Honeybook vs Check Cherry – Comparison

Last updated on February 8, 2024

Coaches juggle many tasks, including keeping track of clients, sessions, and payments. When you add to that consistent engagement with clients and creative processes, the work can be tough and time-consuming.

That’s where business management platforms come in. They can minimize your day-to-day responsibilities by organizing and automating tasks. But with so many options available, how do you pick the right one for you?

This article is dedicated to a Honeybook vs Check Cherry comparison. These two platforms are widely used among small businesses and entrepreneurs, so let’s see what they have to offer. We’ll dive into their cost, ease of use, features, and the support they provide to users. 

Honeybook vs Check Cherry: An Overview

Honeybook is a clientflow management platform designed to help “creative entrepreneurs and freelancers book more clients, manage projects, and get paid—all in one place.” Its array of tools includes powerful automation, CRM, scheduling, payment processing, and reporting. They even give you access to a library of templates with dozens of ready-made business documents and marketing materials. To find out why Honeybook is the leading platform among coaches and other creative professionals, check out our Honeybook review. 

Check Cherry is a booking and CRM software tailored to the needs of start-ups and entrepreneurs. It is an end-to-end solution featuring appointment booking, messaging, invoicing, and reporting tools. Even though this platform mainly targets professionals like photographers and event planners, its functionalities make it well-suited for coaches too.  

Pricing & Free Trial

Honeybook is the more affordable platform of the two, but let’s examine their pricing structures and see whether they allow you to test the software before you sign up. 

Pricing Plan

Honeybook’s basic plan costs only $16/month if you choose an annual subscription. You’ll get pretty much all the essential features within this plan, such as unlimited clients, a calendar, a client portal, invoicing, and payments. As you move up the tiers, more features like automation, scheduler, and expense management will become available. If you use our link or the promo code ‘lifecoachmag’, you can get a 50% discount. 

Check Cherry also has three-tiered pricing, but their starting cost is $29/month if you pay annually. You’ll get access to all features with every plan, but the difference is in the number of bookings, admin accounts, and brands (different logo, email, and color scheme).

Free Trial

Both platforms provide free trials and don’t ask for your credit card information beforehand. With Honeybook, the trial period lasts for 7 days.

Check Cherry’s trial is more generous. You’ll get two weeks (14 days) to explore its functionalities at no cost. 

Features

Our next step is to look into the list of features for both Honeybook and Check Cherry and what special functionalities they provide.

Honeybook Features

• CRM
• Scheduling
• Automation
• Contracts
• Invoices
• Payments
• Expense tracking
• Reports
• Communication
• Client portal
• Templates
• Honeybook AI
• Mobile app
• Integration with Zapier, Google Calendar, Gmail, iCloud Mail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook Mail, AoI Mail, QuickBooks, Zoom, etc.

Honeybook’s proposals feature combines contracts, invoices, and payments into one document. By reducing the number of steps to complete, proposals can help you convert clients and enable them to make payments more quickly.

You’ll have access to numerous pre-designed templates created based on insights gathered from successful businesses over the past decade. Some of the available templates include intake questionnaires, contracts, requests for reviews, and many others. 

Honeybook AI helps you “work smarter” by leveraging data-powered intelligence to improve your communication with personalized responses, predicting which leads are most likely to book, and generating images for your files, proposals, templates, and more. 

Check Cherry Features

• CRM
• Scheduling
• Automation
• Contracts
• Invoices
• Payments
• Expense tracking
• Travel fees calculations
• Tax calculations
• Reports
• Lead management
• Communication
• Client portal
• Mobile app
• Integration with Zapier, Google Calendar, Gmail, iCloud Mail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook Mail, AoI Mail, QuickBooks, Zoom, Spotify, etc.

Check Cherry is perfect for selling packages. The platform enables clients to book your services through a website button by simply selecting a package, agreeing to terms, and making a deposit. You can manage availability, configure package preferences, include add-ons, automatically calculate pricing, and even offer discounts on certain packages.

You can automate sales tax calculations for bookings and eliminate the need for manual computation with tax calculations. Check Cherry differentiates between taxable and tax-exempt services, sets tax rates based on geographical zones, and automatically pulls tax rates from addresses via TaxJar.

If you’d like to close more deals, you can rely on Check Cherry’s lead management. The platform will send automatic email alerts when a client doesn’t finish a reservation. These alerts include the contact information collected during the booking process so you can follow up with these potential leads. 

Honeybook vs Check Cherry – How Are They Different?

Although Honeybook and Check Cherry have several similar features, their differences can help you make the decision.

Templates

Honeybook’s templates aren’t your average generic templates. They have a modern design and are tailored for different industries, including coaching. This feature is hugely valuable because it can save you a ton of time that you’d otherwise spend on designing and creating these documents. 

Automation

Honeybook offers more automation functionalities than Check Cherry. While Check Cherry allows you to automate emails, Honeybook allows you to schedule the sending of sets of messages, files, and tasks. 

Payments

Honeybook and Check Cherry approach payment processing in different ways. Honeybook has an embedded payment processing system and doesn’t support payments through personal accounts on PayPal, Stripe, or Venmo. Check Cherry links to your current payment provider and integrates with Stripe, Square, PayPal, Apple Pay, and Google Pay.

Calculations

Check Cherry has more advanced features for price calculations and adjustment. You can use the platform to automatically calculate sales tax and travel fees and apply them to pricing, and the flex pricing feature even automatically adjusts prices with surcharges or discounts according to fluctuations in demand.

Customer Support

Honeybook has a 4.8 rating for customer service on Capterra. Reviewers claim that the support they receive is stellar, and you can reach them throughout the week via email. If you have questions about billing, you can also give them a call.

Check Cherry has a 5.0 rating for customer service on Capterra. While all the reviews are positive, we should consider that, at the moment, they only have 5 reviews. The representatives are available via live chat or email, but they don’t specify their work days or hours. 

Conclusion – Honeybook or Check Cherry?

Honeybook and Check Cherry are very similar in terms of features and purpose, as both platforms are made for creative professionals looking to streamline client and booking management. While both software solutions are excellent choices, we would give a slight advantage to Honeybook.

Honeybook is more suited for coaches with features that strongly focus on improved engagement with clients, automating repetitive tasks, and templates that are tailor-made for life coaches. This is also the more affordable tool.

Even though Check Cherry also supports bookings and selling packages, some of their features are clearly targeted at event planners and photographers, such as equipment lists, staff management, and travel fee calculations, so you probably won’t get much use out of them.  

Alternatives to Honeybook and Check Cherry

If you’d like to consider alternative options before you make up your mind, we recommend checking out all-in-one software created for coaches, such as Paperbell, Practice, CoachVantage, Simplero, and Bonsai.

You can find an overview of these platforms, along with some other popular life coaching tools, in our list of the best coaching software. In addition, you can refer to our Honeybook alternatives article to find out how the software compares to its top competitors.

Life Coach Magazine

The Life Coach Magazine staff is your team for high-quality content on topics from personal development, to coaching tips, to how to grow your coaching business.