Built around US tax software, or built around the client

The short version, before the detail

SmartVault was built for accounting and tax practices, and much of its value is in where it plugs in: document routing from tax preparation software, a structured folder template per client and engagement, and workflow tied to the way a US tax practice actually runs a season.

Droplana was built for the client-facing surface and nothing else. One private, persistent portal per client. No client accounts. No integrations. Flat price per business. Servers in Germany.

Two questions usually settle it. Does your practice run on US tax software that SmartVault plugs into? And does it matter to you that data sits in the EU rather than the US? A yes to the first points firmly at SmartVault. A yes to the second points the other way.

Side-by-side

SmartVault's feature set, integrations and pricing change. Verify at smartvault.com rather than relying on this page.

Where SmartVault is clearly the better choice

Worth stating without hedging.

Your practice runs on US tax preparation software. SmartVault's integrations with common tax and accounting packages are the reason most of its customers chose it. Documents route into the right client folder without anyone filing them. If that describes your season, nothing on this page should talk you out of it, and Droplana has no equivalent - we have no integrations at all.

You want one system for all firm documents, not just client-facing ones. SmartVault is a document management system. Internal working papers, engagement files, archived years - all of it lives in the same structured repository with permissions and retention applied consistently. Droplana holds only what you share with a client. Your internal documents stay wherever they are now.

You want templated folder structures. A standard folder tree applied automatically to every new client and engagement is genuinely useful at scale, and Droplana has no folders to template - the organising unit is the client, full stop.

You need US data residency or a US-specific compliance posture. We host in Germany. For a US firm with US clients, that is at best neutral and at worst an added conversation.

If two of those four apply, the comparison is over.

Where Droplana is the better choice

Your practice is in Europe. Files, comments and metadata stay on Hetzner infrastructure in Germany. Droplana is operated by an EU company registered in Croatia, and a Data Processing Agreement is available on all plans, countersigned on Practice and Studio. Storage is under opaque randomly generated identifiers, encrypted at rest with a key derived per client. For a European practice explaining to a client where their bank statements live, this is a materially shorter conversation.

Your clients are the bottleneck, not your filing. The most common complaint about portals of any kind is that clients will not use them. Droplana removes the part they resist: there is no account and no password. They open a link. They confirm by email magic link or with a Google or Microsoft account they already have, and the device is remembered for 90 days. Then they see a checklist of what you are still waiting on, and a Take Photo button that opens their phone camera for anything that only exists on paper.

You want the price to stop moving. Free covers 3 clients and 2 GB. Solo is 19 EUR per month plus tax with unlimited clients and 50 GB. Practice is 49 EUR with 250 GB and 5 seats including the owner. Studio is 99 EUR with 1 TB and 15 seats. Annual billing costs ten months. Per-user pricing prices your team; if your team is small and your client list is not, it is measuring the wrong thing.

You want less system, not more. Some practices do not want a document management system. They want their existing filing to stay exactly as it is, and they want one clean place where clients send things in and collect things back. That is the whole of what Droplana does.

The part where a document management system is genuinely more

Being honest about the category difference matters more here than in most comparisons, because the two tools are not really the same shape.

A document management system gives you consistent structure across every client and every year, permissions applied at the folder level, retention that can be enforced centrally, and an audit trail across your whole document estate. Those are real properties of a real category of software, and a client portal does not provide them.

Droplana gives you what you have shared with a client, grouped by client, with a comment and a status per file, plus a signature record with a public verification page. That is a smaller claim and a deliberate one.

If your problem is "our firm's documents are a mess," a portal will not fix it. If your problem is "the client-facing part of our document flow is a mess, and everything else is fine," a document management system is a large answer to a specific question.

Can you run both?

Yes, and some practices should. SmartVault or any other document system as the internal repository, Droplana as the client-facing surface where documents arrive and leave. The portal does not need to know about your internal structure, and your internal structure does not need to be exposed to clients.

The cost of that arrangement is one manual step: files come out of the portal and into your system. Whether that step is worth it depends on how much the client-side experience is currently costing you in chasing.

The accounting practices page covers what the per-client structure looks like in daily use, and the client portal guide is the broader evaluation framework for this category.

Check our simple pricing (or start free)

Storage levels and team seats scale with your plan.
Security, per-client encryption, isolation, in-browser PDF signing, and data export are the same on every plan.
No per-client fees. Tax calculated by Creem at checkout.

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