SuiteDash vs Dubsado: Which Investment Will Pay Off?

Which software should you invest in to help you automate your business?

That’s one of the hardest, yet most crucial decisions — you shouldn’t take it lightly. After all, once you make your pick, you need to adjust your business to make it fit the tool and build workflows around it. And the more time and effort you put into that, the more stressful and expensive jumping ships will be, if you either change your mind or grow your business.

That’s why our series on software comparisons focuses on helping small to medium business owners make smart, informed decisions. This article is no different; we’re here to shine the light on three popular tools that cater to various audiences: SuiteDash vs Dubsado vs Zendo.

Let’s discover what these three business and project management tools have in store for us.

SuiteDash: Introduction

SuiteDash is a rather old tool, having been founded back in 2012 by Mike Lambert. Since then, it managed to build a huge clientbase, becoming one of the more popular solutions on the market. But on the other hand, it’s quite clearly a product of its times — prepare yourself for retro vibes!

Design & UX/UI Experience

While SuiteDash can’t really boast about following the newest design trends, at least it promotes simplicity — its interface is divided in two, with a sidebar with all the tabs listed on the left and the rest of the screen taken by the tabs’ content.

If you’re logging in for the very first time, you’ll also be welcomed by onboarding windows, which will do their best to explain all the features. As they should — SuiteDash is a behemoth of a software that can feel overwhelming at times.

Most tabs look similar to each other, with the table format being the most common. While switching between tabs, you might notice that SuiteDash isn’t the fastest tool — it can lag a bit, souring the overall experience.

There are also signs of times that are now gone with the wind. For example, the buttons to either save or cancel are located at the bottom left part of the window pop-up, which is quite unintuitive and might require some getting used to.

Despite all that, SuiteDash is hardly an eyesore. While a bit outdated, it won’t make your eyes bleed.

Unique Selling Proposition

SuiteDash’s special sauce that makes business owners willing to invest in it lies in its powerful Client Relationship Management features; and they’re not only about managing your clientbase, but also about preparing one-of-a-kind onboardings and supplying them with LMS learning.

In many similar tools, the client management starts and ends with inviting them to the platform. Here, it’s much more complex.

First, you can create Contacts, individuals that you work with, and then create Companies, which can be assigned the following roles: Lead, Prospect, Client. These three roles come with their own permissions. So for example, a Prospect can be invited to their own secure Client Portal, while only a Client can be sent invoices and documents.

Prospects and Clients can also have a Coordinator and a Salesperson assigned, which would serve as a point of contact. They can also keep track of client’s actions on the platform, ensuring no reply goes unanswered.

And if you feel the need to group your clients beyond their place of employment — for example, you’d like to have all the CEOs or newsletter subscribers in one place — you can create Circles. This way, it’ll be much easier for you to share resources, create personalized spaces for them, or to create email campaigns just for them.

Once you invite your clients to their aforementioned personalized space, they can be welcomed by an onboarding process that may consist of the following steps: filling out forms and ticking off checklists, making appointments, uploading and downloading files, signing documents. You can also embed any useful content, such as images or video, to make the process more interactive.

Moreover, you can make it possible for clients to skip some steps. And if you’re afraid some of them may be unsure of what to do next, you can include a “Help, I’m stuck” button, which will notify an assigned agent.

It’s also worth noting that the onboarding doesn’t have to be restricted to clients — you can also create onboardings for your team members.

But that’s far from the end for the client journey! There’s also the Learning Management System. Just like in the case of onboarding processes, you can use the LMS for your team to prepare any kind of learning materials they might need. Whether that’s cybersecurity training, Figma tutorials, or a presentation of company values — here’s the space to include all that.

Automation & Workflows

What’s the point of an all-in-one solution that doesn’t help you save time, only adds to it?

And that’s what often happens with project management tools — when you think yourself productive for moving your tasks around and creating endless checklists, but which don’t really influence your revenue.

