QuickBooks Online Review 2025: Pros, Cons, Alternatives

You might be using an unsupported or outdated browser. Jennifer Simonson is a business journalist with a decade of experience covering entrepreneurship and small business. Yes, QuickBooks has a mobile app that lets you send invoices, track expenses, capture receipts and monitor cash flow from anywhere.

FreshBooks

Zoho Books is best for those who are already using Zoho products to manage their businesses, as it offers seamless integration and is more affordable than QuickBooks overall. If you need accounting software to run and grow a business, QuickBooks is the more robust choice. While every business is different, the best form of software integrates effortlessly with payroll, expense tracking and banking software, says J.R. When your small business outgrows the spreadsheet method, accounting software like QuickBooks is the next logical step.

QuickBooks Pricing and Plans

The high-end Advanced plan adds a Finance Agent for financial planning and KPI analysis, and a Project Management Agent that features continuous project cost allocation to help teams stay within their project budgets. “Get it right the first time” carries much more significance for accounting operations than for most other business processes. They praise its integration and inventory management capabilities, which are especially useful for small businesses.

• $21/month Currently discounted to $2.10/month for 3 months
• Freelancers, retail shops, contractors and small business owners use software like QuickBooks to manage day-to-day finances.
• That’s why at Tech.co, we have full-time product researchers to re-run this testing process regularly.
• Its unlimited income and expense tracking, along with multi-company support, also put it near the top of our list.
• Objective and comprehensive business accounting software ratings rubric.

Best for Simple Accounting

QuickBooks is an accounting software offering features like automated bookkeeping, invoices, billing and expenses, time tracking, and payroll processing. You won’t find standard business management features like payroll and time tracking, but there are multiple subscription plans starting at $5.99 per month (paid annually). AccountEdge is a straightforward, desktop accounting software for businesses that want full control of their books. FreshBooks is adept at basic invoicing and time tracking, making it ideal for service-based businesses.

What is accounting software?

• Companies can add invoices, estimates, expenses, time, bills, purchase orders, etc., to store all the necessary information about a project in one place.
• QuickBooks is arguably the most popular accounting software option available, but it isn’t the only solution.
• While still desktop-based, AccountEdge has transitioned to a subscription model, requiring monthly or annual payments.
• QuickBooks Online connects with more than 750 apps across categories like payroll, inventory, CRM, time tracking and e-commerce.
• Other recent QuickBooks Online updates include better functionality for the Payroll add-on, which can now download multiple payroll reports bundled into a single Excel file across payroll runs, at any time after the run that you decide you need it.
• They also point to its high price for growing businesses and report difficulties with mileage tracking, integrations and other features.

QuickBooks mobile app also supports taking pictures of receipts to match its information with existing transactions. Users can filter the expense data based on category, date, payee, status, and delivery method for easy understanding. QuickBooks also provides users with an idea about project profitability. Companies can set up rules to categorize recurring transactions and create custom tags for noncurrent liabilities definition income and expense tracking. The invoices are instantly payable via debit and credit cards, ACH, Apple Pay, PayPal, and Venmo.

TallyPrime – Best Perpetual License Option

Again, these were judged by whether they were included automatically in the plan, as a paid add-on or not at all. For pricing, our primary concern for an alternative software option to QuickBooks was its starting price. We also look at less tangible benefits, such as customer support quality and ease of use.

Project Tracking: Accurate, Comprehensive Accounting of Costs

Many small businesses and freelancers find it a cost-effective solution, particularly its free version that meets the needs of solopreneurs. All paid plans come with custom invoices, sales receipts, online payments and payment reminders. NetSuite users praise its customization options that allow them to tailor the software to their specific needs.

While ideal for project-based businesses, Xero may not suit manufacturing or distribution sectors without third-party integrations. Compare that to QuickBooks’ Simple Start Plan, which includes these features but only one user, while its Advanced plan caps at 25 users. The best QuickBooks alternatives include cloud-based options like CustomBooks and Xero, free software like Wave, and one-time purchases like TallyPrime. For Forbes Advisor SMB, Dennis covers HR, payroll, payment processing, business formation and many other products and services for small and midsize businesses. As an example, a company’s accounting software costs may total $4,000 a year, while its benefits amount to $5,500 (150 work hours saved at an average of $30 an hour plus $1,000 due to fewer errors and penalties). High-end accounting packages add more forecasting and analytics features, as well as personalized customer support.

