Blog

Top 5 Best Client Portal Software for Small Businesses (2024)

ByAdamonJanuary 5, 2024

As a small business, you have a lot of priorities to manage, and if you're looking for a client portal software for small business you may find yourself completely lost in the sea of options.

There are so many client portals out there, but some stand out as particularly good for small businesses.

We researched the client portals out there, and identified the top 5 best client portal software for small businesses.

But, what makes sets some client portal for small businesses aside from the others? Here are a few of the factors we considered when making this list:

Price (for small businesses who may not have large budgets)
Ease of Use (because you're busy with other tasks, your client portal needs to be as seamless as possible)
Integration with other software (migrating your existing software can take a long time especially for small businesses)
Security and compliance (all businesses need to keep client data secure)
Customizability (your client portal should fit in with your business's branding)

I hope some of these factors resonate with you and your small business.

If so, let's get right into the top 5 client portal software for small businesses!

The Best Client Portal Software for Small Business: Foyer

The best client portal for small businesses

Foyer is a great client portal for small business, because it is affordable (you can pay just $10 per month), has features for just about every small business use case (e.g. file sharing, e-signatures, secure messaging), and comes in a modern easy-to-use interface.

Here are some features that Foyer gets right:

Secure file sharing
Custom forms
Knowledge bases
eSignature Integration with DocuSign
Secure Email Outlook Add-in

Foyer is secure-by-default. With Foyer's end-to-end encryption and audit trails, you can be confident your business and client data is secure.

Not only is the data within Foyer secure, but Foyer secures your email via its integration with Microsoft Outlook. Foyer's Secure Email Outlook Add-In is provided with all Foyer subscriptions which encrypts email body and attachments so you can send documents securely over email.

Your Foyer client portal can be completely white-labeled so it fits in with your small business's branding. You can change the logo, colors, and completely remove any Foyer branding so your client portal looks like it was custom-made just for your business.

Customers love Foyer's mobile support. Every page of your client portal (including admin and staff pages) works on any device. Clients can send you files and messages directly using their phones, and you can even use more advanced features like creating custom forms, investigating audit logs, and creating knowledge bases all from your phone.

Foyer's pricing is simple. You get every feature (including secure email and their DocuSign integration) for just $10 per month per internal user. An internal user are your staff or employees who will need to login to the portal. You can have any number of clients for no additional cost.

You'll get a full 100GB of storage for each internal user which is plenty for most small businesses (how big is 100GB).

Foyer is a perfect client portal for small businesses because it meets all our criteria of being: affordable, easy to use, flexible (via integrations with DocuSign and Outlook), secure, and customizable (via white-labeling).

If you're interested in Foyer, click here to get started (set up only takes 1 minute).

2. Clinked

The Clinked home page

Clinked is our second best pick for best client portal software for small businesses. It has all the features you'd expect of a client portal: white-labeling, secure file sharing, collaboration features, and project management capabilities.

Clinked has a modern interface, and works on desktop and mobile. They support both mobile via a web browser through their own app.

With a 4.8 out of 5 rating on Capterra, it is well received by its customers.

A couple downsides about Clinked are that its pricing is steep, starts with a low amount of storage (100GB shared between up to 100 users), and customers have complained their lack of integrations with other software. For more information on pricing, checkout their pricing page.

For example, their most popular plan, the Standard plan, is currently $299 per month (when paid monthly). The price alone could be enough to deter small businesses from choosing Clinked.

Some features, including their project management features, are locked behind higher pricing plans, so be careful that you choose the right plan before signing up!

Overall, Clinked is a modern client portal that has a solution for just about every client portal use case your small business will run into, but you'll have to pay a hefty price for it.

Check it out! But I encourage you to read on, as we have some more budget friendly options to come.

3. OneHub

OneHub

OneHub is a great choice for small businesses when it comes to secure client portals. Like Clinked, they offer a custom secure client portal, with file sharing, messages and support for virtual data room use cases. But, at a more palatable price.

OneHub has a 4.5 out of 5 on Capterra where customers leave reviews on its ease of use and bang-for-buck.

A few features that OneHub gets right are its real time notifications, file recovery (for accidentally deleted files), and the ability to e-sign documents via their DocuSign integration.

Where OneHub might disappoint are in its dated user interface, lack of customization in file sharing and data rooms (sharing workflows), and its confusing setup.

