Determining what is the best client portal software for digital marketing agencies requires starting a lot of free trials, reading a lot of reviews, and watching a lot of tutorials.
Fortunately for you, I have done the leg work to narrow down the candidates and provide an overview to help you select the best client portal for your agency.
As the founder of Ahsuite, I can’t pretend to be unbiased. But I have done my best to set that bias aside and offer an honest, objective assessment of the pros and cons of each client portal solution.
What is a client portal?
First, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about just what a client portal is.
A client portal is a secure platform that enables clients to access information, documents, messages, and other data by logging in.
Many digital marketing agencies use client portals to manage their projects and streamline communication with clients and teams.
Furthermore, a client portal can help an agency build relationships with clients, as it provides a venue for personalization and branding.
1. Ahsuite
Ahsuite’s secure client portal software is designed to bolster your team’s security, streamline communication with clients, and help you keep organized and productive.
By integrating multiple collaboration tools into one platform, Ahsuite aims to have all the functionality you need to manage your agency. Features include group messaging with reply by email, file storage with client approvals, a secure password manager for your team, and the most complete task management system of any dedicated client portal software.
The client portals themselves have a minimalist design that is extremely easy to use. Clients do not need any special training or hand-holding to access their files, tasks, or information.
The centerpiece of every Ahsuite client portal is a big iframe where you can embed anything from Figma boards to Looker Studio dashboards, slide decks to spreadsheets. Rather than send links to your clients over email, you can share almost anything securely in the client portal.
What People Like:
- Users like how Ahsuite client portals are easy to use, so they don’t have to spend so much time on customer support and training.
- Users also like the helpful and unique features like the encrypted team password manager and work journals.
What People Don’t Like:
- Ahsuite lacks client invoicing and billing at this time.
- Ahsuite also lacks the ability to create documents directly, which is a focus of some other client portal tools.
Pricing:
Ahsuite gives you the opportunity to try out all of their plans free of charge for a period of one month. After that, the Professional plan is $30 per month and provides unlimited client portals on the ahsuite.com domain.
If you want to white-label Ahsuite on your own custom domain, the Agency plan is necessary. This plan costs $150 per month and includes 20 sub-accounts for your team.
Ahsuite also has a free plan called Ahsuite View that lets you embed anything in up to three client portals, but does not include collaboration features like tasks, messaging or file management.
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a customer support helpdesk program that provides an amazing experience for users. It has an omnichannel messaging system allowing you to respond to inquiries from various sources such as email, social media, chat widgets,s and more.
Additionally, its ticketing system allows you to invite collaborators to help resolve customer issues. Moreover, its client portals provide customers with the ability to check on the status of their support tickets, submit new tickets, and access helpful resources.
What People Like:
- It is easy and intuitive it is to set up, and it offers a comprehensive solution to customer support and issues tracking needs.
- As you might expect from a company that provides a virtual help desk, Freshdesk has excellent customer support.
What People Don’t Like:
- The automation is fairly limited and basic.
- The lower-tier plans don’t have all the features implied by their marketing.
Pricing:
Freshdesk offers a free plan for up to ten users.
The Growth plan is $18 per agent per month, granting access to automation and integrations.
The Pro plan is $59 per month with more advanced automation and features and customizations.
The Enterprise plan is $95 per agent per month and includes bots.
3. Monday
Monday coupon codes is a comprehensive tool that can be used to streamline collaboration and increase productivity.
It allows you to build custom boards to manage projects, marketing, sales, software development, and more, with Gantt and Kanban views. It even offers time tracking and automation, making it a great choice for businesses of all sizes.
Additionally, the Standard plan allows you to grant clients access, so you can use Monday as a client portal. With all of its features, it’s no wonder Monday is among the most popular software on the market.
What People Like:
- Clients appreciate the ability to monitor their workflows with a variety of visual options, as well as the integrated time tracking.
- The product offers an impressive combination of power and simplicity, making it a dependable and reliable asset to include in your client suite.
What People Don’t Like:
- The basic plan is quite basic indeed, lacking such features as Gantt and calendar view.
- The dependencies options are fairly limited.
