Bizzle or FreeAgent?
Two different businesses.

What is actually different?

Every accounting product is designed around an imagined customer, and you can usually tell who it was. FreeAgent's is a contractor: one person, a laptop, a handful of clients, work billed by the day or the project, and a tax bill that needs forecasting because nobody is deducting it at source. Almost every decision in the product follows from that person.

Bizzle's imagined customer is different. Someone whose work arrives by telephone, happens at somebody else's address, and generates a receipt in a van rather than an entry in a timesheet. A plumber, a salon, a mobile mechanic, a cleaning company. The phone ringing unanswered costs them a job today; a timesheet would be no use to them at all.

Both keep a proper double-entry ledger, and both handle invoices, expenses and VAT. The overlap is real, and it is not where the decision lives. The decision is which of those two descriptions is closer to your week.

How do they compare, line by line?

Where FreeAgent is the better choice

• —Time tracking straight through to an invoice. If you bill by the hour or the day, that path is the product, and ours is not built around it.
• —The tax timeline. Showing a contractor what they will owe and when, months ahead, is the single most reassuring thing accounting software can do for someone with no PAYE deducting anything.
• —Restraint. It does less on purpose, which means less to configure and less to ignore. For a one-person consultancy that is a genuine feature rather than a limitation.
• —Self assessment and micro-company filing workflows are well trodden there, for exactly the kind of company it was built for.
• —Years in market against our early access — edge cases already found and fixed, which is worth something real.

So which should you pick?

Choose FreeAgent if you are a contractor or consultant: you bill time or projects, you work at a desk, your phone rarely rings with new work, and what you want from software is a clear view of the tax coming.

Choose Bizzle if work reaches you by phone, happens away from a desk, and the admin that costs you evenings is chasing, filing and the calls you could not answer — none of which a timesheet-shaped product is built to solve.

If you are somewhere between the two — a consultant whose phone does ring, a trade billing day rates — the honest test is where last month's lost hours actually went.