Bonsai (hellobonsai.com) comes up constantly when freelancers look for one place to hold projects, clients and billing. If most of your income comes from overseas clients, it is a genuinely good product. This comparison is by the work a Thai freelancer actually does, not by feature count.
What Bonsai is
As of August 2026, Bonsai calls itself "the unified platform for service businesses" — consolidating projects, clients and billing. Its strength is the client-facing stack: CRM and pipeline, scheduling, proposals, contracts, forms and a client portal, plus project depth most freelance tools skip — timesheets, resource planning, Gantt views and workload reports.
Current pricing
| Plan | Monthly | Annual (per month) |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | $15/user | $9/user |
| Essentials | $25/user | $19/user |
| Premium | $39/user | $29/user |
| Elite | $59/user | $49/user (min. 3 users) |
The detail worth reading twice: invoicing and payments are not in Basic. They start at Essentials. So if you are buying Bonsai to bill clients, your real entry price is $25 per user per month — roughly 825 baht at 33 THB/USD — and it scales per seat. MANA is priced in baht for one business: the Mana plan is ฿290/month (annual billing costs ten months), with a free tier to start on.
What Bonsai does well
- Commercial paperwork, US-style. Proposals and contracts with templates and e-signature are polished and fast.
- Real project management. Timesheets, Gantt, resourcing and per-project profit reporting — built for studios and agencies with staff.
- Global accounting integrations. QuickBooks Online and Xero (Xero on Elite), plus Zapier, Calendly, Slack and Google.
- Stripe payments and multi-currency billing, which solves getting paid by US and European clients cleanly.
If your clients are foreign companies paying by card and you work with a team of three or more, Bonsai is the better fit. That is not a hedge; it is the honest answer.
Where Thai freelancers hit a wall
1. The documents aren't Thai documents. A ใบเสนอราคา, ใบแจ้งหนี้, ใบเสร็จรับเงิน or ใบกำกับภาษี has to carry things a Thai client's accounting team looks for: the 13-digit taxpayer ID, head-office or branch designation, the registered address, and a correctly separated 7% VAT base. A generic international invoice was not designed for that.
2. No withholding tax line. Thai companies withhold 3% from nearly every freelance invoice. A tool that doesn't model that line leaves your recorded revenue permanently out of step with the cash that lands in your account — and makes December's reconciliation against your 50 ทวิ certificates painful.
3. No PromptPay. Thai clients transfer; they rarely pay by card. Routing a Thai client through Stripe adds roughly 3% plus currency conversion, which visibly eats the margin on smaller jobs.
4. Language and context. Both your workspace and the documents your client receives are in English. Some Thai corporate clients need Thai-language paperwork to push a payment through their internal process.
5. Per-seat pricing in USD. Your cost tracks the baht, which sat between 33 and 34 through mid-2026, and card payments add a conversion fee on top.
What MANA covers instead
MANA handles the Thai side of documents and money natively: quotations, invoices and receipts in formats Thai clients accept, PromptPay QR embedded in the document, a public link so a client can view and pay without creating an account, and slip verification that checks an uploaded payment slip against bank-side data before booking the income and reconciling it to that exact document. On the money side there are wallets, monthly budgets and cash-flow forecasting — in Thai, priced in baht.
Side by side
| Job to be done | Bonsai | MANA |
|---|---|---|
| Thai-format documents with tax ID / branch | No | Yes |
| 3% withholding on the document | No | Yes |
| Thai 7% VAT handling | Not in context | Yes |
| PromptPay QR + slip verification | No | Yes |
| International contracts + e-signature | Very strong | Not the focus |
| Team timesheets / Gantt | Very strong | Built for one person |
| Pricing | Per user, in USD | In baht, free tier available |
One question decides it
Ask: does most of your money this year come from clients paying in dollars by card, or from Thai clients who transfer and then ask for a receipt?
- Overseas clients and a team → Bonsai earns its price.
- Thai clients → your time sink is paperwork and tax mechanics, which is exactly what MANA was built for.
- A mix → look at which side of your paperwork costs you more hours per month, and buy the tool that removes those hours.
If your work is mostly domestic, start on MANA's free plan and issue one real invoice. You will see the difference faster than any comparison table can show it.