HoneyBook Reviews

I love how easy it is to use, and how amenable the HB team is to updating the software if you have a feature request or complaint. It provides very visual, easy user prompts that allow me to easily accomplish what I need in a fraction of the time of other software apps I've tried.

It's annoying that I can't delete the default emails that came with my account to replace them with my own workflow, so myself or a team member doesn't get confused with their suggested emails vs. the ones I actually want to use.

Honeybook is very user friendly and was easy to set up along with the help of the concierge! My favorite part is the pipeline. I’m able to see all of my active projects and where they are in my workflow. As a photographer it is very important for me to build good relationships and communicate well with my clients so knowing who needs a consultation or who needs their gallery edited and delivered is crucial!

The only con is that I didn’t find honeybook sooner! I don’t know how I did business without it. I look back at those times and laugh at how much work I was doing that didn’t even amount to half of what honeybook does for me!

That it was easy to understand and use as a team

Refinding documents is a bit of a task sometimes

I love how quick and easy Honeybook is to use and update. I'm constantly fine-tuning my processes and it is so satisfying to have everything saved and organized in a very intuitive way.

I don't like how many separate emails I need to make to send out my appointment scheduling.

I absolutely love all of the tools I've tried so far, and can't wait to more fully utilize what HoneyBook offers. I launched my site after embedding forms and links to scheduling and it WORKS. I have onboarded two new clients already, and have others that are excited to work with me in the future because of the steps I've taken with HoneyBook.

As a professional designer, I'm used to being able to create whatever I need in my design software, but was thrilled to be able to remove that tedious aspect from my workflow after setting up brochures in HoneyBook. I would love some increased functionality and flexibility in those brochure templates, but that's certainly not going to keep me from using this amazing tool.

Makes customer acquisition very easy from prospecting to contract signed. Automation templates and functionality make this a very smooth orocess

After booking the client; PM automations are quite lacking - would need a separate solution to assist with that. Would love for it to be incorporated

HoneyBook helped me find a solution to all the little problems I was needing to solve with starting my new business. Fast professional looking billing and receiving card payments was essential to my startup phase.

I feel I haven’t even scratched the surface of what all HoneyBook can do and setting up everything is a bit tedious. I know I’d be creating all this on my own and it’d look terrible. So I am willing to put some extra work in to figure it out, just wish it were easier.

I love that everything is in one place for myself and for my clients. I can easily see what I have going on in my business!

I wish that there was the option to tax different parts within an invoice (ie - GST/PST on an album, but just GST on the shoot portion)

Everything has made my life SO much more organized and I have not lost communication with a customer

When the outlook integration comes it will be damn near perfect!

Organization, accountability and I can send contracts and proposal

I like all the program is interesting and clean

The complete set up of contracts, invoices and legal portions was so quick and easy. Now we don't have to struggle with creating new proposals with each client. The auto population of products previously used is a huge time saver and makes it really easy for new employees to get the right price with the right product.

The only thing I would like to see, and truly, I haven't asked, so it may even be there already; the monthly report of income shows the total of all contracts that came in during the month. We only collect a deposit from each. We would like to see the income report reflect just the deposit total of the month for our accounting purposes.

The best part about HoneyBook is that I'm able to fully customize everything to match my brand's visuals. Everything about this CRM is easy to use. The support team is always incredible if you need help - they're seriously the best around. The community around HB is also amazing. I love how easy it is to go from an inquiry to a booked project with my automated workflows! The newer client portal feature is always a client favorite, too!

I would love to see a more flexible method for viewing pipelines and tasks. I prefer to view a Kanban-type of pipeline/workflow and tasks. I'd like to be able to click on a workflow and see how many clients/projects I have under it.

I also don't like that I can't charge for certain appointment types. I would love to use the scheduling feature for booking mini sessions or other items that I would charge for outside of weddings/brand sessions. It would also be great if certain appointment types could work as lead capture forms (i.e.: when an appointment is booked, a new inquiry is created).

For financial tracking, it would be nice to be able to create a recurring expense.

