Bonsai vs Wave: the documents, or the ledger?

By the WorkKitly Team · Last updated: November 2026 · 9 min read

Read Bonsai from the front of a job and it is the whole engagement in one subscription: a proposal the client accepts, a contract they sign, the project, the time, the invoice, the payment — one chain, nothing re-typed. Read Wave from the same starting point and the job has no front at all: there is no proposal to send and no contract to sign, at any price. What Wave has instead is the thing Bonsai only imitates — a real set of books, double-entry, kept properly, for $0. The two products barely compete. Each sells the half of a freelancer's admin the other one skips.

Who is each one for? Bonsai suits a solo whose work begins with documents — consultants, designers, developers, anyone whose jobs start with a pitch and a signature, and whose books are simple enough to live in a tracker until tax time. Wave suits a solo whose work begins with the invoice — steady clients, nothing to pitch — and who wants the books underneath to be real without paying a subscription for them. The first tool's centre of gravity is winning and formalising the work; the second's is accounting for it honestly.

Three facts decide most real choices. Only one of these products can send a contract, and it is not the free one. Only one keeps double-entry books, and it is not the paid one. And the fee everyone compares first is thirty cents apart on a $2,000 invoice, while the subscriptions are $228 apart before anyone has invoiced anything. This page prices both halves — and then prices the combination most shortlists end at: the suite for the documents, the free ledger underneath.

Two ladders, two different products

Bonsai's ladder starts one tier before the money. Basic at $9 a month billed annually ($15 monthly) is the waiting room — time tracking, tasks, a CRM, unlimited projects — and it cannot send an invoice at all. Essentials at $19 ($25 monthly) is where the product actually begins: proposals, contracts, the full template library, intake forms, scheduling, a client portal, and the income-and-expense tracking. Premium at $29 ($39) adds the management layer — project insights, a deals pipeline, your own branding on client documents — and Elite at $49 ($59) is a team tier with a three-user minimum. Wave's ladder has two rungs and the first is free: Starter at $0 holds unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping, and Pro at $19 a month, or $190 billed annually, buys automation over the same core — bank auto-import, automated reminders, receipt capture, proper user roles.

Read the ladders as two answers to the question "what is the subscription for?" Bonsai's buys the engagement: everything a client signs, accepts or pays, in one system that starts before the work does. Wave declines to sell the front of the job at all — and gives the back away, keeping its $19 tier for labour-saving rather than capability. Neither ladder is a trick. Each simply reveals where the company thinks the value sits: Bonsai before the invoice, Wave underneath it.

A year of getting paid, priced on both

Start with the fee everyone compares first, because it is nearly the smallest number here. On a $2,000 invoice paid by card, Bonsai's 2.9% + $0.30 takes $58.30 and leaves you $1,941.70; Wave's 2.9% + $0.60 takes $58.60 and leaves $1,941.40 — thirty cents apart. Wave charges a premium on American Express — 3.4% + $0.60, which is $68.60 on that invoice — while Bonsai publishes no premium-card rate. Bank payments tie at this size: Wave takes 1% (minimum $1), a flat $20.00, and Bonsai quotes ACH as "as low as 1%" with no published cap — the same $20.00 at the quoted floor, with less certainty about what a larger invoice would actually cost. Fragment the payments and the fixed fees start to speak: ten $200 card payments cost $61.00 on Bonsai and $64.00 on Wave Starter, while Wave Pro — which waives its $0.60 fixed fee on the first ten card transactions a month — charges $58.00.

Now run the year. Twelve monthly $2,000 invoices, all paid by card, each side on the cheapest tier that invoices:

Wave wins the year, and the interesting column is the free tier's neighbour. Pro totals $886.00 — $182.80 more than the Starter tier it upgrades — because at one payment a month its $0.60 card-fee waiver is worth $7.20 a year against a $190 subscription. Pro buys back admin time: auto-imported bank transactions, reminders that send themselves. It never pays for itself in fees at this volume, and it adds no depth — the ledger underneath is Starter's ledger. Bonsai's $927.60, meanwhile, is not buying invoicing, which Wave gives away. It is buying everything in the next section.

The documents: what only Bonsai sells

Bonsai was founded on the document, and it shows in the flow: the proposal is not a PDF you email but a page the client accepts; the contract follows it in the same system, signed in the same sitting; the project, the tracked time and the invoice all hang off that signed record. Its template library covers the engagements a solo practice signs repeatedly, so the tenth contract takes minutes rather than an afternoon. This is the chain the whole suite is organised around, and it is complete at Essentials — $228 a year for the signed engagement, against the $516 a year the same engagement costs inside FreshBooks' second tier, as our Bonsai vs FreshBooks comparison prices it.

Wave's side of this section is one sentence long: there are no documents. Estimates exist, and an estimate is a useful thing — a priced outline a client can approve informally. But it is not a proposal with an acceptance, and it is not a contract with a signature, and neither exists at $0 or at $19. A Wave user whose work starts with a pitch signs that pitch somewhere else — a documents tool, a lawyer's template, a hope — and the admin Bonsai consolidates stays scattered. That absence is the single clearest line in this comparison, and it is why our scores below grade it directly rather than leaving the row out.

The ledger: what only Wave keeps

Clear away the suspicion the price invites, because it is wrong: Wave's books are real accounting. Starter keeps a genuine double-entry ledger — debits, credits, a chart of accounts, sales tax tracked, the core reports — which is why its accounting depth score in our tests is 7.6 and not the near-zero an invoicing-only tool would earn. A Wave user at tax time has books, not a shoebox, and an accountant can work from them. What Starter makes you do by hand is the maintenance — transactions entered or imported manually, categorised manually, reminders yours to send — and Pro removes exactly that labour, nothing more.

