---|---|---|
| How it's billed | Per account, monthly. One person, one price. | Per account rather than per seat, with team members capped by tier. Prices below are the billed-yearly rates the pricing page leads with. |
| Entry plan | Free — $0/month, 2 clients and 3 projects, no card, no time limit | Starter — $29/month billed yearly |
| Portal + contracts + invoicing | Pro — $19/month, unlimited clients and projects, including the branded client portal, contracts with e-signatures, Stripe invoicing and payments, time tracking, expenses and the finance dashboard | Starter — $29/month billed yearly. It already includes the client portal, contracts and invoicing. |
| Also charges | Nothing on top. Card and ACH payments run through your own Stripe account at your own Stripe rates; Frelo takes no cut. |
|
- Proposals and lead-capture forms, plus a scheduler on Essentials and above — the whole enquiry-to-booking stretch Frelo does not cover
- Automations that move a project through stages without you
- Mobile apps, and a large community of templates and workflows for creative businesses
- Payment processing is built in rather than routed through your own Stripe account, which is simpler to set up
- You want payments to land in your own Stripe account. Frelo creates payment links on your Connect account and is not in the money flow, so you are on Stripe's own rates rather than a platform's.
- Your work is billed by the hour. Frelo builds invoices from tracked time and marks the entries billed so the same hour cannot go out twice.
- You want a flat $19/month, or a free plan with no card and no time limit, rather than $29/month billed yearly as the entry point.
What Frelo does not do
Frelo starts once you have the client. It has no client-facing scheduling or booking pages, proposals or lead-capture forms, a CRM pipeline, native mobile apps and no full bookkeeping or accounting. If those are the parts of your week you want software for, HoneyBook is the more complete product and you should buy it.
What Frelo does instead is the stretch after the deal is signed: one link your client opens without an account, invoices built from tracked hours, and a finance view that tells you what you are owed. See the full feature list.
Common questions
- Is Frelo cheaper than HoneyBook?
- On the entry plans, yes: Frelo Pro is $19/month and HoneyBook's Starter is $29/month billed yearly. HoneyBook also takes a payment processing cut of 2.7% + 10¢ on cards and 1.5% on ACH; with Frelo, payments run through your own Stripe account at your own Stripe rates. Figures are from HoneyBook's pricing page, checked on the date shown on this page.
- Does HoneyBook track time?
- Yes. It is not listed on the pricing page, but HoneyBook's help centre documents a time tracker with billable and non-billable hours that can be added to an invoice. We mention this because a comparison that implied otherwise would be wrong.
- What does HoneyBook do that Frelo does not?
- Proposals, lead-capture forms, client-facing scheduling, workflow automations and mobile apps. HoneyBook covers getting the work; Frelo starts once you have it.
HoneyBook is a trademark of its owner. Frelo is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by HoneyBook. The figures on this page were read from https://www.honeybook.com/pricing on August 21, 2026 and may since have changed.
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