Very user friendly, they offer so much! I love being able to track my expenses and schedule clients. I love the workflow feature, it’s so helpful. I REALLY love the fact that clients can pay you through the HB invoice. That’s probably the best part. Its awesome that they added a COVID-19 tool kit that shows you which clients are most likely to be affected. And then they have email templates that are COVID related. So many resources are provided, it’s like they actually care about us 🥺 💕 haha.
Highly recommend

The only thing that’s a little slow is the payment actually getting to my bank account. I’m not even sure if HB has anything to do with the time it takes, but I do wish it didn’t take 2 days to finally show up in my account. I wish there was an option to “instantly” transfer the funds for like a 1% fee. Like Venmo! That way if someone needs the money ASAP, they can instantly get it OR they can choose to wait the 1-2 business days to get the full payment. That would AMAZING

HoneyBook just overall has so many great features that will help you run & maintain your business every day. During the onset of Covid & with so many of us experiencing cancellations & such, they were the only CRM I knew of that rolled out any help with legal documents to help you convey the right words to your clients to not only help you stay level headed & in charge of your business, but also helped your clients realize that cancelling should be a last resort & that we business owners are here for them!
I am also a big fan of most all of the templates that they provide for you to help set your business up for success! Aaaand in the Winter, I love the little Snowman icon that sips hot cocoa & makes the computer screen be a wintery scene. Adorable!
HoneyBook is very easy to use, & their customer service & tech departments are da bomb!

The only things I wish that HoneyBook would improve on the most would be trying different variations with the project pipeline, with adding more availability or being able to choose between pipelines for different project types, & working out some kinks with the scheduling system between what we intend for clients to see in availability & what they actually see; & for the client to be able to go in & change their selection of date & time immediately afterwards & up to half an hour later.

Honeybook is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. Luckily, I started using it when I began my business, so I didn't need to transfer any existing CRM or sales data over. When I was onboarding, HoneyBook's support staff loaded in a bunch of pre-designed templates specific to my industry. They also took images I sent them of my products and prices and turned them into usable sales proposals. That alone has saved me WEEKS of time that I would have had to spend learning how to use HoneyBook and manually inputting my content.

The time tracker does not function to the extent that I need it to. I currently use Time Doctor to track my time, but it would be nice if I could keep everything in HoneyBook.

Also, I oftentimes don't see my reminders for following up with "tasks" for clients in my projects pipeline. If there's a way to have those notifications automatically sync with my personal google calendar and send me an email reminder, that would be helpful. Pipedrive's CRM and sales pipeline does a really great job of showing urgent prospects to follow up with. I think it color-codes them too.

Also, the email feature within HoneyBook can be a bit confusing. Sometimes, I can't tell if an email sent or not. The notes are also not displayed in a way that's very easy to read. It would be nice to add bullets, bold text, underline, etc. Pipedrive does a really great job of showing all of the email threads and notes between clients and multiple team members in their CRM.

Also, the first time I sent an invoice, HoneyBook automatically included a place for gratuity/tip. I've now figured out how to turn that setting off, but I couldn't see that it was automatically included in my invoice ahead of time. With my business (and I think most), they will never need gratuity, so I think that's kind of an odd setting. Maybe instead of having to click and review the settings in the left side bar of invoices, there could be an extra prompt to review those settings before the user sends the proposal to their client.

Everyone kept telling me, "Honeybook is great, but there's a learning curve." So I was a little intimidated. They were wrong, I could jump in face first and start using it exclusively immediately. Even in the middle of a terrible time for my little business, I will pull all the strings I can find to be able to afford Honeybook. It's easy for me, easy for my clients and keeps me focused. It saves me time and energy and thats the most important thing!

The only thing I'm having issues with right now is making a brochure. It probably user error, but I wish it there more extensive editing capabilities within the brochure making operation. I will play around with it some more though.

I love the pipeline, where each client's project is categorized by stage (new inquiry, tour scheduled, proposal signed, etc.). I can pull up all clients who are in the "Planning" stage of the pipeline, for example.

Under each client's project is absolutely everything related to their project: all emails exchanged, contracts, payment schedule, separate workspaces with vendors who will be working on the project, and more. I have templates for emails and have them sent automatically. One goes out when we receive an inquiry, a different one 5 days after client signs the contract, and another 30 days before their event date. There are also templates for brochures, contracts, and payment plans. I can't imagine having to do all of that manually!

I set the system up for my business with no outside assistance. It was easy to understand.

Would like to have more ability to make formatting changes (bullets, numbering, bold, etc.) when editing a document. I can do this on a new document, but not when editing an existing one.
Workflows could be improved to have more triggers and the ability to automatically send files.

Running my own business where clients contract via email and forms through my website can get overwhelming when trying to keep track of small but important details. Invoicing, payment processing, contracts, client communication, client surveys and now they have a feature where you can connect with other local professionals on projects. Very useful.

