QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: Which Accounting Software Is Best?

Our research shows that QuickBooks is a better accounting software than FreshBooks, almost across the board. QuickBooks would be a great fit for any business looking to really nail down their accounting — regardless of size and industry. For businesses in the hospitality sector, however, it’s worth exploring the best accounting software for hospitality businesses to find a solution tailored to industry-specific needs.

FreshBooks does fit in very well for small retail businesses — particularly if they have an ecommerce presence. Its inventory management features, and ecommerce integrations are available on its cheapest pricing tier, making it a great choice for small businesses in the retail sector.

In this guide, we’ll compare these two admirable accounting software providers on everything from pricing and features to ease of use and customer support. Check out this comparison table, which matches QuickBooks vs FreshBooks to give you a better idea of how they stack up.

In this guide:

• QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: Key Differences
• QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: Pricing
• Best for Features: QuickBooks
• Best for Ease of Use: Tie
• Best for Customer Service and Support: QuickBooks
• About Our Research
• Alternative Accounting Software Providers
• Verdict: Which Accounting Software Is Better?
• QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: FAQ

FreshBooks vs QuickBooks Online: Key Differences

FreshBooks and QuickBooks are two of the best accounting software providers available today, but they have some major differences. It’s these differences that could help decide which one is best for your business.

When QuickBooks is best

• QuickBooks is better than FreshBooks for larger businesses
• QuickBooks has more complex functionality than FreshBooks
• QuickBooks is a better value than FreshBooks

When FreshBooks is best

• FreshBooks is better than QuickBooks for small retail businesses
• FreshBooks has better integrations with ecommerce platforms than QuickBooks

Overall, QuickBooks has more features than FreshBooks — scoring a 9 out of 10 in our research for advanced features, compared to FreshBooks at only 4 out of 10 — due to extensive project accounting and cash-flow services. QuickBooks also makes many of these complex features available on its cheapest pricing tiers.

FreshBooks is a good fit for small online retail businesses, and tops our list of the best retail accounting software. It integrates with top ecommerce platforms and providers inventory management on all of its pricing tiers.

Read on for more information about how FreshBooks and QuickBooks compare with regards to pricing, features, and more.

QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: Pricing

At first glance, you might think FreshBooks is an overall cheaper option than QuickBooks. However, QuickBooks offers a more comprehensive feature set than FreshBooks, for less. What’s more, QuickBooks never places a limit on the number of clients your business can have — which could be essential.

We think that QuickBooks, on balance, offers better value for money than FreshBooks.

QuickBooks’ pricing plans let you get started from $20 per month with its self-employed plan. However, this plan is designed for freelancers and sole traders. So, if you’re running a larger business, we’d recommend the Simple Start plan, which costs $35 per month. The Simple Start plan lets you start a supplier database, create budgets and cash flow projects, and allows you to generate purchase orders.

FreshBooks’ pricing plans start from $17 per month with the Lite plan (although you can get 50% off for the first three months, making it only $8.50 per month), which gives you custom invoicing and lets you import expenses. However, it does limit you to 5 clients until you get to the Plus plan at $30 per month, or pay $55 per month for the Premium plan, which is why we consider QuickBooks a better value.

Both services offer a 30-day free trial (but no permanently free plans: You’ll need to try our guide to the best free accounting software for those). Here’s the in-depth breakdown of their plan pricing.

Best for Features: QuickBooks

Our research found that both accounting software services offer a broad range of the frequently needed accounting features, covering the basics of invoicing, expensing, and time tracking, with plenty of third-party integrations to handle everything else.

However, QuickBooks is simply unmatched in our research when it comes to features, scoring a perfect 10 out of 10 in nearly every category, from bookkeeping to accounts payable and receivable. FreshBooks scores highly overall with 7.5 out of 10 and 6.5 out of 10 for bookkeeping and accounts payable, but it didn’t get perfect marks since it lacks some useful features including budgeting and cash-flow projection. In the end, you just can’t beat QuickBooks, the best small business accounting software.

All features offer in-depth functionality as well, letting users tweak templates to get just the right setup. Here’s an overview of what to expect from each service.

Accounting

FreshBooks has a “Double-Entry Accounting” feature, which tracks revenue items against their related expenses. This gives users a mini snapshot of their profits and losses at a granular level. It’ll also automatically check that debit and credit amounts are equal to each other, pinpointing errors in the moment, and not leaving them for users to sort out during tax season.

