Bonsai VS Task Session

Task Session's answer:

Task Session puts both halves of client work in one place: the CRM where leads and clients live, and the workspace where the work actually gets delivered.

Most small teams pay for a CRM and a project tool separately, then spend the week copying data between them. Here a lead becomes a client, the client becomes a project, the project produces timesheets, and those timesheets turn into an invoice - without re-entering anything.

It is also self-hosted, so the whole system runs on your own server and your client data, contracts and invoices never leave it.

Task Session's answer:

Small agencies, studios and freelancers who work directly with clients - digital and marketing agencies, design and development shops, consultants and service businesses, typically between 2 and 50 people.

The usual profile is a team that has outgrown spreadsheets, WhatsApp groups and a shared inbox, but does not want an enterprise suite or five separate subscriptions. They need client records, project delivery, billable hours and invoicing in one place, and they care about hosting it themselves so the client data stays on their own server.

Task Session's answer:

Task Session came out of the mess of running agency work across too many tools.

Leads sat in one CRM, projects in a second app, hours in a third, invoices in a spreadsheet, and client files were scattered across email. Every status update meant checking four places, and every invoice meant reconstructing the month from memory. The tools were fine on their own - the gaps between them were the problem.

So we built the workflow we actually wanted: contact to project to timesheet to invoice, in one system, running on our own server. We used it day to day for our own clients first, and it worked well enough that we packaged it up for other agencies and freelancers dealing with the same pile of disconnected apps.

Task Session's answer:

Three reasons: scope, ownership and cost.

Scope: CRM, projects, tasks, time tracking, attendance, invoicing, a client portal, chat and file management ship together. A small agency does not have to stitch four or five subscriptions into one workflow and then keep them in sync.

Ownership: Task Session is self-hosted, so your client list, project history and invoices sit on infrastructure you control. That matters when you are holding other people's data.

Cost: it is not a per-seat monthly bill that grows every time you hire, so adding a designer or an assistant does not add another recurring line item across three tools.

The trade-off is honest. If you want a hosted enterprise suite with a large app marketplace, a bigger platform will suit you better. Task Session is for teams that want the whole client workflow in one place, on their own server.

Task Session's answer:

Task Session is a self-hosted web application built with PHP on the Laravel framework, with MySQL for data storage. The interface is standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript, responsive across desktop and mobile browsers.

The stack is deliberate: it runs on ordinary LAMP-style shared or VPS hosting, with no containers, managed services or special infrastructure required. Most agencies already have hosting that runs PHP and MySQL, so installing Task Session on their own server is straightforward.