Dubsado vs. Honeybook – 8 Reasons Why We Choose Dubsado

How Dubsado has revolutionized our wedding business

Madison and I wanted to share our thoughts on why our favorite CRM is Dubsado, and how the other CRMs just didn’t live up to our expectations. We are wedding videographers, but we believe this information will apply to all businesses. As wedding and event professionals we were tired of the confusing excel and google spreadsheets as an attempt to stay organized while tracking leads, payment, forms, contracts, etc. Our team needed an excellent CRM to help us manage our business.

So, what did we do? We basically tried them all! We tried Tave, 17 Hats, Shoot Q, Honeybook, and basically every CRM on the market, and we initially thought Honeybook was the solution to all of our problems. Everyone raved about Honeybook and we were big fans at first, but it ended up not being the answer to our problems, and we canceled our subscription within the first year. We switched to a which was a new start-up in the CRM world at the time, Dubsado and we have not looked back.

8 Reasons We Love Dubsado

So, with all of that background, we are going to explain the major things we love about Dubsado, then we will share some of the key differences. Just because Dubsado is perfect for us, does not mean Honeybook is not perfect for you! So, let’s dive in!

1. Dubsado Customization

If you are doing your research into CRMs you will probably read a lot about how Dubsado is complex and on the surface, it may appear that way, but in reality, it is not any more complicated than any other CRM on the market. Just like buying a new car, you have to get used to where things are and the features. Dubsado is a very robust platform that allows you to customize a lot of the client-facing areas, where other CRMs do not. You can customize your contact form (lead capture), you can create client portals to hold all of your communication, forms, questionnaires, contracts, invoices, etc all in one place, and it is all white-labeled so users never know they are using a third-party platform!

2. Contact Forms or Lead Capture Forms

Dubsado requires you to use their lead capture form to add new clients (or you can do this manually within dubsado), but at this time there is no way to use any built-in forms from your website builder and send the information over to Zapier. With all of that said, you have the ability to customize the design to fit your website! You can also set it up with Zapier where you get a text message when someone fills out the form!

3. The Dubsado Dashboard

The Dubsado Dashboard shows a quick glance over your business. You can set financial goals and it will show you the current open invoices to be paid along with the revenue over the past 30 days rolling. It also shows your calendar, any tasks, and financials income/expenses, etc.

If you go to the Project tab you can see all of your clients and potential clients. Dubsado breaks down inquiries into two parts: Leads and Jobs. A lead is anyone who is not yet a client and a Job is anyone who is a client. To sort where a lead is in your booking funnel you can set up different leads and job statuses. We have our lead statuses set up as follows:

Initial Inquiry Response
Follow Up #1
Follow Up #2
Final Follow Up

Our Job Statuses are just current and past, but you can customize these to fit your business needs! You can even automate how clients move through this process.

4. Automations and Workflows

This alone is one of the most powerful features of Dubsado. You can create custom pre-built emails and set them to be sent out at certain times along the client journey. This allows you to automate a lot of the mundane client communications, so you can focus on generating more leads and taking care of your clients! Like I mentioned above you can automate how your clients move through the lead and job statuses along as your emails send or separately depending on your business.

5. Built-In Scheduler

6. Dubsado Integrations

Cloudspot for client galleries to deliver photographs
Zapier Integrations
Quickbooks Online
Xero
Video Conferencing

7. Customer Support

Dubsado is like a family and every single person on their team genuinely cares about your success. I have never experienced a team that takes care of their customers as they do. They have a white glove service to migrate and set up your account if you are transferring from another CRM, 1:1 calls to talk through any issues you may have, free training that goes over everything Dubsado, a support staff that is the best out there, a Facebook community that is amazing, and so much more!

8. Transparency about Future Features

Dubsado is very transparent on what features the platform offers, what features are currently being worked on, and features that are coming in the future. They keep all of this information available, so users know what is offered and what is potentially coming down the road. They also take users’ requests to continually approve on the platform!

We clearly love Dubsado but we haven’t really shared much about Honeybook or why we tried out Dubsado to begin with, so we are going to share a little bit more about our personal experience with Honeybook.

So, Why did we leave Honeybook for Dubsado?

We love Dubsado, but we thought we would go over some of the features we did not like about Honeybook, and some features we do miss.

Processing Fees: Honeybook uses a built-in payment process, whereas Dubsado utilizes Stripe or PayPal. The Honeybook fees for Credit/Debit Cards is 3% and ACH/Bank Transfers is 1.5%. Stripe on the other hand has a 3% fee for Credit Cards and a max $5 fee for ACH/bank transfer.
Emails in Spam: When using Honeybook a lot of emails can end up in spam filters and there is little to nothing you can do to stop it. A fellow business owner did a ton of tests sending emails using different CRMs and found Honeybook had a very high rate of emails ending up in spam, significantly higher than Dubsado.
Honeybook Contact Form: The Honeybook contact form is only customizable to a certain extent and loads a default Roboto font even if you change it in the settings. The form also has a built-in Recaptcha that supposedly helps prevent spam, but at the same time causes significant page speed issues on any page where you embed your contact form.
The Client-Facing Experience: For us, we hated the client-facing experience. From a client perspective (when we personally got married), it was clunky and was not user friendly at all. Honeybook is beautiful and simple from a wedding vendor or business perspective, but the way it works for clients was not a positive reflection on our brand, so this alone was the major reason why we changed.
Customer Support: When we or others have reached out to Honeybook support in regards to issues with spam emails or slow contact forms, etc they do not answer and do not approve questions in the Facebook group if they show Honeybook in a negative light, or brings to surface known issues.
An App: One of the biggest features Honeybook users rave about is the app. When we were Honeybook users, the app did not exist, but I can see how that can be helpful! Dubsado does not currently have an app, but one is in the pipeline in the future (no date or timeline is set, but Dubsado does work on Safari on iPhone). So, if you are wanting an app, then Honeybook has one!

Check out Dubsado here to see why it is the best CRM for you! By clicking that link or any link to Dubsado in this article you will receive 20% off your first month or year, or use the code 65south at checkout!

You also may be interested in one of our latest blog posts.

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**Since leaving Honeybook, I do believe they have made some changes and updates, but I do not know the scope of them. If you like Honeybook or want to try it out, by using the links for Honeybook within this article you do receive 50% off your first year. Please note we are affiliates of Dubsado and Honeybook. We do get a small payment when someone signs up using our code.**