Laura Elizabeth is a designer and the founder of 3 products: Client Portal (a super simple way to store your clients' deliverables), Design Academy (a design course for developers), and Project Pack (sets of templates and documents for freelancers and agencies).
We compared the client portals, competitors included
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Hey Reader, If you're weighing up client portals, you've probably noticed most "best of" comparisons are written by the company that happens to come out on top. So we wrote one too. But we've tried to be straight about it, including the bits where Client Portal isn't the right call. It covers the main options freelancers actually consider: the all-in-one suites, the project management tools, the productised-service platforms, and the free route, and where Client Portal fits in among them. A few to note:
Will it tell you exactly which one to buy? Not quite, because it depends on how you work. But it should save you an afternoon of opening pricing pages in seventeen tabs. Have a look, and if you've got a question about whether Client Portal would suit how you work, just hit reply. I read them all. –Laura *Though we are in talks about a standalone version... 👀 |
Laura Elizabeth
Laura Elizabeth is a designer and the founder of 3 products: Client Portal (a super simple way to store your clients' deliverables), Design Academy (a design course for developers), and Project Pack (sets of templates and documents for freelancers and agencies).
Hey Reader, If you've set up Client Portal and then stalled on what to put in it, build the onboarding one first. Most of us sell some version of a core service plus a few extras, or a handful of separate services. But onboarding sits outside all of that. It isn't something you sell, it's what happens before any of it starts, and it runs the same way no matter which service the client ends up buying. That's what makes it the easiest portal to build. It's near enough identical for every...
Hey Reader, Whatever you sell, and however you've structured it, onboarding sits outside all of it. It isn't one of your services. It's what happens before any of them start, and it runs more or less the same way no matter what the client ends up buying. Same contract, same questionnaire, same request for logos and brand files, same explanation of how you work and how quickly you reply to things. You've probably written that explanation eight times in eight different emails. Which is a good...
Hey Reader, A little while back, Cheryl Porcelijn had me on De Podcast voor Webdesigners - her weekly podcast for web designers. It's normally in Dutch, but this episode is in English, and we talked about Client Portal: how it got started, what it's actually for, and some of the ways people are using it that I didn't originally anticipate. Cheryl has been using Client Portal with her own web design clients for years - and more recently as a companion to her course - so the conversation felt...