I wish it was a little more upscale looking on fonts, colors and the user experience. My brand is more of a luxury brand so I want customers to feel like when they're being transferred to the contract or payment portion of our interactions that they're still receiving a luxury experience.

1.Template building for sure. Not having to hand customize every single contract has saved so much time.
2. The fact that, in the wedding industry, it is heavily female dominant.... which means a lot of us are moms.... which means that this app allowed me to take care of critical work while on my phone. THAT is a lifesaver with kiddos. If you know you know!
3. The time between sending a proposal and getting paid (depending on how ready to book a client was) was minutes at most. I’d get live feedback when they opened the file, signed the contract, and made a payment. I never had to guess.
4. Customer service was great!!! They actively ask for feedback from their customers and even go granular with their questions so they can consider the nuances of each client’s industry!

1. The email communication side of the app is very hit or miss. Where they soar with sending files and making payments a BREEZE, the ability to create a streamlined, semi-automated Follow-up process for leads that come in is sorely lacking. Even if HoneyBook never intends to be the best at that portion of sales, I feel it is a simple task to add a feature that makes it easy to add tags to leads so that you can export those contacts to a service that DOES soar in email communication and lead nurturing.
2. There is still a lot of room for more organization in the communication process from sales to project completion.

I love how seamless and easy to use it is. It may be a transition at first but once you get changed over you will NEVER go back. The workflow is so easy to use and very customizable. Other softwares i've tested are not even comparable to how simple honeybook is to use.

The only thing i wish were better is the calendar system. It would be nice to be able to block dates out on the calendar to avoid booking, like if you had planned a vacation. I also with it would sync directly to ical. I hate having to make it use google becuase if google runs out of space it doesnt tell me and then i have a calendar issue.

User friendly for both myself and my clients, ease of set up (love that they do most of the upload work & it’s easily changeable!), the community it’s created, & the “opportunities” section.

1. I wish there was more internal automation, like the workflow applied just sent out the emails and not prompted me to act.
2. While “linked” with Calendly, it’s not linked in the correct way. I wish when someone signed up for a slot in Calendly, it could generate an automatic proposal that I could look over before sending, or sent automatically. When adding my “Calendly link” to a honeybook email, the link always fails. I don’t use Calendly enough to have this be a major issue, just a nuisance.
3. More flexibility in personal branding & branding the contact form. I don’t currently use the form on my site because of this.

There is a very small learning curve using Honeybook. When I convinced my previous employer to purchase Honeybook, I realized how very quick and easy it was to integrate into the company. Now, as a business owner, my employees can utilize Honeybook as well and our company can have full transparency on where we are at with each client.

I really wish that Batch Emailing had more options. We often need to send specific batch emails to our clients dependednt on which stage they are at on our timeline. Only having the options to hand select each client to send the batch emails to or to send them to our entire client list is an inefficient use of our time and thus we find no use for this tool that has so much potential to be so valuable to our business.

When singing up with Honeybook they took my exhausting contracts, forms, questionnaires and placed them into their system. This saved me so much time switching from DIY client management to this online resource.

When responding to an email through the software, it makes a new email. Some clients have more questions and I’d like a way to organize with in a project the emails.

The ability to work from anywhere at any time is one of the best features. I can access all the information for our clients from home and answer any questions. Since leads go directly to this program, all emails are attached to each project so you have a record of everything you said. The Library stores all our documents and handouts. I love the report section--last month the owner was starting a project to see what months was our best months for bookings. He said he was going to have to dig through Quickbooks for the information. I pointed out that the information was already in the Honeybooks!

The only thing have to say that is bad about this program is when there is an update of change. Opening up the program to do something and finding that things have changed with no notice is frustrating.

Honeybook is essential to running my business and now that I've been a user for more than 2 years, I can't imagine not using it. As a photographer, it is important for me to keep all of my scheduling, contracting, payments, and details as organized as possible so that I don't miss a meeting, or special detail for a wedding or photo session. Every part of my business is streamlined now that I use Honeybook. Reporting on Honeybook is made very easy from being able to see what % I've booked based on the number of signed contracts, where most of my clients find me, and how much money in taxes I need to pay for the quarter. Additionally, Honeybook has an opportunity board where creatives can post about need for associates, styled photo sessions. Finally, if you refer 2 people per year to Honeybook, your cost for the entire year is covered.. can't beat that!

There are times when I donate photo sessions to non-profits and want to be able to send an invoice showing how much the session would have cost, then adding a discount to show a $0 invoice but there is not a way to send that without charging the invoice and refunding. I wish that I could do more on the mobile app, but new features are being added frequently.