So don’t fall into the trap of doing everything manually — your chosen solution should have automations and workflows, so that you don’t have to lift a finger for the repetitive, boring tasks.

Thankfully, SuiteDash didn’t underestimate the power of automations and introduced them every step of the way.

And we truly mean every step of the way.

Whether you’re adding estimates or invoices, creating events or onboarding flows, you’ll find the “assign automations” feature. With its help, you’ll be able to create workflows triggered by specific events, such as adding items to a checklist, creating new deals, sending emails and sms, adding and removing from circles, sending portal access invitations, and more.

Target Audience

SuiteDash advertises itself as an all-in-one solution made for small to medium businesses of all kinds. We disagree.

Considering the available features, we can describe the target audience more precisely: SuiteDash will suit those who care about the Client Relationship Management part of business, including salespersons and marketing specialists that like to track their leads, prospects, and group their clients together in various combinations. But if you work with fewer clients on bigger, custom projects, you might need another tool — one that focuses on delivering excellent customer service and which optimizes the selling services part of the business.

Investment

Last but not least, let’s talk about the investment that SuiteDash requires, both in terms of money and the time spent on setting up the platform and learning how to use it.

SuiteDash offers three different billing options: monthly, yearly, and lifetime deals. Lifetime deals aren’t that common, so it is a nice surprise.

What’s worth noting is that the absolute best features that SuiteDash has to offer can be found in the last plan, Pinnacle, including automations, onboardings, and the Learning Management System. Because of that, SuiteDash turns out to be on the pricier scale.

💡 If you’d like to learn more in-depth about SuiteDash’s pricing plans, check out this article.

When it comes to set up, SuiteDash is a huge tool that requires lots of time to truly understand it in order to make the best of it. Even setting up your companies and circles might be time-consuming, so prepare yourself to log many hours, and especially if you plan on introducing complex onboarding processes and courses.

Overall, SuiteDash might be a good solution for these small businesses that focus on the client relationship management features, where they can create marketing campaigns and robust workflows, instead of the project management part of the business itself. If you don’t have a big enough clientbase, this tool might be a let down.

Dubsado: Introduction

Dubsado, in comparison to SuiteDash, is a much newer tool, having been founded in 2016 by a married couple Becca & Jake Berg. With its endearing marketing that emphasizes their self-funding and family values, Dubsado managed to steal the hearts of many worldwide creative freelancers, from photographers and make-up artists to coaches and marketing specialists.

Design & UX/UI Experience

Dubsado welcomes new users with a clean look that has survived the trials of time. While it’s not the most modern interface you might see, it’s good enough to make the experience pleasant enough.

The trouble starts once we start looking for specific features.

For example, you might wonder where the Contacts are — something fundamental for any business, a one place to note down all your clients and collaborators. Unfortunately, Contacts are a bit hidden under Utilities → Address Book, which is extremely unintuitive and out of sight.

There are also some surprising design choices. For example, to create a new client, you select a button that prompts a pop-up window to appear. If you decide that you don’t want to add a new client after all, there’s no “cancel” button or a “cross” icon — instead, you have to select the “trash can” icon.

Despite these small grievances, Dubsado looks quite good when compared to competition.

Unique Selling Proposition

Dubsado launched at the perfect time, where the numbers of freelancers kept growing, and so grew the demand for a tool easing the burdens of administrative pains.

Let’s not kid ourselves — the bulk of work revolves around documentation, from proposals and contracts to invoices and estimates. And while invoices don’t need to look fancy, an eye-catching proposal could influence a client’s impression of the vendor.

For that reason, Dubsado decided to create a drag-and-drop editor to help freelancers create the documents that truly reflect their brand. The best part is, you don’t need to start from scratch — Dubsado comes with a huge template library, which covers the needs of many industries and professions!

While we do appreciate pretty templates, we have to point out one issue — Dubsado is only suitable for those who like exchanging back-and-forth emails with their clients, which is an outdated concept.