Pricing:
After a free trial period with two users, you can choose between three different plans. The Basic plan is $10 per user per month, the Standard plan is $12 per month, and the Pro plan will cost $20. The more expensive plans come with more features, automation, and fewer restrictions.
4. SuiteDash
SuiteDash is the “all-in-one business software” for teams and customers alike. From client portals and tasks to files, client billing and a CRM, this program has everything one needs to succeed. It even has chat, activity tracking, knowledge base management, and marketing automation, all of which can be branded to suit.
What’s more, SuiteDash enables users to assign specific assets and pages to customers, after which they get their own access to an interface that mirrors the administrators. Plus, with its block editor, it’s a snap to custom pages.
What People Like:
- SuiteDash is a great bang for your buck, as it can substitute multiple costly solutions.
- Customers are delighted with excellent customer service, a broad range of features, and extensive plans for the future.
What People Don’t Like:
- Despite the range of helpful resources available, some users were still overwhelmed by the complexity of the software, which is unsurprising when you consider the sheer number of functions it provides.
- Additionally, it appears that implementing certain aspects of the program is still a work in progress.
Pricing:
You can get 14 days of SuiteDash for free when you sign up for a trial. After that, you’ll have the choice of two additional plans.
The Start Plan is $19 per month and offers unlimited clients, team members, and client portals.
Their Thrive Plan gives you access to additional features such as client-side live chat, autoresponder drip marketing, deal stage pipelines, and more for $49 per month.
For the ultimate SuiteDash experience, upgrade to the Pinnacle Plan for $99 and enjoy the extra benefits of task dependency logic, automation, a learning management system, 2 TB of storage, and more.
All plans can be white-labeled with your agency branding.
5. Clinked
Are you looking for a comprehensive solution to manage your client projects? Clinked provides a highly customizable client portal that can help you take your customer relationships to the next level.
Their platform offers a host of features, including seamless collaboration, easy-to-use communication tools, and secure data storage.
Plus, Clinked integrates with Google Workspace to give you full control over your projects.
All their plans come with a white-label option, and you can even get a white-labeled mobile app for an extra fee.
What people like:
- The Clinked interface is attractive and user-friendly, which is critical for anything you want your clients to use.
- The option to have a mobile app is a nice plus.
What people don’t like:
- Tasks are not available in the Lite plan, which makes it pretty expensive for a productivity tool.
- Some reviewers consider Clinked light on integrations.
Pricing:
Clinked provides four different plans to fit your needs. Starting at $99 per month, their Lite plan includes access for up to 100 members, 100 GB of storage, and the Files and Notes tools with white-label branding.
The Standard plan, which costs $249 per month, offers the same features as well as Tasks, Chat, a shared Calendar, and the ability to use a custom domain. You also get 1 TB of storage.
The Premium plan increases the number of members to 250 and storage to 3 TB and adds white-label email notifications and document watermarking for $495 per month.
For those looking for even more, their Enterprise plan for $995 per month provides 1000 members, 5 TB of storage, a white label mobile app, Single Sign On, and more.
Final Thoughts
A good client portal is one that can do everything that you need to do, which is to say that one needs to be tailored fit to your business needs.
As new client portals like Ahsuite enters the market, more service businesses are choosing the efficiency and professionalism of a dedicated client portal and with Ahsuite – you can share files, and messages and embed anything you want in a clean and simple client portal.
Everything your digital marketing team needs to keep communication, files, and tasks organized.
At the end of the day, the best client portal software for you depends on what you want to achieve. Do you need a tool for customer support? Are you trying to involve clients in projects? Or do you need a platform that integrates sales, billing, projects, and marketing?
Each of the client portal solutions reviewed here have their strengths and weaknesses.
I promised to set my bias aside, but I can’t help pointing out that Ahsuite is more of a client portal than Monday, more user-friendly and attractive than SuiteDash, much more affordable than Clinked, and more suited to marketing agencies than FreshDesk. But hey, that’s just my opinion!
No matter your needs, there is a client portal solution out there that can help you reach your goals. With the wide range of options available, it’s up to you to decide which one is the best fit for your marketing agency.