Adding other income in FreshBooks

Financial transactions are imported and categorized into FreshBooks, with categories for equity, transfers, or refunds. You can export a summary report to Excel, if needed. You can also add your own accountant to a FreshBooks account with a few clicks, giving them the ease of exclusive access.

QuickBooks is similarly built around tracking all your expenses: it sorts transactions into tax categories and links photos of receipts to the transactions they represent, generating a variety of reports from the raw data. QuickBooks’ mobile app also uses smartphone GPS to automatically track miles driven, creating a report that logs accurate business trip deductions.

QuickBooks is our winner when it comes to the nuts and bolts of accounting, with neat extra features that can make your life easier.

Invoicing and Payments

QuickBooks offers six customizable invoice templates, automatically added billable hours (with integrations available for Google Calendar and the time tracking service, QuickBooks Time), automated reminders, alerts to let users know when their customers have viewed or have paid an invoice, recurring invoices, automatic matching, and pairs payments to invoices to leave a paper trail for who has paid what.

QuickBooks also offers bill scanning on its Essentials and Plus plans, something FreshBooks can’t match. QuickBooks also lets you create purchase orders on all of its plans.

Designing an invoice within QuickBooks

FreshBooks offers an invoice generator, which not only lets users create a custom template complete with a logo, but it includes a ‘thank you’ email to accompany it. You can quickly add tracked time and expenses as well, and you can set up taxes to be added automatically if needed.

You can automate follow-up reminders to be sent at set intervals, and you can charge late fees either as a percentage or a flat rate. FreshBooks’ software lets businesses accept payment through Automated Clearing House (ACH) bank transfers, and major credit cards (Mastercard, Visa,  American Express, and Apple Pay).

QuickBooks takes the cake again with its affordable range of accounts payable features.

Expense Tracking

Quickbooks’ business expense tracking features can integrate with users’ accounts across platforms, including bank accounts, credit cards, PayPal, Square, and more. Users can create custom categories to automatically shunt expenses into, and can run reports for added visibility.

Managing expenses in QuickBooks

The mobile app can snap photos of receipts, and then automatically process the information, adding it fluidly. This feature also applies to invoicing, letting users add receipt images to their invoices when needed. There’s also a built-in cash flow statement feature, which keeps users updated on their profits and losses at any given time.

FreshBooks has many of the same expensing abilities: you can connect bank accounts and credit cards, support multiple currencies, photograph and log receipts, categorize expenses to make tax filings easier, and back everything up on the cloud. You can mark client-specific expenses as billable to that client, so that the extra charge is automatically included with the invoice.

This one is too close to call for us, both providers are strong across the board.

Time Tracking

FreshBooks includes time tracking features in its core plans. It offers a timer – available across mobile and browsers – that users can clock in and out with, and includes fields to note which client to bill and how each time period was spent. With the right integration, you can track time from within Asana, Basecamp, Trello, and Teamwork, among others. Entire teams’ times are visible to you in a calendar view, allowing for a full bird’s-eye view of an operation in real-time.

FreshBooks’ time tracking functionality

QuickBooks, however, offers a feature-rich time tracking function at an additional cost. Called QuickBooks Time, the service is designed for assigning employees tasks in addition to allowing employees to track their time. The base plan is called Premium and costs $8 per user per month, on top of a base fee of $20 per month. It includes job and shift scheduling, real-time reports, time-off management, alerts, and even a time clock kiosk with facial recognition.

The other plan, Elite, costs $10 per user per month after a base $40 per month fee. It includes everything in Premium, plus project estimates that can be compared to actuals, a project activity feed, timesheet signatures, and geofencing. Both plans come with a deal offering half off of the base fee for the initial three months.

If you’re a small business comfortable with letting your employees manage their own time, FreshBooks offers the best time tracking. If your projects require more top-down oversight (and you have the money to pay for it), the QuickBooks Time add-on is for you.

FreshBooks’ time tracking feature is cheaper, but QuickBooks’ option offers better, practical features.

Payroll Processing

FreshBooks does not have a native feature for processing employee payrolls, but it does offer two integrations: Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), which costs $6 per user per month after a base $40 per month fee; and PaymentEvolution, a Canada-only payroll service that charges $2.50 per employee per payroll run.

