Wave's core accounting product costs nothing, and it isn't a stripped-down trial version designed to push you toward a paid plan — full double-entry bookkeeping and invoicing, free, indefinitely. That alone makes it worth naming first, because QuickBooks Simple Start starts at roughly $35 a month for what is, for a genuinely solo business, often the same basic job.
| Tool | Entry plan | Price/mo | Users |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wave | Starter (accounting, invoicing) | $0 | unlimited |
| Wave | Pro (receipts, bank import, auto-categorize) | ~$19 | unlimited |
| Xero | Starter (20 invoices, 5 bills/mo) | ~$15 | unlimited |
| Xero | Growing (unlimited invoicing) | ~$42 | unlimited |
| QuickBooks | Simple Start | ~$35 | 1 |
| QuickBooks | Essentials / Plus | ~$65 / ~$99 | 3 / 5 |
The catch with Wave, and it's a real one, is that receipt scanning, automatic bank import and auto-categorization all sit behind the ~$19/month Pro tier — manual bank entry on the free plan gets old fast once transaction volume picks up, which is exactly when a lot of Wave users end up paying anyway. Xero takes a different approach to the same problem: every plan, even the cheapest Starter tier at around $15, includes unlimited users, which QuickBooks conspicuously doesn't — Simple Start is capped at a single user, and you have to move up to Essentials or Plus just to add teammates.
Both QuickBooks and Xero nudged prices up again this year, which is worth knowing if you're comparing against an older quote — and both lean on introductory discounts, often 50% off for the first three months, that make the sticker price at signup look better than what you'll actually pay by month four.
What decides this one, more than the numbers, is who else needs access to the books. Wave suits freelancers and micro-businesses with straightforward income and expenses — clean, free, and genuinely enough to run a Schedule C without complaint. Xero is the better fit the moment you're planning to grow a team, since unlimited users on every tier means adding a bookkeeper or a co-founder doesn't trigger a plan upgrade — it's also the more common choice outside the US, with a correspondingly large app ecosystem. QuickBooks remains the American default mostly because of accountant familiarity: if you're working with a bookkeeper or CPA, there's a good chance QuickBooks is simply what they already know, and that institutional fluency is worth something even at the highest price of the three.
Solo and simple, start on Wave for free and only move to Pro once manual bank entry actually becomes the bottleneck it eventually will. Planning to hire, or want the cheapest path to a multi-user setup, Xero is the better value. If your accountant has a strong QuickBooks preference, that preference is usually worth deferring to — the software's job is partly to make their job easier too.