Bonsai's money tools are a different species, honestly labelled by the score: 7.2 for an income-and-expense tracker. It follows the suite's money — what was invoiced, what landed, what you spent — and at tax time it produces a genuinely useful summary. But it does not keep double-entry books and it does not reconcile a bank account, because it was never built to: the suite's depth is spent in front of the invoice, not underneath it. The accountant question settles most real-world versions of this choice. If a professional closes your year from your software, they will ask for a ledger — and in this pairing, only the free product has one.

Time, borders and the edges that separate them

Time runs the opposite way. Bonsai tracks time on every plan, including Basic — hours against projects, flowing onto invoices — because it was built for people who sell hours as well as outcomes. Wave has no timer at any price: hours live in another app, or in your head, and arrive on invoices typed by hand. A practice that bills time and retypes it into Wave is paying a small tax on every invoice; a practice that bills projects and packages will never once notice the missing feature. Know which one you are.

Geography is an edge with only one side to state: Wave operates only in the US and Canada. Outside them, this comparison does not start — the free ledger simply is not sold. And the entry-tier edges mirror each other neatly enough to be worth one line each: Bonsai's cheapest plan cannot invoice, and Wave's free plan cannot sign. Each product's headline price withholds the other product's whole reason to exist.

The solo lens

Picture two solos at the same revenue. A brand consultant wins every job through a pitch: three proposals a month, contracts for the two that land, deposits and milestones after. Her admin pain is entirely in front of the work, and Bonsai Essentials at $228 a year replaces the proposal tool, the e-signature tool and the invoicing tool she currently stitches together — the tracker underneath is enough, because her books are simple and her accountant gets exports, not chaos. A bookkeeper's support practice bills the same eight clients every month: no pitches, no contracts per job, ninety-six invoices a year. His pain is entirely behind the work, and Wave Starter does the whole job — invoices out, ledger kept — for the price of the payment fees he would pay anywhere.

And the solo with both pains? The third column most comparisons refuse to print: Bonsai Essentials in front, Wave Starter underneath it, is $228 a year of subscription. Invoice through Bonsai and the year on our spine totals $927.60; invoice through Wave instead, keeping Bonsai purely for the documents, and it totals $931.20 — $3.60 more, because Wave's fixed card fee is the higher of the two. Either way the discipline is the same: every payment taken in exactly one tool, and the books reconciled monthly while the trail is short. What never makes sense is the reverse hope — waiting for Bonsai's tracker to grow into accounting, or for Wave to grow a contracts product. Neither is on either company's road, and the scores below show you exactly why.

Scores from our tests

Scores are out of 10, from the scenario in our test method above. All five of Bonsai's categories and four of Wave's repeat the values published in our earlier comparisons of each platform — Wave's accounting depth of 7.6, for example, was first published against Zoho Books, and is repeated here unchanged. One value is new in this pairing: Wave's proposals and contracts score. Wave has not been scored on documents before, because there was nothing to score — it has no proposals or contracts product — and 4.5 grades the gap itself: estimates exist and can be sent, but there is no document a client accepts and signs. It follows the same logic as Wave's published 4.5 for time tracking, another feature it does not offer, where the manual workaround is what gets graded.

Look at where each column earns its total. Wave wins three rows — ease by 1.2, cost by 2.1, accounting by 0.4 — and its 9.8 for cost is the highest single category score in any of our accounting comparisons, earned by a working product at $0. Bonsai wins two rows, one of them by the widest margin on this page: proposals and contracts by 4.1, because one product has the documents and the other does not. The 0.1 of overall between them is the honest summary of the pairing — the scoreline is nearly tied, and the shape is not: decide which half of the job is yours.

Questions

Which one fits you?

The honest limits

Bonsai's limits are at the edges of the suite. The entry plan cannot invoice at all — Basic is time tracking, tasks and a CRM at a $9 headline that is not a billing price, and comparing it against invoicing tools misleads. The books are a tracker: no double-entry, no bank reconciliation, and an accountant closing your year will want a real ledger somewhere. Its ACH fee is quoted as "as low as 1%" with no published cap — a floor, not a rate. And Elite's three-user minimum prices a team structure a solo will never use.

Wave's limits are absences, stated plainly. No proposals and no contracts at any price — the documents half of a practice lives in another tool, or nowhere. No time tracking at any price. The free tier's maintenance is manual — transactions entered and categorised by hand, reminders yours to send — until Pro automates it, and Pro's fee maths, priced above, only makes sense as buying time. And the map ends at the border: the US and Canada are the whole of Wave's world.

One more option worth naming, because it is ours and it is free: if you are not ready to pay for a suite, the documents themselves do not require a subscription. Our free proposal generator produces the proposal and our free invoice generator produces the invoice — in your browser, no account, nothing uploaded. What Bonsai sells on top is the system around the documents, and what Wave sells is nothing at all — the ledger is free. Buy the system when the system is your bottleneck, not before.

Related: do the maths before you subscribe

Three free WorkKitly tools pair with this comparison. Work out what your hours must earn with the freelance hourly rate calculator — it is the number a $228 subscription has to fit inside. Then try the work itself free before paying for a suite's document features: the proposal generator for the document clients sign, and the invoice generator for the one they pay. If those cover your volume, the suite can wait until proposals and contracts — not invoices — are what actually hurt.

Also compare: Bonsai against the accounting-first platform is our Bonsai vs FreshBooks comparison — same Bonsai scores, books first — and the suite against the clientflow specialist is Bonsai vs HoneyBook. Wave's hardest tests are Wave vs QuickBooks, where the free ledger meets the US standard at the same 7.9, and FreshBooks vs Wave, where it meets the invoicing specialist. Same scores, different opponents.