Additionally, if you're looking for any knowledge base or project management features, you may want to look at a different option, as OneHub has no solution for those use cases.

While its a bit pricy, OneHub is still reasonable when compared to other solutions like Clinked. Their most popular plan, the Advanced Plan, is $25 per month per internal user when paid for monthly. For exact pricing information, visit OneHub's pricing page.

If you're a small business looking to share files, sign files, and maybe even use some advanced features like virtual data rooms, OneHub could be the right choice for you. It is one of the more affordable client portals, which gives it a decisive edge for small businesses on a budget.

4. Encyro

Encyro

I've reached out to hundreds of accountants to gather feedback on their client portals, and most were all using the same few big-name products.

But, I was surprised when I stumbled upon one accountant who was happily using Encyro to collect tax documents from his clients.

Encyro offers a simple solution for retrieving files from client without login, while also providing HIPAA compliant secure email and e-signatures.

Encyro's pricing is great for small businesses at an initial $10 per month then around $7.99 for each user after. See Encyro's pricing page for more details.

They don't have too many reviews on Capterra, but the ones they do have are generally favorable. Their customers bring up a few cumbersome workflows with emails and deleting files, and inflexibility for how files and messages are displayed.

The main issues small businesses could run into with Encyro is that they might not be able to support your exact use case. For example, one accountant I reached out to cited the inability to share files only via email verification (without login).

In addition, some of the features like virtual data rooms, project management, and knowledge bases are not supported by Encryo.

You can think of Encyro primarily as a file drop-off solution along with secure email. It's good at what it does, but many businesses will want a bit more features out of their client portal.

5. Google Workspace

Google Workspace

You may not have expected this one, but if you're a small business on a budget, you need to consider using Google Workspace to cover your client portal needs.

The pricing and bang-for-buck is unmatched. The amount of different products and features you get for the Business Starter plan (just $6 per month per internal user) is unparalleled.

Here's a few of the features you get access to with just their entry level subscription:

Business Email via Gmail
Unlimited public or intranet sites via Google Sites
30GB of Storage in Google Drive (how big is 30GB)
Video meetings with Google Meet (up to 100 simultaneous participants)
Google Forms for securely collecting client information

And that's just the beginning, the Google ecosystem is vast and the integrations they have are seamless (e.g. between Google Docs and Google Sites for example).

You could even set up a barebones client portal service using Google Sites and Google Drive at no cost.

I'm such a fan of Google Workspace myself that I created a guide on how to create a Google Sites client portal. Check it out if you're interested!

Using Google Workspace requires a little creativity, and it won't be the most seamless experience, but you can absolutely use the services offered by Google Workspace to function as a client portal for your business.

Why Foyer is The Best Client Portal Software for Small Businesses

Foyer is the best client portal for small businesses because the bang-for-buck you get is unmatched by any other client portal.

You cover all the most critical small business use cases starting at an affordable price of just $10 per month per internal user.

Here's some of the features you'll get with any Foyer plan:

Secure file sharing
Knowledge bases
Secure email
E-Signatures via DocuSign
Audit Trails
Custom Forms
Mobile support
White-labeling
Real-time and email notifications

Read on to discover how Foyer's features can be used to solve the problems you're tackling at your small business.

White-Label Your Client Portal To Build Client Trust and Brand Awareness

White-labeling a Foyer client portal As a small business, it's important to white-label your client portal so that your customers trust that the portal belongs to you, but also to build brand awareness. There are so many reasons why white-labeling is beneficial!

With Foyer's secure client portal, you can set your own logo and color, template your own emails, use your own domain name, and more.

To white-label your client portal, just head to the Org page where you can configure:

Color
- For the page header and for all buttons

Your Logo
- Shown all throughout your client portal including email notifications

Name
- Shown in the header, login/sign up pages, and in emails

There's even a built-in email templater where you can completely customize the subject and body of any invitation emails you send out to your clients and staff.

Create Knowledge Bases To Share Vital Company Information

Creating a knowledge base with Foyer

With your Foyer client portal, creating and sharing knowledge bases between your team and clients is easy.

To create knowledge base pages, navigate to the "Pages" section and click the "+" icon in the left drawer. Name your page and incorporate content using the rich-text editor. You can: embed videos, images, format text, and more.

Under the edit icon (next to the page title), you can select which users and groups have access to the page. Any shared pages will show up under the recipients' "Pages" tab. Your staff are free to edit knowledge base pages, while clients are restricted to read-only access.

