HoneyBook covers most of what a solo coaching practice runs on: proposals and contracts, invoices and payments, a client portal, templates and workflow automation, with unlimited clients and projects on every plan. Its integrations include Zoom, Google Calendar, Calendly, Gmail and Outlook, which suit session-based work. The scheduler, automations and SMS reminders come with Essentials and Premium, not Starter. Live lead forms are capped at 2 on Starter and 10 on Essentials. The cost is $36/month on the plan that does the core job, or $432 a year.
Nexa covers a lot of the business side: invoices, estimates and proposals that convert to invoices, recurring invoices and payment plans, a client pay portal on your own Stripe account, a CRM with a pipeline and a public lead form, and a booking page with intake forms, group-class capacity and reschedule and cancel links. It also has bookkeeping, including expenses, profit and loss, and sales tax tracking. It does not have text messages or calls, and it has no Google Calendar sync, only an .ics export. It has no app marketplace or integration library. Its automated emails, such as sequences, workflows and reminders, send only while Nexa is open on one of your devices. It is software you run yourself, with no hosted support desk or vendor onboarding.
Over three years HoneyBook at $36/month comes to $1,296. Nexa is $279 once, or $279 over three years on a single device. With optional Cloud Sync at $4.99/month it comes to $458.64. Nexa is a reasonable fit for a coach who wants low cost and owns their setup. That coach must be fine with one device (or paying for sync) and with emails sending only while the app is open. A coach who depends on calendar sync, Zoom, text reminders or hosted support should stay with HoneyBook.
Our read for career coaches: Stay with HoneyBook if you rely on calendar sync, text reminders or its integrations; Nexa is the cheaper option only for a coach who can do without them.
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
HoneyBook costs career coaches $432/year at today's list price. Nexa is $279 once for invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking and accounting in one suite — so after 7.8 months it has cost less than HoneyBook, and you own it after that. What it is not: hosted-for-you software with a support desk and a roadmap you can lobby. That is the trade, and the rest of this page is the detail behind it.
Nexa is $279 once, about $23 a month over its first year. Its Drain Guard reads your expenses (from a linked bank, an imported statement, or ones you type in), finds the charges that repeat, and adds them up by the month. Keep or Cut then walks you through them one at a time. Cancel $23 a month of charges you'd forgotten about and Nexa has paid for itself inside the first year, before you count the HoneyBook bill you'd stop paying.
It depends on what you find and what you cancel, so we don't promise a number. In our demo data, Drain Guard finds 5 subscriptions adding up to $110.13 a month. That is sample data, not a customer's.
The verdict for career coaches: Stay with HoneyBook if the needs in our read above apply to you. If they don't, Nexa covers the core invoicing, scheduling and books for $279 once against $1,296 for HoneyBook over three years.
Client records, scheduling, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
None of that is a software problem you can buy your way out of in one click — it is why the tool you pick matters more than what it costs. HoneyBook solves some of it. So does Nexa. The difference is what you are left holding in three years.
Today's list price is $36/month — $432 a year, from HoneyBook's own pricing page. Every figure below is that price, multiplied. Nothing is projected.
Nexa: $279 once (or 3 × $99). Over the same three years, that is $1,017 less.
If HoneyBook raises its price, the three-year cost goes up; if it cuts it, the cost comes down. We don't guess which. Add-ons, extra seats and card-processing fees are not included, on either side.
| Feature | HoneyBook | Nexa |
|---|---|---|
| Invoicing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Scheduling | ✓ | ✓ |
| CRM | ✓ | ✓ |
| Time Tracking | — | ✓ |
| Full Accounting | — | ✓ (SIMPL) |
| Task Management | — | ✓ |
| Works offline | — | ✓ |
| Price | $36/mo | $279 once or 3 × $99 |
| 3-Year Total | $1,296 | $279 |
| You own it? | No — stop paying, lose access | Yes — forever |
✓ and ✗ for HoneyBook come from its own published feature list. — means the feature isn't in that list, which is not the same as HoneyBook lacking it: check with them. Three years is at today's price.
Straight from HoneyBook's own feature set. If one of these is the reason you pay them, that reason does not disappear because Nexa is cheaper.
HoneyBook is the better call if you need beautiful proposals and contracts specifically, or if your team is large enough that per-seat pricing still beats buying software outright.
HoneyBook describes itself as built for anyone with clients, aimed at small businesses that work with clients. Its categories are event services, marketing, design and creative, professional services, personal services, and home and real estate. (honeybook.com)
Read on each linked page in October 2026. Check them again before you decide; vendors change plans often.