The times where people were excited over receiving and sending emails are long gone; now it resembles more of a chore, especially with the endless spam and newsletters you can’t force yourself into unsubscribing from. Because of the high influx of messages, it’s laughably easy to miss an important email, or read it and then forget about it entirely.

That’s why tools that introduce their own messaging features are more coveted, where the clients can enjoy real-time discussions with the team assigned to their projects.

Nonetheless, if you don’t mind firing off emails after emails, and your clients are satisfied with that, you might find Dubsado’s customizable templates and its editor full of possibilities.

Automation & Workflows

There’s another feature that acts as Dubsado’s USP — Workflows. With its help, you can create long and complex business processes with all the actions triggering each other.

Sending emails and forms, adding tags, changing project status, sending contracts, primary invoices, and appointment schedulers, activating and deactivating client portals, creating todos and invoices — those are just some of the examples of actions that can trigger another.

We also get to decide the moment of the trigger, whether it happens on a specified time and date, or if it happens right after, or after a delay, be it a matter of hours, days, weeks, or years.

There are some more rules you can include; for example, the trigger might only happen after your client paid for an invoice, signed a contract, after an appointment has ended, after a form got completed, and more.

But no feature is perfect, and there are some downsides to Dubsado’s Workflows.

One of them is the painful lack of branches — if you want the workflow to branch into two, depending on the client’s actions (or inactions), you have to create an entirely new workflow.

Another downside lies with the interface. It is, without a doubt, quite outdated. New tools that focus on automation, like Zapier or HoneyBook, present visual editors that make it much clearer and easier to not only create a workflow, but also fix and maintain it in the long run.

Target Audience

Taking into consideration Dubsado’s marketing and the features they offer, it’s quite clear who their target audience is: all the freelancers and solopreneurs who want to run their businesses on their own terms.

All the event planners, graphic designers, coaches, photographers, consultants, makeup artists, and photographers — among others — can use Dubsado for their own gain. But the competition and the market landscape have changed a lot in the past few years, with many new tools, tailored to specific professions, popping up left and right.

For example, photographers can now make do with Studio Ninja or Sprout Studio, while consultants might prefer Paperbell to invest in.

Over the years, Dubsado hasn’t changed much. There are hardly any new features being released, which puts Dubsado’s future development into question.

Investment

Dubsado offers two extremely affordable plans, a Starter Plan & Premier Plan.

This tool also doesn’t require that much investment of our time and effort in learning it, since it’s pretty straightforward and easy to navigate — only workflows might be more time-consuming, if you care about creating many complex processes.

💡 If you’d like to learn more in-depth about Dubsado’s pricing plans, check out this article.

Overall, Dubsado might be a good fit for those who are just starting their side business and want to make sure they’re on the right track, before jumping into the fray. For those people, the trial Dubsado offers might be especially tempting — you can use the tool’s free version for as long as you want, if you’re fine with keeping fewer than three clients on board.

Zendo: Introduction

Zendo is a fairly new all-in-one platform, launched in 2021, following the success of its prototype, WP Kraken. Because of that, Zendo firmly rejects outdated ways of doing business, including the reliance on email for client communication.

Zendo is one of the few solutions that focuses on vendor-client collaboration and helping teams work together. It doesn’t cater to long freelancers, but small to medium teams that value transparency.

Design & UX/UI Experience

Because Zendo is such a new tool, it comes with a much fresher interface that follows only the best of UX & UI practices. That’s why, no user will find themselves overwhelmed with too many tabs to sift through, hidden features that don’t want to be found, or misleading copy.

Zendo also aims to strike just the right balance between what can and can’t be customized. Some tools — like Plutio — lead its users into a trap of customizing every single detail, which not only is time-consuming, but it can also lead us to rather average results.

In Zendo, you can choose the accent color, which will be present throughout the whole platform, as well as customize the sidebar, so that both clients and team members gain access to different tabs and resources. This way, you can quickly adjust Zendo to represent your brand, without needlessly wasting your time on trivialities.