You can even assign a knowledge base page as the home page, ensuring that clients or staff are welcomed with specific content after they login. This proves invaluable for onboarding and can be used to seamlessly link back to resources, enhancing your customer portal's utility.

Some business opt to use a dedicated service for knowledge bases, like Notion, but I think it is better to have your knowledge base integrated right into your customer portal with Foyer.

Use Custom Forms to Collect Specific Client Data

Creating a custom form in Foyer

Sometimes you need to request exact information, but a regular file drop-off would be too confusing for clients. Foyer has a solution just for this called "Forms".

Forms enable you to collect the exact information you need by letting you choose and a wide array of fields (e.g. text, files, multiple choice).

All data collected by your forms go straight into your client portal where it can be easily shared internally in your organization. You can collect files of any type and size (including large files). All you do is add a field, and choose the "file" field, and save the form.

Foyer comes with both desktop and email notifications. So you'll get an email to all your staff whenever a form is submitted so you never miss any updates from your clients. Anyone can opt-out of these notifications by visiting their notification preferences.

To get started, visit the "Forms" tab, click "Form Definitions", and "Add Form".

Each form is made up of "steps", and each step has any number of fields. Fields can be textboxes, file inputs, or multiple choice check boxes.

You can choose the style of your form between the two built-in settings: "stepper" and "row". Stepper will treat each step as a different page (perfect for mobile), while "row" will show the whole form as a single page (ideal for desktop). The "stepper" view is what is shown in the screenshot above.

You'll often see businesses create forms using a service like Jotform, but having your forms built-in to your own client portal is really convenient.

Keep Your Client Portal Secure With Audit Trails

Viewing Audit Logs in Foyer

Client portal are not only about productivity. A huge part of them is their security. That's why Foyer has complete audit trails built-in, so you can track every security event that occurs within your organization to keep your clients and your business as a whole safe.

Each audit log is stamped with when it occurred, who did it, and what exactly happened. These logs cannot be deleted. So you'll always have a way to go back in time to replay what happened. Here are a few example audit log actions:

Deleting files
Previewing files
Disabling or enabling Two Factor Authentication (2FA)
- Important to know if someone is subverting security measures
Unsuccessful Login Attempts
- Tells you if someone may be attempting to access your account

There are over 50 different audit log actions, so you'll have the full picture of what's going on in your client portal.

Also, if any of your clients are in the healthcare industry, audit trails is essential if you are storing HIPAA data or any other personally identifiable information (PII).

Foyer provides searching, filtering, and sorting through all audit logs to make auditing easy.

Collect File Signatures From Anyone With DocuSign

Signing a file with DocuSign

Foyer has partnered with the industry leading e-signature solution, DocuSign, to simplify collecting file signatures from your clients.

You can select any file within Foyer, and request file signatures from your clients or staff. You'll receive updates directly in your client portal on the status of each file signature, and the final signed copy of the file will be securely uploaded into your client portal.

Using a client portal integration with DocuSign helps keep your business secure by avoiding transferring files over email, which is an inherently unsecure means of sharing files. You certainly wouldn't want a signed copy of any file to be leaked!

For more information, check out our comprehensive guide on how to how to send file signature requests.

If you use another service for eSignatures, or don't want to use DocuSign, that's fine too! Check out this list of e-signature services and decided which is best for your business.

Secure Your Email With Foyer's Secure Email Outlook Add-in

Sending Secure Email with Foyer's Outlook Add-in

Foyer's Secure Email Outlook Add-in facilitates secure email communication, which is ideal for small business use cases where you're exchanging contracts, forms, and other sensitive data. It is particularly effective for:

Sending end-to-end encrypted files and messages via email.
Transmitting large files of any size and type through email.

Given the inherent risks associated with standard email for file transmission, adopting a secure email service is paramount for many businesses. Foyer's Secure Email Outlook Add-in addresses this concern by encrypting all file attachments and email contents, ensuring robust protection against data leaks.

Additionally, the add-in simplifies the process of sending large files, surpassing the typical 20MB attachment size limit imposed by traditional email providers. You can seamlessly drag and drop any file, regardless of its size, for secure email transmission.

For detailed instructions, please refer to comprehensive guide on how to send secure email.

If you're using another email provider than Outlook, check out this list of secure email providers. Whether you use Foyer secure email or not, you should really be encrypting all your email.