Software doesn't do the actual work — it automates the business around it. And that part is the same for every career coach: find the work, manage it, bill for it, get paid. Each step has a tool — and the right single tool runs the whole loop, so the handoffs are automatic and you get back to the actual work. Tap a step to see what gets automated.
An inquiry becomes a proposal becomes a signed engagement — the terms and the retainer set.
The work you're paid for — with the hours, tasks, and expenses tracked against the engagement instead of reconstructed at month-end.
The work becomes the invoice — the hours, the add-ons, the materials, the deposit credited — totaled and sent, instead of re-typed at 9pm.
Paid by card or link, the deposit credited, and what's overdue chased — without you doing it by hand.
You can stitch four separate subscriptions across these four steps, or run one tool that does the whole flow so a booking becomes a job becomes an invoice becomes a payment without re-typing. Either way the goal is the same: less time on the business of the business, more on the actual work. (Nexa is built to be the one — but the honest options for each step are above and below.)
HoneyBook plus whatever else you're paying for:
Email yourself this comparison?
The median Career Coach earns $55,000/year. At $432/year, HoneyBook is a recurring slice of that — paid again every year, whether the year was good or not. Owning the same jobs outright is $279 once, and the slice stops.
Nexa is $279 once. Invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, accounting — all connected, built for career coaches. You own it like you own your resume and LinkedIn profile templates.
An honest fit check — because the wrong tool is worse than no tool.
The honest fit: if you're a solo or small career coaches business that owns its tools and is sick of renting software, Nexa replaces your whole stack for $279 once. If you're scaling into a large team with dedicated admin staff, a bigger platform may fit better — and we'd rather tell you that now than sell you the wrong thing.
Client records, scheduling, invoicing and time tracking are the pieces of that day. Some tools rent you each piece separately. A few — Nexa among them — bundle the lot and carry their own booking link, with no per-appointment cut. The sections below price both routes honestly.
A career coach guides people through one of the more anxious transitions of their lives, and the day is a string of one-on-ones at very different stages. An early-stage client may not yet know what they want, so the session is assessment and reflection, using a strengths inventory to surface what energizes them and where they keep getting stuck. A mid-search client needs tactical help: rewriting a resume so it survives the applicant tracking system's keyword filter while still sounding like a person, sharpening a LinkedIn headline, or rehearsing the answer to why they left their last job. The coach also plays accountability partner, because job searching is lonely and easy to avoid, so each session sets concrete targets, a number of applications, a few networking reaches, an informational interview, and the next session checks whether they happened. Between clients the coach is buried in documents, juggling several people's resume versions, target-company lists, and salary research, and the constant low-grade risk is sending one client the wrong draft. There's also the rhythm of the relationship arc: a client goes hot during the search, lands interviews, disappears the moment they get an offer, then reappears a year later wanting negotiation help or facing a layoff. Keeping those relationships warm, and remembering where each person was, is half the business.
Real career coaches near you who run their business on Nexa — book directly, no platform fee. Are you a career coach? Post your business and get found in your area — $2.99 one-time. Or browse every career coach on Nexa →
The tools of the trade — each a one-time buy that earns its keep for years.
You paid for these once because good tools last. That's the bar your software should clear too — priced like a tool you own, $279 once, not a subscription that costs more than your kit every year.
We build a career coach's guide the same way every time, and we'd rather you trust it than take it on faith. Nexa is our product, so the test we hold ourselves to is simple: a tool only "wins" a job here when it genuinely does that job better for a career coach — and where something free, open-source, or buy-once does it better, we say so and link you to it. Where Nexa falls short (payroll is the honest example), we name the alternative outright.
Found something out of date? Prices change and we don't catch every move the day it happens. This guide is published and maintained by the Nexa team; if a figure here is wrong, tell us and we'll fix it — getting it right matters more to us than the sale.
For solo career coaches and small teams, yes. invoicing, scheduling, CRM, time tracking, task management, and full accounting — all for $279 once. HoneyBook may be better if you have a large team (10+) or need enterprise-specific features.
HoneyBook has features like Beautiful proposals and contracts and Client portal that some businesses rely on. For most solo career coaches, these aren't dealbreakers.
At $36/month, Nexa pays for itself in 7.8 months. After that: $432 saved every year.
Yes. Nexa is $279 as a one-time payment, or 3 payments of $99 ($297 total). Either way it's a one-time purchase — no subscription, no recurring fees ever.
Own your tools. Stop renting your software.
Get Nexa — $279 Once