Quivva vs Brisk
Brisk is a new invoicing and client management tool with a clear focus: create an invoice, send it, get paid, chase it if you need to. It is well designed and easy to start with, and the invoicing loop is the whole product.
Quivva models the engagement underneath the invoice. Retainers, tracked time, capacity and burn position are the primary focus, and the invoice is generated from work already recorded rather than entered.
If invoicing is your actual problem, and you bill flat amounts you already know, Brisk will get you there faster and currently costs nothing. If the invoice is the easy part and the hard part is knowing where you stand across several retainer relationships, Brisk does not attempt that.
The problem this page is really about
There are two different pains that both feel like “invoicing is a mess”, and they have different solutions.
The first is friction and anxiety around the act of invoicing: the invoice looks amateurish, you put it off, it goes out late, and then you feel awkward chasing it. Brisk is a direct answer to this. It is a painkiller.
The second is that by the time you sit down to invoice, you no longer know what to bill. You have hours in one place, a retainer allowance in your head, and a spreadsheet you have not updated in three weeks. The invoice is not hard to send, it is hard to be confident in. That is the problem Quivva is built around.
Being honest about it: the first pain is sharper and more urgent. If that is genuinely your problem, take Brisk seriously.
Pricing
Brisk is currently free. It launched recently and has not yet introduced paid plans.
Quivva is US$15 per month, or US$144 per year.
That is not a gap that can be argued away, and pretending otherwise would be insulting. Free is free. The honest framing is that these are different products at different stages, and free is the correct price for a tool that does the narrow thing well while it establishes itself.
The question worth asking is what you would still be doing manually. If you bill fixed monthly amounts you already know, Brisk covers you and the price difference is real money for no loss. If you bill against tracked hours or a retainer allowance, the spreadsheet does not go away when you adopt Brisk. It sits alongside it.
Invoicing approach
Both tools produce a clean invoice. They arrive there differently.
In Brisk, an invoice is essentially a professional looking template you fill in. You enter the line items, the amounts and the details each time. That is a fair design for flat-fee work, and it is fast when the amount is already known.
A few rough edges showed up in testing, worth reading as signs of a young product rather than a verdict on it. Uploading a logo forced it into a circular placeholder that truncated most of it, and the same logo occasionally rendered on a black background when drafting an invoice. On an invoice where a post code or tax ID had not been entered, the label still printed with nothing next to it, so the invoice showed a bare “Tax ID”. There was no payment terms field on the invoice.
In Quivva you do not need to enter anything on the invoice. Time tracked against a retainer period or project milestone groups by task name into line items automatically, showing hours, rate and subtotal. Where your task naming drifted across the month you can merge two groups into one line, or split them back apart. You choose which of your bank accounts to display, review, and send. Each client already carries their own currency, payment terms and preferred bank account.
The practical difference is that the invoice is a consequence of work you have already recorded, rather than a separate act of data entry.
Getting paid, and how much automation you want
Brisk has some genuinely good ideas here, and one of them deserves more thought than it first appears to.
The invoice arrives as a designed HTML email with a download button, and links to a hosted invoice page. On that page there is a button for the client to confirm they have sent payment. That is a nice touch, though it does have a limitation where a client transfers the money but does not press the button. Both tools currently support bank transfer only, with card payments marked as coming.
Brisk also has automatic payment reminders, with token templating for things like invoice number, and three selectable tones: professional, friendly and detailed. That is a thoughtful piece of design.
It is also the place to be careful, depending on who your clients are. If you are a fractional executive who speaks to your client’s CEO every week, an automated reminder going out in your name without your knowledge is not obviously an improvement. It is efficient, and efficiency is the right goal when you have forty clients paying small amounts. When you have four clients paying serious money for your judgement, the invoice and any follow-up are part of the relationship, and being one step removed from them carries a cost that can exceed time saved.
Quivva’s approach reflects that. Invoices go out as a plain text email with the PDF attached, deliberately, because for a close client an invoice that looks like it came from a billing system rather than from you is a downgrade. Overdue invoices are surfaced to you rather than actioned on your behalf, with the intent that chasing stays a decision you make.
This is a philosophical difference where you’d either prefer the convenience of automation, or prefer to control client touch points. Brisk’s reminders go out automatically and save you time. Quivva’s reminders surface first for you, and are only sent when you proof-read, edit and hit send. Or just ignore, if you don’t wish to chase at this time.
Client records
In Brisk, adding a client is a form: contact name, email, the basics. There is no more depth to it than that.
In Quivva the client is the top-level object and everything hangs off it. One active retainer at a time (pay-for-work or pay-for-access), any number of fixed-price projects with milestones, all time entries, all invoices, all expenses. The client also carries currency, tax identifier, payment terms and preferred bank account, so those are configured once rather than restated each invoice. Ending a relationship archives the client and preserves the history rather than deleting it.
This is a direct consequence of scope. Brisk is building toward contracts, which its founder has said is the next major piece. Until that lands, the client record is a contact record.
Speed and feel
Brisk looks good. The marketing site is slick, and the app itself follows current design conventions carefully. It is a well-executed version of the modern default.
Quivva looks more distinctive and, depending on taste, a little quirkier. It approaches design from first principles,
Where Brisk struggled in testing was responsiveness. It is built on Next.js and clicking between screens was slow enough to be genuinely uncertain, long enough that it was not clear whether a click had registered, followed by a white screen and then the page. Quivva holds state on the client, so screen changes are close to instant.
This is fixable and may already have improved. It is mentioned because for a tool you open several times a day, it is the kind of thing that determines whether you keep using it.
Where Brisk is the better choice
If invoicing is genuinely the whole problem. If you bill flat monthly amounts you already know and do not track time, Quivva’s machinery is overhead you will not use. Brisk is lighter and gets you to a sent invoice faster.
If you want automated chasing. Brisk’s reminders with tone selection are better than anything Quivva currently offers, and if you would rather delegate follow-up entirely, that is a real advantage.
If you want a hosted invoice page for clients. Brisk has one. Quivva sends a PDF attachment and does not currently offer a client portal.
If price is decisive. Brisk is free.
If conventional polish matters to you. Brisk’s visual design is more immediately familiar and, to many people, more handsome.
Which to choose
Choose Brisk if you need invoices out the door with minimum ceremony, you bill amounts you already know, and you want automated reminders handling the awkward part.
Choose Quivva if you bill against tracked time or a retainer allowance, if you need to know your burn position and real capacity without maintaining a spreadsheet alongside, and if you would rather stay personally in the loop on client-facing communication.
The clearest test: if you adopted Brisk tomorrow, would you still be keeping a spreadsheet to work out what to put on the invoice? If yes, the invoice was never the problem.