Client portal software: four kinds, and which one fits.

What the category is actually selling

Every product here makes the same promise in slightly different words. Everything in one place. A single source of truth for the engagement. One link, always up to date. An extension of your agency. Underneath the promise the products differ mostly in what they bundle around it, and the bundle is what you are really choosing between.

It is worth knowing who else is searching alongside you. The head term "client portal" is enormous, and most of it is navigational: people typing it are logging in to their therapist, their accountant or their lawyer, not shopping for software. The buying happens on the narrower phrases, and the buyer is usually a services firm of three to thirty people deciding how to hand work over. If you are that buyer, the four categories below are your actual shortlist.

The four kinds of client portal software

1. All-in-one suites

SuiteDash, Copilot, Moxo, Clinked, Zendo, OneSuite, Taskip. These sell the whole engagement in one place: two-way file exchange, messaging, tasks and approvals, e-signatures, invoicing and payments, often a CRM and a helpdesk too, all behind a branded login you invite the client into. Pricing models differ sharply: some sell flat tiers with unlimited users, others charge per internal seat or cap how many clients a tier admits.

They are the right purchase when the engagement genuinely is two-way traffic. The cost of the choice is that you are asking a client to adopt software, and every part of the value sits behind that step.

2. Vertical practice-management tools

SimplePractice for therapy practices, TaxDome and Canopy for accounting firms, MyCase for law firms, SmartVault for document exchange. Here the portal is one module inside software built for a profession, so it already knows what an intake form, an engagement letter or a trust ledger is. This is also where the navigational search volume comes from: these products have very large numbers of end clients logging in every month.

If you work in one of those professions, the vertical tool usually beats a general suite, because the portal understands your workflow and you are paying for the rest of the product anyway. If you do not, most of these are closed to you, because the portal comes bundled with the practice software rather than sold on its own. SmartVault is the exception, being a standalone document manager and portal you can buy without a practice suite.

3. No-code portal builders

Softr, Notion, and interfaces built directly on Airtable or Google Sheets. You assemble the portal you want on top of data you already keep, which is appealing when nothing off the shelf matches your shape. Softr publishes its pricing by app user, with separate allowances for team app users and client app users on its paid plans, so the cost still tracks how many people sign in.

Notion is the most common improvised version, and it has one limit worth knowing before you commit. Per Notion's own documentation, a page published to the web can be viewed by anyone on the web, and Notion does not offer password protection for published pages. Restricting access means adding the client as a guest, which requires them to have a Notion account. So the improvised Notion portal is either open to anyone holding the link or gated behind an account, with nothing in between.

Builders suit teams who enjoy owning the build. The trade is that you have become the maintainer of an internal application, and the client still has to log in.

4. Delivery-first links

This is what Stacktree is, and it is the honest opposite of the other three. Each deliverable is published as a private page at an unguessable URL on your own domain, and the gate goes on the work rather than on the person: a passcode, or a restriction to the client's company email domain. Publish under a client name and the pages collect into a client space, which can bind its own hostname, acme.youragency.com, and serve a generated portal at the root with each deliverable at a path underneath. One gate covers the whole space, so the client types the passcode once and stays in for 30 days.

Your client's side of it is: click, read. There is no account, no invite, no password reset and no seat, ever. The corresponding limitation is real: comments can come back on the page itself, but files, signatures and payments cannot.

The complaint that no feature list answers

Read enough agency threads about portal software and one finding repeats far more often than any other. The problem is never a missing feature. It is "I set it up and the client never used it". The invite goes out, the client opens the portal once during onboarding, and every later "it's in the portal" comes back as "can you just email it".

The category's own published advice about this is telling: put something the client cannot get anywhere else behind the login, so they are forced to go in. That is a workaround for a design problem, and the design problem is the login. The alternative fits in one line: the client gets one secure link, and no account.

That is a fair description of the fourth category, and it is also why the fourth category cannot do the things the first three can. Nothing that requires the client to be an identified, logged-in user survives the removal of the login.

A decision rule you can apply in one line

If the client has to put something in, buy a portal. If the client only has to take something out, they need a link.

Three questions make that concrete. Does the client upload documents to you on a schedule? Do you collect signatures or payments as part of the engagement? Would a regulator or a client's auditor expect the exchange to be logged in one system? Two yeses and you should buy a suite, or your profession's practice software if you have one. No to all three and you are buying nine features to get one.

When to buy a suite instead

Some practices should buy the suite, and a comparison page that cannot say so is not worth reading. Four signs it is the right machinery for you:

• Files come back on a schedule. The client uploads monthly financials, receipts, brand assets or case documents and you return finished work. That two-way exchange is the core portal workflow, and nothing else does it as cleanly.
• Signatures and payments are part of the engagement. Contracts, approvals and invoices belonging next to the documents they relate to is a genuine reason to consolidate.
• The exchange has to be logged in one system. Some professions need a defensible record of who sent what and when, in one place, with an audit trail.
• Your profession has its own software. If you are an accountant, a therapist or a lawyer, buy the practice tool and use the portal inside it. A general suite will be a worse fit and a second subscription.

Stacktree does none of that, and no plan adds it. There is no file collection from clients, no e-signatures, no invoicing, no payments, no CRM, no project management and no messaging. Plenty of firms run both: the suite for paperwork and compliance, and a client space for the work itself, because a finished deliverable deserves better than a PDF in a filing cabinet the client avoids.

Where a delivery-first link is the better buy

• Your output is finished artefacts. Reports, audits, proposals, decks, dashboards, prototypes. The client's job is to read them.
• Your clients live in email. Sending a link asks nothing of them that they are not already doing twenty times a day.
• You want your own name on it. From Solo, work serves from a domain you own with no footer of ours on the page, and the passcode prompt is a styled page rather than the browser's grey credential box.
• You want to know it was read before the call. From Solo you see opens, unique viewers and when it was last opened. Studio adds time on page, scroll depth and an attention heatmap.
• You do not want to run onboarding for software your client did not ask for. There is nothing to onboard.

What it costs

Stacktree is priced flat per workspace, in USD, and clients are never seats. Free is $0: three pages in total for the lifetime of the account, each expiring after seven days, no passcodes or email gates, no viewer numbers, and a small "Made with Stacktree" footer on the page. It is enough to see how a deliverable lands, not a place to keep client work.

Solo is $19 a month: 25 pages live at a time, no expiry, passcodes and company-email gates, one custom domain, one activated client space, opens and unique viewers, and no footer. Studio is $79: unlimited pages, ten custom domains, the engagement analytics, and ten activated client spaces. Firm is $249: 25 domains, up to 1 GB a page, uncapped publishing and unlimited spaces. A space counts as activated once it has a hostname bound or its portal switched on, archiving one gives the slot back, and space hostnames do not consume your custom-domain slots. Filing pages under a client is free on every plan, including Free, because grouping your own work should not be a paid feature. Full detail on the pricing page.

Two things portal buyers ask about are not built yet, and are worth saying plainly rather than burying. Applying your logo, typeface and colours across every page you publish is coming soon; today the portal is a clean neutral layout under your domain. Team members and roles inside a workspace are coming soon too; plans are flat per workspace in the meantime, which is why adding people does not change the price.