An honest look at Combinely reviews (2025): Features, limitations & a better alternative

Trying to scale a professional services firm can feel like an uphill battle. Whether you’re in accounting, finance, or consulting, your growth is often handcuffed to your headcount. It makes sense, when you think about how much of the work is painfully manual: digging through client emails, chasing down documents late at night, and answering the same "quick question" for the tenth time this week.

Combinely is one of the newer AI tools on the block aiming to fix this very problem for accountants. It sells itself as an "AI coworker" that can automate the tedious parts of the job, freeing up your team to focus on work that actually moves the needle. But like any shiny new tool, it’s smart to look beyond the marketing page.

This post is a straightforward look at what we know, based on the handful of Combinely reviews and public info out there. We’ll get into its features, some potential drawbacks, and see how it compares to more flexible, transparent AI platforms on the market.

What is Combinely?

At its heart, Combinely is an AI assistant, or "coworker," designed from the ground up to automate workflows for accountants. The company’s origin story is a classic one, born out of frustration. Co-founder Tom Invernizzi, who has a background at Deloitte and London Business School, was tired of "the drudgery of repetitive tasks" that are so common in the industry. He linked up with co-founder Arthur Granacher, an engineer with experience at places like Google and Shazam, to build a way out.

Combinely’s main job is to plug into an accountant’s inbox (it seems to focus on Outlook) and start learning from past emails and documents. Once it gets the hang of things, it starts drafting email replies, creating first-pass versions of deliverables, and generally helping to manage the never-ending stream of client messages.

After getting its start in the London Business School’s Incubator, the company picked up steam and landed a spot in Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 batch. They know who they’re for: small to large accounting firms looking to get more done without burning out their teams on administrative tasks.

A closer look at Combinely’s features

Since Combinely is still pretty new, finding a detailed, hands-on review is tough. But if you piece together what the founders have said in interviews, what’s on directory listings, and some of the early chatter, you can get a good sense of what it’s supposed to do.

Proactive email and workflow help

Combinely’s main hook is that it works proactively. It doesn’t just sit there waiting for you to tell it what to do. Instead, it watches your inbox and starts working on its own. The whole point is to cut down on the "30% to 40% of an accountant’s day" that is apparently spent just wrestling with Outlook.

Here are the main things it automates:

• Drafting replies: It reads incoming questions and writes up draft responses based on how your firm has answered similar questions in the past.

• Generating deliverables: If a client email asks for something specific, it can use your existing templates to create a first draft of a tax summary or financial review.

• Document review: The AI can pull key numbers and details from financial documents and even flag things that look off, so a human can double-check them.

It builds client profiles on the fly

To keep from sounding like a generic robot, Combinely creates a live profile for every client that’s always being updated. This profile keeps track of past conversations, specific client requests, and even little quirks, which helps the AI make its responses feel more personal.

It’s a bit more advanced than a static CRM entry. The idea is to have a "living, breathing understanding of each client" that helps make every AI-assisted interaction feel like it’s coming from someone who actually knows them.

It’s all about accounting

Combinely is not trying to be a jack-of-all-trades AI assistant. Its biggest advantage is that it’s been trained specifically on the world of accounting. It gets the lingo, the workflows, and the compliance stuff. This focus is what makes it different from a general tool like ChatGPT, since it’s designed to use your firm’s private data and past work to give answers that are accurate and secure.

What early reviews and signals are telling us

When you’re looking at a new B2B tool, "reviews" are more than just stars on a page. You find them in early user comments, in the product’s built-in limitations, and even in how the company decides to sell it. Here’s what we’re picking up so far.

User skepticism and the "black box" issue

Over on Reddit, in a thread in the r/taxpros community, a potential user who sat through a demo shared their hesitation. They said, 'It's hard to tell from that how well it would work in practice and how easily I can get my staff to actually use it.'

Reddit

This points to a common headache with tools that you can’t try on your own. When a product is hidden behind a mandatory sales demo, it’s really hard for teams to know if it’s a good fit without sinking a bunch of time into the process. You’re basically left guessing whether the "black box" will do what you need it to do for your specific ways of working.

That’s a different world from platforms like eesel AI, which let you set everything up yourself. You can connect your knowledge sources and see it work in minutes, not after a week of back-and-forth with a sales rep. eesel AI even has a powerful simulation mode that lets you test the AI on thousands of your past tickets, risk-free. This gives you a clear, honest look at how it will perform before you ever let it talk to a customer.

The eesel AI simulation dashboard, a key feature missing from some Combinely reviews, shows how AI can predict automation performance based on past data.

A narrow focus can be a blessing and a curse

Combinely’s laser focus on accounting is its strength, but it’s also a big limitation. The platform is built for the workflows of accountants, and primarily inside Outlook.

But what happens when you want to automate things in other parts of your business, like IT support or HR? Or what if you want an AI assistant to help out in other tools your team relies on, like Zendesk, Jira Service Management, or Slack? You’d probably have to go out and find a whole separate tool for that.

This is where a more flexible platform can offer a lot more value down the road. For example, eesel AI connects with over 100 different tools right away. It can pull knowledge from help desks like Freshdesk, internal wikis like Confluence and Google Docs, and your chat platforms. This means you can build helpful AI agents for your entire company, not just one department.

A screenshot showing the wide range of integrations eesel AI supports, a contrast to the narrow focus noted in Combinely reviews.

A lack of fine-grained control

The "proactive" part of Combinely means the AI is making the call on when and how to jump in. For a lot of firms, that idea of handing over the keys can be a little nerve-wracking, especially when dealing with sensitive client data.

The public information about Combinely doesn’t get into the details of how much you can customize its behavior. Can you set rules for which types of emails it should handle? Can you define exactly when it should flag something for a human?

In comparison, eesel AI is built around a fully customizable workflow builder. You get complete control to decide which tickets the AI handles, when it needs to escalate to a person, and what actions it can take, from simple things like tagging a ticket to more complex tasks like using an API to look up order info in Shopify.

The eesel AI interface for setting custom rules and guardrails, which offers more control than what is suggested in Combinely reviews.

Combinely’s pricing: What we uncovered

If you go looking for Combinely’s pricing, you’re going to come up empty. It’s not listed on their site or anywhere else.

This isn’t unusual for new startups selling to bigger companies, but it’s not great for buyers. First, it means you can’t just try it out, you have to talk to sales just to get a price. Second, the cost can be a total mystery. Without a clear pricing model, it’s tough to know if you’ll be charged per user, per AI interaction, or something else entirely, which makes budgeting pretty tricky.

For teams that just want to know what they’re getting into, this can feel like a bit of a red flag.

For teams that prefer predictability, eesel AI has clear, public pricing plans that are easy to figure out. There are no surprise fees that punish you for having a busy month. You can even start with a monthly plan and cancel whenever you want, which lets you test it out, prove its value, and scale up without being locked in.

The verdict: A promising tool for a specific niche

From our review, Combinely looks like a smart, well-funded startup with a solid team. They’re tackling a real and costly problem in the accounting world, and their specialized focus could save firms a ton of non-billable hours.

However, the downsides are hard to ignore. The fact that you can’t try it yourself, its narrow focus on accounting in Outlook, and the lack of clear pricing make it a bit of a gamble.

For firms that want a powerful and flexible AI platform that can automate work across the entire business, a tool like eesel AI probably makes more sense in the long run. With its huge list of integrations, easy self-serve setup, and handy simulation tools, you can take the guesswork out of AI and see the value right away, whether you’re in accounting, customer support, IT, or all three.