BEO HQ vs Dubsado
Dubsado is a client-management CRM built for service businesses generally; BEO HQ produces the catering documents an event actually runs on, including the one Dubsado has no concept of.
Plenty of caterers land on Dubsado, and for good reason. It handles the client relationship end to end: lead capture forms, proposals, contracts with e-signature, invoices and payment plans, scheduling, client portals, and automated workflows that chase people so you do not have to. At $335 a year for Starter and $525 for Premier, it is fairly priced for what it does, and the 21-day free trial gives you full Premier access without a card.
The gap shows up on event day. Dubsado is built for service businesses in general, so it has no idea what a banquet event order is. There is no menu library, no per-person math, no guaranteed guest count, no kitchen-facing output, and nothing your chef or banquet captain can work from. This page is about that gap, and about the fact that using both is often the right answer rather than picking one.
| Feature | BEO HQ | Dubsado |
|---|---|---|
| Annual price | $190 to $390 | $335 to $525 |
| Monthly equivalent | $19 to $39 | About $28 to $44 |
| Free tier | 1 watermarked BEO + 1 invoice | 21-day trial, no free plan |
| Additional users | Included on Pro ($39) | $25/mo for 4 to 10 users |
| Banquet event order | Core feature | No, not a concept in the product |
| Menu library | Reusable, with per-person pricing | No |
| Kitchen sheet, packing list | Generated from the same event | No |
| Guest counts and guarantees | Built into the event record | No |
| Proposals and contracts | Yes, catering-specific | Yes, and genuinely good |
| E-signature | Yes, on Pro ($39) | Yes |
| Lead capture and workflows | Not included, by design | Yes, the core strength |
| Client portal | Share link per document | Yes, full portal |
| Best for | Producing catering documents | Managing the client relationship |
Choose Dubsado if...
- Your bottleneck is client management: chasing leads, sending reminders, and keeping onboarding consistent.
- You want automated workflows that fire on their own once a form is submitted or a contract is signed.
- You run other service work alongside catering and want one CRM covering all of it.
- A client portal and scheduling matter more to you than what the kitchen reads on Saturday.
Choose BEO HQ if...
- You need an actual banquet event order, and a generic proposal tool cannot make one.
- You want a reusable menu library with per-person and per-item pricing instead of retyping dishes into a rich text field.
- Your kitchen and floor team need something to work from: counts by selection, timeline, setup, staffing.
- You want duplicate-last-event for the formats you run over and over.
What Dubsado cannot produce
This is not a knock on Dubsado, it is a scope observation. Dubsado is horizontal software for service businesses, so its documents are built from a rich text editor and a line-item table. That is enough for a photographer or a consultant. It is not enough for a caterer, because the catering document set has structure that a generic editor cannot represent.
A BEO needs guest count and guarantee as distinct numbers, entree counts by selection, dietary needs as counts rather than prose, a timeline in real minutes, room setup, staffing with call times, and a financial summary where service charge and tax interact in a specific order. You can type all of that into a Dubsado form field. What you cannot do is have the software understand it, carry it into the next document, or produce a kitchen-facing version with the prices stripped out.
The real cost math
Dubsado's Starter plan is $335 a year, roughly $27.92 a month, and Premier is $525 a year, roughly $43.75 a month. Premier is where the workflows, scheduling, and public proposals live, so most people who choose Dubsado for the automation end up there. Extra users are $25 a month for four to ten seats, and each additional brand is $10 a month.
BEO HQ Starter is $19 a month or $190 a year, and Pro is $39 a month or $390 a year with multiple users included. If you are choosing between them purely on price they are close enough that price should not decide it. Decide on output: which one produces the document your team needs on the day.
Using both is a legitimate setup
The honest answer for a lot of caterers is that these tools do not really compete. Dubsado owns the funnel from inquiry to signed contract. BEO HQ owns the paperwork from signed contract to event day and invoice. Running Dubsado for lead capture and client communication while producing BEOs, kitchen sheets, and packing lists in BEO HQ is a perfectly coherent stack, and at a combined cost well under a single venue platform.
If your budget only stretches to one, the question is which half of the job hurts more right now. If leads are going cold in your inbox, fix that first. If you are rewriting the same event details into a Word template every week and your chef is working off a text message, fix that first.
Is BEO HQ a good Dubsado alternative?
As a replacement for the document half, yes. If you adopted Dubsado mainly to send proposals and invoices and you have never used the workflow automation, BEO HQ does that job with catering structure built in, for a similar or lower price.
As a replacement for the CRM half, no. BEO HQ has no lead capture forms, no automated email sequences, no scheduling, and no client portal. Switching from Dubsado to BEO HQ expecting those to be there would be a bad surprise, and it is better to say so plainly than to let you find out in week two.
Keep your CRM. Fix the paperwork.
Build a real banquet event order on the landing page without an account, and see whether the output is what your kitchen has been missing.