Unique Selling Proposition

Many tools only help you take care of the project and task management parts of your business, leaving the selling part to you. First inquiries, sending proposals and contracts, nailing down the details and discussing the scope of the project — everything usually happens through email, which is hardly the most convenient way of communicating.

Zendo, having learnt all that from the mistakes of its competitors, decided to empower clients and allow them to close any deals themselves, anytime they want, without any assistance.

Introducing: Service Catalog!

Service Catalog is a place to showcase your offer, where you can make your subscription packages shine, describe the ins-and-outs of your productized services in-depth, and impress your clients with the range of custom services.

First, your clients may browse the catalog in their own time, learning about your offer, comparing prices, and choosing add-ons. Then, they can make their choice and purchase the service of their choice at once, filling out the customizable Order Form to describe their needs and requests in detail. Then, after they make an account for their own Client Portal, they can log in to Zendo and talk directly to the team, make further purchases, check on their projects, or upload any files.

Thanks to that, you never have to worry about keeping your clients up to date, since they’re notified of each new message and status changes. They’ll appreciate the transparency you offer, building trust, and delight in the control they gain. They won’t have to wait on you to send over any files or documents — they’ll have access to everything they need at all times, and they can manage their purchases whenever they want.

Besides submitting new requests, they can make payments within them with just a click, or cancel and pause their subscriptions if they want to temporarily suspend it. These are the features that will make your business stand out from the crowd, without a doubt.

Automation & Workflows

Zendo offers some automation options that make the customer experience more pleasant. For example, whenever a new client creates a new request, you can fire off an automated follow-up with all the information needed. When the request is set to as “Done”, a similar message can be automatically triggered just as well to cover all your bases.

On top of that, you can set up triggers to control the statuses — forget about manually updating them, the triggers can do that for you.

But most importantly, Zendo allows you to create one of the best possible automated processes and workflows, all thanks to the Zapier integration.

The Zapier integration not only helps you set up processes within the platform itself, but also with over 7,000 different apps, including the entire Google Suite, Mailchimp, Trello, Airtable, Slack, HubSpot, Notion, Asana, Loom, MailerLite, Miro, and more.

And you won’t have to stop yourself at creating simple workflows — you’ll be able to create paths that diverge from a specific point to accommodate for your client’s actions and inactions; for example, your workflow could split into two depending on your client rejecting a quote or accepting it.

Target Audience

Zendo solves the business needs of small to medium teams that focus on selling services of all kinds, including custom, productized, and subscription-based. It’s meant for people appreciating simplicity and modern solutions, where you can say goodbye to email and invite clients to collaborate with you on a daily basis.

Many professions can enjoy Zendo, from marketing specialists and graphic designers to accountants and web developers. This tool isn’t built around a specific industry, but around a specific mindset, where healthy and transparent communication is at the core of a successful business.

Investment

Zendo offers four subscription plans, which are rather straightforward.

The first plan — Essential — has everything a business owner might need to run their business, with the caveat that they can’t invite any other team member to the platform.

The second plan, Pro, comes with advanced white-label features and the Zapier integration, with the option to invite one more person on board. For more collaborators, you can always buy additional seats for $19 per user a month.

The Max plan comes with unlimited seats and the removal of the “Powered by Zendo” labels, which will make you look more professional in your clients’ eyes.

Then, there’s the Enterprise plan, which is fully custom and its price is up for estimation.

When it comes to the learning curve, Zendo isn’t as difficult to understand as SuiteDash, and it also doesn’t require as much of a time commitment when it comes to setting up your workspace. After providing billing details and creating your services, you’re ready to start selling!

SuiteDash vs Dubsado vs Zendo: The Verdict

We went over three tools that couldn’t be more different from each other, offering solutions that only would work for specific needs and purposes.

To make the choice a little bit easier still, remember that you can sign up for free trials or free plans to take them for a test drive — in the case of Zendo, that means signing up for a forever free plan, where you can test the workspace without any time limits!

Originally published at https://getzendo.io on August 9, 2024.