Alternative
The Bonsai alternative built in the UK
People look for a Bonsai alternative for ordinary reasons: a job it does not cover, a price that moved, or a product that grew in a direction they did not. This page is the honest version for UK creators: what changes on Herd, what you give up, and how the move actually goes.
An all-in-one freelance business suite: contracts, proposals, invoices, time tracking, expenses and light CRM, priced per user. For a lot of people that is enough, and if it is enough for you there is no reason to move.
Herd is a UK product with three sides in one account. Creators run content, deals, contracts and invoices. Brands run campaigns, review content and pay creator invoices by card. Agencies run a roster with commission splits and white-label client portals. Herd costs from £99/month for creators, billed in pounds. That breadth is the whole trade: Herd covers more of the week, and in a few places it covers it less thoroughly than Bonsai does.
The rest of this page is the practical version: what lands in the same account when you switch, what you give up by leaving Bonsai, what it costs in pounds, and the order to do the move in. There is no importer, so it is manual work, and that belongs above the pricing table rather than under it.
What changes when you switch
Each line below is something we could not find in Bonsai's published feature list when we checked on 21 September 2026, or a difference in how the two are priced. On Herd they are part of the same account, which is the practical difference a switch makes.
Not in Bonsai
No social publishing, content calendar or video editor.
Not in Bonsai
No media kit, public profile or rate card for brand deals.
Not in Bonsai
No opportunities queue and no brand or agency counterpart.
Not in Bonsai
No digital products or memberships.
Not in Bonsai
No video meetings hosted in the product.
Different on Herd
Per-user pricing, so a small team costs several times the headline.
In practice that means one composer posting to Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X, an invoice that carries a card pay link and settles into your own bank through Stripe, and a contract drawn from the deal and signed in the browser. Herd does not publish to LinkedIn or Pinterest and has no link-in-bio page, so a switch is rarely a clean swap.
What you would give up
A switch costs you something. These are Bonsai's advantages, not ours, and any one of them can be a good reason to stay where you are.
- A very large library of contract templates covering many kinds of freelance work.
- Time tracking and timesheets, which Herd does not have.
- Much cheaper at $9 per user a month billed annually.
- Can invoice in GBP, so UK freelancers are not forced into dollars.
- A 7-day trial before you pay anything.
Moving over
There is no importer. Herd cannot read a Bonsai export, and we would rather say that plainly than bury it. Moving is manual, for most people an afternoon rather than a fortnight, and this is the order that leaves the fewest gaps.
Re-create your templates
Re-create the two or three contract templates you actually use. Bonsai exports as PDF, which is enough to copy from.
Let open invoices finish
Leave open invoices in Bonsai until they are paid, then stop raising new ones there.
Connect Stripe
Connect Stripe in Herd before the first Herd invoice.
Keep what still works
Keep a time tracker elsewhere if you bill hourly. Herd does not replace that.
What each one costs
Basic is $15 per user a month or $9 billed annually, Essentials is $25 or $19, Premium is $39 or $29, and Elite is $59 or $49 with a three user minimum, all in USD. Those figures are from Bonsai's own pricing page, last checked on 21 September 2026. Herd is priced in pounds and costs from £99/month for creators, with 17% off when you pay for the year and a 14-day cooling-off period on every paid plan.
Herd, in pounds
For creators
- FreeFree, no card
- Starter£99/month, £986/year
- Pro£299/month, £2,978/year
Annual billing saves 17% on creator and Brand plans and 20% on the Agency plan. 14-day cooling-off on every paid plan. Brands and agencies can book a live demo before subscribing.
Bonsai, as published
- Basic$15/user/mo or $9/user/mo annual
USD
- Essentials$25/user/mo or $19/user/mo annual
USD
- Premium$39/user/mo or $29/user/mo annual
USD
- Elite$59/user/mo or $49/user/mo annual
USD · Minimum 3 users
Pricing last checked 21 September 2026 from hellobonsai.com.
