The Best HoneyBook Alternative is Assembly

Assembly vs. HoneyBook

Assembly is a flexible platform that scales with your business, supports more complex workflows, and gives you more control over payments, custom integrations, and creative expression. HoneyBook might work for solo freelancers, but Assembly handles that use case plus much more.

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Flexibility

Assembly is designed for freelancers and scaling team

HoneyBook’s feature set is geared toward solo photographers and event planners. Assembly, on the other hand, is great for creative professionals and broader service firms of 2 to 50+ employees looking for more customization, automation, and security. Whether you’re in marketing, consulting, accounting, law, real estate, or tech, Assembly adapts to your workflows — offering advanced integrations and team-based controls that HoneyBook simply doesn’t match.

Photography
Evening planning
Freelancing
Marketing
Consulting
Accounting and bookkeeping
Law
Real estate
Technology

Payments

Assembly delivers a more robust billing experience with lower fees.

Assembly supports more currencies — USD, CAD, AUD, and GBP — along with one-time surcharging and a lower-cost ACH setup. While HoneyBook charges 1.5% on ACH transactions with no fee cap, Assembly’s 1% ACH rate maxes out at $10 per transaction. That means a business processing $200,000 in payments per year could see up to $3,000 in ACH fees with HoneyBook but just $100 with Assembly (assuming 10 transactions at $20,000 each), resulting in 97% savings.

Credit cards
ACH Supported — 1% with $10 maximum fee Supported — 1.5% fee with no maximum
Multi currency Yes — USD, CAD, AUD, and GBP Yes — USD and CAD only
Surcharging

Creativity

Assembly lets you express your creativity better. Assembly effortlessly embeds thousands of third-party products — like YouTube, Loom, Calendly, Typeform, Airtable, and ClickUp — directly in your client portal. Imagine delivering project status updates via a live Airtable kanban board or sharing Loom videos right inside your portal without forcing clients to jump between platforms. HoneyBook’s customization options focus on colors and logos, but it doesn’t offer native embedding of these powerful external tools.

Client portal customization Comprehensive — configure each app’s name and icon, typography, and more Basic — colors, login images, and emails
Embed schedulers like Calendly
Embed videos from YouTube and Loom
Embed forms from TypeForm and JotForm
Embed kanban views from Airtable and ClickUp
Embed photo albums

Scale

Assembly comes with more advanced features, a developer ecosystem, and better support.

HoneyBook offers helpful features for some soloproneurs, but Assembly’s toolkit is built with expanding teams in mind. Beyond essential features Assembly comes with support for embedded apps, more team controls and permission, and ever-expanding app store, a more comprehensive API, and support for more complex work workflow automation.

Messaging and team inbox
Proposals and contracts
File-sharing and intake forms
Task and project management
Invoices, subscriptions, pay links
Embeds & links
App Visibility — Control which clients can see each app
Client Access — Control which team members can access each client
App Store — Install apps built by others
Developer platform Comprehensive — Open-source apps, integrations, and more Limited — Basic API only
Automations Comprehensive — In-app, Zapier, Make, API Limited — Low coverage on Zapier, Make, and API