Portage salarial or auto-entrepreneur?

My husband and I were looking into registering as auto-entrepreneur as we have recently moved to France and are keen to move across to the French system as soon as possible. We are both English teachers and work for an academy in Spain (at the moment, all our work is based in Spain), although we are looking to take some private students in France so that we would be invoicing different clients.

You suggested portage salarial might be a better option for us initially. This looks like a simple and straightforward solution for us however, we’ve had a look into this system and it seems that we would only receive around 50% of our earnings after the umbrella company has taken fees, charges etc. - is this correct? If this is the case, there’s no way we could manage losing 50% or our earnings. We are paid a fix rate for our work so could not pass additional fees on to clients, so for us it would mean a pretty big reduction in income.

Perhaps auto-entrepreneur would be the best option for us, providing we make sure we have additional clients to invoice asap? Unless there is an alternative option that we’re missing? If we do go down the auto-entrepreneur route, how many different invoices do we need and do we need to have different invoices each month, or is it enough to have multiple invoices over the financial year?