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FreshBooks and Wave are our other top picks, respectively, for service-based companies and sole proprietors who don’t need payroll features. Moreover, it has also improved in other areas, including account reconciliation, bank feeds, custom fields, and project management. QuickBooks Online remains the small business accounting service to beat, thanks to its depth, customizability, insightful AI Agents, and top-notch reports. I am responsible for content in the AI, financial, graphic design, operating system, photo and video editing, productivity, and small business categories, among others. QuickBooks offers many different products at different price points.

Reviews

Limited account users with each plan. Chat and phone support available Monday through Saturday in all plans. Robust feature set includes record-keeping, reporting, invoicing and inventory management, plus a capable mobile app. The products support material requisition multi-factor authentication (MFA) and allow companies to assign various roles and permissions to provide specific levels of access, from least privileged (the default) to most privileged.

The platform includes plenty of functionality for streamlining accounting tasks that might otherwise be missed or forgotten. Quicken, the granddaddy of all personal financial solutions, is now a hybrid solution. If you’re a self-employed worker, how fast can you find out whether you’re on track with your income how much will it cost to hire an accountant to do my taxes this month? But how easy is it to discover how much money you’ve spent on lattes, gas, or work clothes this month? QuickBooks Online remains an Editors’ Choice winner for SMB accounting solutions, thanks to its flexibility and thoroughness. The app’s billing, inventory, reporting, and transaction features go well beyond those of competitors.

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The desktop and online versions of AccountEdge’s accounting software support payroll management and account reconciliation, as well as UPS integration and links to Shopify stores. Businesses looking for an on-premises accounting software solution will appreciate AccountEdge’s command centers, which put advanced financial data management tools within easy reach. It also offers automatic time tracking for accurate invoicing — one of the few core accounting tools that QuickBooks lacks entirely. QuickBooks is a great option for small businesses that want full-featured accounting software but, if you’re just using it for invoicing purposes, you may want to consider an alternative. When it comes to QuickBooks vs. Quicken, QuickBooks is designed for businesses and includes tools for invoicing, payroll, expense tracking, sales tax and financial reporting.

You simply assign transactions (bills, estimates, expenses, invoices, payments, purchase orders, and time) to specific projects. The site also supports multi-item assemblies and service-based sales. It also supports electronic bill payment through QuickBooks Bill Pay, a feature that no other competitor offers. QuickBooks Online offers all the sales transaction forms you might need, from invoices and estimates to credit memos, sales receipts, and statements. The records themselves are more thorough than most I’ve seen, and the software supports more import formats (CSV, Excel, Google Sheets, and QuickBooks Desktop) than others. AI Agents work behind the scenes in many areas of QuickBooks Online, providing automation and insights that can support your business operations.

Depending on your budget, it may be worth it for your small business. You can get QuickBooks Online for as low as $30 per month at regular cost or pay as much as $1,340 per year for QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise. There are plenty of free accounting apps available that are similar to QuickBooks. We wanted to gauge the opinions of real users of these QuickBooks alternatives and turned to third-party websites to get a gauge of how these customers felt about their experiences with them.

AccountEdge Pro’s desktop accounting software adopts the familiar, generic interface of apps designed for Windows PCs and Macs. All Zoho Books plans, including the free version, support automated bank reconciliation that identifies and matches transactions from your bank statements to your accounting records. In addition to its free plan for a single user and an accountant, Zoho Books sells five complete accounting packages priced from $20 a month for three users for Standard. Zoho Books delivers the core accounting features small businesses need at an affordable price, and without an excess of bells and whistles. Manufacturers and wholesalers have unique accounting needs that aren’t addressed in the standard one-size-fits-all accounting software products sold by many vendors.