Agency Handy VS. 17hats

Agency Handy vs 17hats: Which Platform is Best for Your Agency?

17hats is pretty good at client onboarding, creating automated workflows, and sending reminders. But when you need a team to handle clients and projects, Agency Handy will give you peace of mind. For solopreneurs, Agency Handy offers much more, costing much less than 17hats. 

This comprehensive guide on Agency Handy vs. 17hats will clear up confusion and help you decide which tools to invest in.

1. Target Users

Agency Handy is suitable for freelancers, solopreneurs, and agencies of all sizes. The pricing plan is tailored for various professionals. For agencies to never run out of clients, it features lead management to nurture leads and turn them into clients by keeping an eye on them.

However, 17hats only targets freelancers and small businesses, and their pricing is more individual person-centric rather than team-focused.

2. Client Onboarding

Agency Handy fully automates your client onboarding journey. Once you embed the public form, and anyone fills it out, you get the lead. 

If that prospect sees your service catalog page and decides to buy, they can proceed to self-checkout and make the payment. 

All forms, as well as the intake one, are customizable. Depending on the project type, you can add various inputs to the intake form to get the information you need to kick off tasks for clients. You can reuse the form for any similar project type.

Agency Handy will get all these steps done without you having to do anything.

17hats also comes with intake forms; they address them as questionnaires. You can, of course, customize it to make it tailored for any project.

With 17hats, you can automate workflow from quote to contract to invoice. If you have any well-defined projects, 17hats will get things done easily.

3. Service Catalog

Agency Handy showcases all your services in a catalog view. This is more convenient for clients to select one or multiple services from. You can group services and add multiple packages with different pricing plans.

Whereas, 17hats only lets you include services with quotes. There’s no dedicated catalog view for all services.

4. Invoice and Payment

As mentioned earlier, clients can generate invoices for purchased services and complete the payment. No need to manually approve from your end. Clients can make payments via Stripe, PayPal, Wise, Crypto, and manual bank.

17hats comes with pretty much the same thing for invoicing. It’s integrated with their workflows. Payments can be done via Stripe or Square.

For your productized agency business, you can manage subscriptions for both one-time and recurring payments. 

On the other hand, 17hats also handles recurring payments. But when it comes to showing what you’ve got as revenue or profit, Agency Handy dashboard will be more helpful.

5. Client Relationship Management (CRM)

When it comes to the client portal, Agency Handy is unlike any other tool. Your clients will have your custom-branded portal. 

This is where they can check project updates and upload necessary files related to their projects. They can also communicate with project assignees through messages.

For file feedback, they can share their feedback and concerns with advanced annotation tools to make things straightforward.

With 17hats, the client portal gives clients access to documents, payment invoices, and messages. Similar to Agency Handy, the client portal will be branded as well.

Both Agency Handy and 17hats CRMs come with user centric features. Agency Handy CRM mostly focuses on client management with lead nurturing. Whereas, 17hats CRM focuses on contact, project, and document management.

7. Task Management

Both your team and clients can create tasks as required. Also, when a service is purchased, it will automatically add tasks to the task manager. 

In the Kanban board, you can simply drag and drop the tasks to their status – pending, in progress, for review, or complete. 

For 17hats, it’s basically linear checklists. As long as you aren’t adding an overwhelming number of tasks, you will do just fine. But yeah, it won’t be as convenient as Agency Handy.

8. Team Collaboration

Agency Handy is built for agencies. Therefore, you can add 10 or 30 members as per the plan you go for. You can also set roles for easy management. The team can send exclusive messages to each other as well as to clients.

Team collaboration on 17hats isn’t as flexible as Agency Handy. There are limits, and for adding each team member, you will have to pay extra. 

When comparing how much you have to pay for 10 team members, 17hats would cost way too expensive than the Agency Handy’s $99/mo Team Starter plan.

9. File Feedback and Annotation

For photo and video editors, web designers, and other creative individuals, knowing exactly what changes the client is expecting is important. 

Agency Handy features advanced annotation tools for feedback. Clients can give their feedback right on your designed file, pinpointing changes needed to make using various shapes, arrows, comments, colors, highlighters, and many more. 

Also, you can control the version from the history and restore any version if needed.

Creative clients can only give their feedback through comments or messages with 17hats.

10. Pricing

Agency Handy comes with pricing plans suitable for freelancers, teams, and businesses.

• $19/mo for freelancers with more features than 17hats.
• $99/mo for managing a team of 10 users.
• $199/mo for business level management with up to 30 users and 5 workspaces.

17hats offers 3 pricing plans.

• $60/mo
• $600/year
• $800/two years

17hats claims to offer all features on every plan. But customers claimed that for adding a team and buying templates from the marketplace, adds up to the cost significantly. So, this is the hidden charge you should consider if you want to go with 17hats.

Agency Handy vs 17hats – Which One Should You Choose?

Both Agency Handy and 17hats offer great features for their targeted client base. So, you have to consider your agency or work type and see which one better serves your purposes.

Go for Agency Handy for the following reasons –

• Managing a team of up to 30 members
• Managing multiple brands/businesses
• Work with creative clients for designing and editing tasks
• Need subscription manager for productized services
• Showcase your services in a catalog
• Need a CRM that nurture leads
• Tracks employee worktime
• White-label branding 

Go for 17hats for the following reasons –

• You are the heart and soul of your business
• Main purpose is to create automated invoices and schedules
• Booking appointments with calendar
• Recurring subscription management
• Sending clients reminders about payments and appointments

Conclusion

Even though Agency Handy and 17hats have different client bases, they overlap common features that solopreneurs need to streamline their businesses. Agency Handy is the go-to option for teams and busy freelancers. 17hats is more suitable for one-man army-type businesses.