Freelancer Tools We Love

Freelancer tools help you save time and be more productive. Spend more time on billable hours and less time on admin.

With the rise of freelancers, there’s been a subsequent rise in freelancer tools and software to help you run your own freelance business. There are lots to choose from, so here’s a few of our favorites.

Bonsai for the full stack

Bonsai is a suite of products built specifically for freelancers. With Bonsai, you can manage contracts, accounting, invoices, track billable hours, and even tasks all in one place. They also have a ton of great templates for things like proposals and contracts.

Taskable for tracking all your work and tasks

Ok, so we are slightly biased. Still, we started building Taskable as a side project while freelancing to solve our problem. I had to monitor three Slacks, three Asana organizations, two Trello teams, HubSpot tasks, and Clubhouse. All my tasks were spread all over the place, and getting simple things done was incredibly frustrating.

Taskable layers on top of all project management tools your clients use, to bring all your tasks into a single view.

Current integrations include Slack and Asana. This week we are adding Trello, Jira, and Clubhouse, and we have many more to come!

Besides the integrations, key features we think freelancers will really like are workspaces, where you can separate tasks by client, and the planning and prioritizing features.

Airtable or Notion as a Swiss Army Knife

When I was freelancing, I used Airtable to track all my time tracking, clients, and invoice calculation. It worked pretty well for me. The best part is how extendable Airtable is. I could have added project tracking and other functions to the same base if I wanted to.

Here’s a link to the Airtable base that you can copy and use as your own, and I put together this Loom explainer video on it.

Lots of other freelancers I know use Notion, similar to how I used Airtable. The benefit of Notion is more flexibility because of the documentation/note-taking features, in addition to the table views. However, the tables are less powerful in Notion, and it’s more complex and easy to clutter up.

Finance and accounting for freelancers

When I was in the UK, I used Coconut for my freelance business. It felt like a magical tool - not only did it serve as my bank, but it made it super easy to track expenses and then file taxes.

I am not sure anything like this exists in the US, so freelancers would need a separate bookkeeping software like FreshBooks, Wave, or FreeAgent. In addition, there are several banks now catering to freelancers like Oxygen or Lili (NerdWallet has a good review of bank accounts for the self-employed).

Nira’s templates for freelancers

Nira has put together 171 free resources and templates for freelancers, including contracts, habit trackers, invoices, and proposals. Check them out here.