Those figures are from Bonsai's own pricing page, last checked on 21 September 2026.
Prices in USD, with GBP invoicing; features change, check Bonsai's site before deciding.
Media kit
A page a brand can read before they reply
The media kit is a live page rather than a PDF that goes stale in a download folder. It takes its per-network numbers from the accounts you have connected, sits next to your rate card, and keeps the same link when you update it.
- A public page at herduk.co.uk/yourname with per-network figures from your connected accounts.
- A rate card of priced packages you can share, and proposals built from those same packages.
- You decide when it goes public, and the link does not change afterwards.
Moving from Bonsai
- No. Herd has no importer for Bonsai. You rebuild the pages that matter, re-enter the live work, connect Stripe and leave finished work where it is. The steps on this page are the whole job.
- Yes, and for a month or two that is usually the sensible way to do it. Nothing in Herd depends on Bonsai being switched off, so you can let a reporting cycle or a billing period finish before you cancel.
- Herd does not publish to LinkedIn or Pinterest, has no link-in-bio page, no affiliate link or sales attribution, no Shopify integration and no audience-demographics database of its own. Agencies get an external index of 300M+ public profiles; brands search the creators who are on Herd.
- Every figure was checked on 21 September 2026 against the source linked above. Prices and plan contents change, so read Bonsai's own pricing page before you decide, and tell us at support@herduk.co.uk if something here is out of date.
Creator pricing
Start free and stay there as long as you like. Paid plans add real invoices, the inbox, the media kit and everything else.
Free
Have a proper look around
£0/month
No card needed.
- Content calendar and drafts
- One draft deal to set up
- Invoice preview
- Dashboard with sample data
- Video editor · 1 watermarked export a month
- Community
- Send invoices or activate deals
- Inbox, meetings, media kit
- 7 days of history
- No social integrations
Starter
Run the business by hand
£99/month
Billed monthly. Cancel from your settings at any time.
- Active deals · Up to 5 at a time
- Send invoices your clients pay by card through Stripe
- Stripe payouts to your own bank
- Gmail or Outlook inbox and opportunities queue
- Live media kit, rate card and video meetings
- Video exports · 5 a month, no watermark
- Social integrations · 2 connected accounts
- Contracts, expenses, products and memberships
- 90 days of history
- No automated reminders
Pro
The whole business, no limits
£299/month
Billed monthly. Cancel from your settings at any time.
- Unlimited active deals and video exports
- Contracts with e-signature
- Proposals to brands and agencies
- Payments page with your Stripe balance and payout history
- Digital products and memberships
- Expenses, cashflow and tax-ready exports
- Asset library and email
- Unlimited social integrations
- Prices in GBP. VAT added where applicable.
- Annual billing saves 17% on creator and Brand plans and 20% on the Agency plan.
- 14-day cooling-off period on every paid plan.
- Card payment through Stripe. Cancel from your settings at any time.
- Platform fee on digital product sales: 5%.
Keep reading
The full comparison, the other tools UK creators weigh up, and how Herd works once you are in it.
Herd has a page for each side of the market: creators, brands and agencies. The full list of what the product does is on the features page, and every plan and fee is on the pricing page.
- Herd vs BonsaiThe feature table, the pricing side by side and the verdict on Bonsai.
- Beacons alternativeA creator toolkit built around a link-in-bio page, with a storefront, an auto-updating media kit, email and invoicing attached to it.
- Kitly alternativeA media kit and collaboration tracker for creators, with a separate product, Kitly Business, for agencies managing a roster.
- Later alternativeA social media scheduler with a visual planner, publishing to seven or more networks, a link-in-bio page and post analytics.
- How creators use HerdWhat a week on Herd looks like from the creator side.
- All Herd comparisonsEvery comparison page, grouped by who is doing the comparing.
Run the business side from one screen
Plan the week, send the invoice, sign the contract and watch the money land in your own bank account.
The free plan does not expire and needs no card.