A 17hats alternative made for wedding videographers

One tool for a hundred industries, or one for yours

17hats describes itself as CRM and small business management software and says it serves more than 100 industries, naming balloon artists, photographers, coaches and designers. Its tools include SMS texting, pipelines, online scheduling with Zoom and group bookings, workflow automation, bookkeeping, invoices with payment schedules and auto-pay, contracts, questionnaires, lead capture forms, lead source reporting and a client portal.

Its integrations page lists QuickBooks Online, Zapier, Stripe, Google and Apple calendars, bank connections, two-way email sync and Zoom. It also takes in leads from The Knot and WeddingWire, and imports photography orders from ShootProof, Fundy and ProSelect.

The parts of a 17hats alternative that should feel familiar

As a CRM for videographers, Hailo has a counterpart for most of the 17hats CRM. Leads arrive through a form you design and embed, get an auto-reply in your words, and move through a pipeline with a lead source on every lead. Couples book a discovery call on your own page, with a Google Meet link made for each call or your own link. Contracts carry your studio details and the package the couple picked, questionnaires come back attached to the project, and invoices split into payment plans, with reminders that go out on their own when a payment is due soon or late.

Email goes out from your own Gmail or any mailbox, and replies land on the couple they belong to. Your weddings go out to Google or Apple Calendar. Automations wire triggers to emails, waits and checks, and stop when a couple writes back. The lead management page covers the front end in detail.

What a wedding videographer gets on top

Here is the plain difference: Hailo also works on your footage. Drop in a folder per camera and you get back one synced timeline with up to eight angles, your lavs and recorders placed where they belong, and camera audio filling any gap where no recorder rolled. Short takes from a camera that stopped and restarted stay on that camera. A multi-day wedding keeps each day apart, named however you like. Read more on multicam sync.

Before the sync, Hailo offloads every card at once, labels each clip by moment and trims the shaky stretches, all without touching your originals. After it, the ceremony and the toasts come back cut, and everything opens in Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro or DaVinci Resolve. When the film is finished, you deliver it from Hailo too, in 4K, with upsells and vendor credits on the gallery.

Bookkeeping or finance reports

This is the clearest gap, and the first thing to check when comparing 17hats alternatives. 17hats includes bookkeeping with bank connections and a QuickBooks Online integration. Hailo has neither. What it has is a finance page that shows your year by month and who pays next, expenses you log and tie to a couple, a sales tax report, and reports that export to CSV for your accountant. It also tracks the hours you spend in your editor, so you can see what each film earned per hour. See finance in Hailo.

Where 17hats is ahead

If you are sizing up 17hats competitors, know that Hailo is the narrower tool, and that cuts both ways. These are the things 17hats lists that Hailo does not have.

• SMS texting. Hailo sends email only.
• Leads from The Knot and WeddingWire. Hailo's leads come from your own inquiry form, or you add them by hand.
• QuickBooks Online and Zapier. Neither is built in Hailo yet.
• Photo orders. Hailo delivers films only and takes no print or photo orders.
• Other industries. Hailo is for wedding filmmakers and nobody else.