Dubsado or Cloudspot Studio
Recently, with the addition of Cloud Spot Studio to Cloudspot’s platform, there has been a lot of talk about Dubsado and Cloudspot and what the differences are. Do you need both for your photography business or will one or the other be better for you and your business? In this blog post we will cover:
1.) Price Point
2.) Invoicing, Payments and Contracts
3.) The Client Portal
4.) Questionnaires and Proposals
5.) Scheduling
6.) Galleries
7.) Automation
Let’s get started!
Price Point
Cloudspot offers a few different options based on your storage needs for client photos. The main difference between their plans is the amount of storage you are paying for as the Studio currently comes with any one of their plans. I recommend paying (As opposed to the free version) to remove the Cloudspot branding. You can pick the plan that works best for you and upgrade as needed:
Lite Plan = $15/Month or $144/Year for 100GB of space
Pro Plan = $30/Month or $288/Year for 350 GB of space
Unlimited Plan = $45/Month or $408/Year for Unlimited storage
Dubsado offers two different plans.
Starter Plan at $20/month or $200/year. With the starter plan you get unlimited projects and clients, invoicing and payment plans and form and email templates.
Premier Plan at $40/Month or $400/year. With this plan, you get everything in the starter plan plus scheduling, automated workflows, public proposals, multiple lead capture forms, and the Zapier integration.
It is important to note that Dubsado does not have a gallery system built in so you will need to pay additional for a separate program to deliver your images to your clients if you want to offer online galleries.
Want a discount off your first month or year?
Invoicing, Payments and Contracts
Dubsado allows you to connect Stripe, Square, or PayPal to use as your payment processor. The fees for this depend on the fees set by each of these processors.
Cloudspot has an in house processing via Stripe with a 2.5% processing fee on all transactions.
Both Cloudspot and Dubsado allow you to send professionally crafted invoices to your clients. Both programs also allow for payment plans. Dubsado allows your clients to save their card information for automatic payments whereas Cloudspot requires your clients to enter their information each time.
Both programs offer legally binding e-contracts for you to send to your clients. The contracts that you would send are similar so there is nothing more to note here.
Client Portal
Both Dubsado and Cloudspot have a client Portal that you can send to your clients to keep their projects organized. Both of the portals offer minimal customization options. With Cloudspot, you can edit some of the colors and change the top banner.
With Dubsado, you can customize the colors in the portal, or upload an image for the top banner:
Questionnaires and Proposals
Both Dubsado and Cloudspot have the ability to send questionnaires to your clients. These questionnaires are great for collecting information about a wedding day or family prior to working with them. It is important to note that Cloudspot’s questionnaires will look more basic, and Dubsado’s questionnaires allow for more customization.
It is important to note that at this time, Cloudspot does not offer an option to send a proposal. Dubsado allows you to send a proposal to clients that will allow them to select from your packages, select add-ons, sign the contract, and pay the deposit all at once.
Here is a sample of a current Cloudspot Questionnaire:
Here is an example of part of my Wedding Questionnaire For Photographers as an example of what you can create in Dubsado:
Scheduling
Both platforms allow you to schedule sessions with your clients via a built in scheduler. This makes scheduling regular sessions and mini-sessions a breeze. Dubsado’s scheduler is a little more customizable in the sense that you can use it for scheduling client meetings, attach additional forms, and have more customization for reminders and confirmation emails.
Cloudspot's Advantage: Galleries
Cloudspot allows you to seamlessly deliver your galleries to your clients. This is one of the reasons someone might choose to go with Cloudspot over Dubsado. These galleries don’t have a size limit, and are a beautiful and professional way to deliver galleries to clients. Cloudspot also allows you to attach your printing lab (Such as Millars) right to the gallery so that clients can order prints directly from your galleries.
Dubsado does not offer gallery management and does not at this time integrate with any gallery software.
Dubsado's Advantage: Automation
Where Dubsado really shines is its automation capabilities and workflows. With Dubsado, you can set up a workflow for your entire client journey, from initial inquiry to gallery delivery.
This allows you to have a seamless client journey. You don’t need to worry about remembering to send forms or reminders because the system will do it for you. If you have a lot of clients, and ensures for a consistent client experience for all clients.
Cloudspot does not at this time offer any automation within their software. This is on their roadmap but as Cloudspot studio is still relatively new, it might be a little while before this is implemented.
In Conclusion
The program you choose will be entirely dependent on your needs and what you want your system to do for you. Although I recommend most people to take as much advantage of Dubsado’s robust automation as possible along side Cloudspot, I also understand that some newer photographers might not have the client load yet to justify paying for an additional system.
If you are looking for something to just get you started and cannot yet pay for multiple programs, I recommend starting with Cloudspot Studio with the intent to move on to Dubsado later. Dubsado also offers a free trial of up to three clients with no time limit so you can get into the system, see if it’s for you, and then make your decision from there.