All of QuickBooks’ plans offer a full-service payroll ability, including unlimited payroll runs, auto-calculated taxes, end-of-year forms, an online portal to let employees view pay stubs and tax data, support for garnishments and deductions, and downloadable historical data reports. The Premium plan also adds support for same-day direct deposit and workers’ comp administration, as well as an HR support center.

QuickBooks offers full payroll abilities, making it the clear winner here.

Integration with other software

Both QuickBooks and FreshBooks offer plenty of integrations with commonly used services for payments, payroll, ecommerce, bookkeeping, CRM, file storage, and marketing, among others.

We’ve included a partial list of the most popular options for each accounting service below. The full, searchable databases for both QuickBooks integrations and FreshBooks integrations are available online.

FreshBooks offers more integrations overall, and it even makes its API available to developers interested in creating their own.

FreshBooks’ range of integrations and open API make it the only choice, this time.

FreshBooks integrations

• Shopify
• Squarespace
• Zoom
• Google Workspace
• Gusto
• Stripe
• Fundbox
• HubSpot
• DropBox

QuickBooks integrations

• PayPal
• Square
• Shopify
• Fathom
• Gusto
• Housecall Pro

Reporting and Dashboards

Both accounting services offer plenty of reporting. FreshBooks has reports for profit and loss, sales tax summaries, client accounts, payments collected, and expenses. The dashboard is populated with the most relevant graphs and charts, covering outstanding revenue, monthly recurring revenue, total profit, revenue streams, spending, and unbilled time.

Invoicing with FreshBooks

QuickBooks users can find the Reports Center on their navigation menu, for a quick way to locate the software’s standard pre-set report templates or to customize new ones. A ‘management reports’ section lets users create professional versions, complete with a cover page, table of contents, preliminary pages, and endnotes. The pre-set templates include audit logs, balance sheets, statements of cash flow, open invoices, customer reports, sales tax reports, budget overviews, profit and loss reports compiled by month, class, customer, and year-to-date.

QuickBooks offers impressive custom reporting tools on almost all of its plans, which FreshBooks can’t compete with.

Best for Ease of Use: Tie

Both services offer a graph-filled main dashboard, with a vertical sidebar on the left, from which users can jump to a variety of categories that cover the main features they’ll use. Both services are also easy to pick up, with a relatively intuitive structure that should turn up the needed feature with just a few clicks, even via the mobile app version.

The FreshBooks dashboard

At the same time, neither service is perfect. Functionality for certain features may be too inflexible for some: FreshBooks’ ticketing system is a little stripped down, for instance. However, there are no large scale failures to highlight, and if you’re a typical user, you will likely be just as well off with either option.

And, when it comes to adding third-party integrations and add-on services, both FreshBooks and QuickBooks make it easy. However, some reviewers maintain that QuickBooks doesn’t make it quite as easy to unsubscribe from these extra services. This is an issue that FreshBooks does not face.

Both platforms are brilliantly easy to use, so there’s little to split them here.

Some of the resources on the QuickBooks online portal

Best for Customer Service and Support: QuickBooks

QuickBooks offers a searchable online portal, with articles and video tutorials to guide users through common issues. It’s divided into categories like ‘Reports,’ ‘Payroll and Workers,’ and ‘Advanced Accounting,’ among many others. There’s also an additional resource center, video training courses, a blog, and a community forum where users can interact with their peers.

If logged in, users will also have access to live support, either through a live chat function available from 6am to 6pm PT, Monday through Friday, or via phone call. If you’re on the QuickBooks Advanced plan, the support hours expand to 24/7 service, a perk that FreshBooks doesn’t match on any plan.

FreshBooks does have its own online support portal, with categories including ‘Dashboard & Settings,’ ‘Invoices & Payments,’ and ‘My Team.’ It also offers phone support (Monday through Friday, from 8am to 8pm ET).

In our research, QuickBooks was found to have the best customer support, scoring a 9.3 out of 10 compared to FreshBooks’ 4.3 out of 10 (it has no live chat, 24/7 support, or community forum), so we have to give the edge of QuickBooks on this one.

About Our Research

We take our research very seriously when it comes to business tools like accounting software: Our unbiased Tech.co research team took a hands-on approach to testing out each and every feature. For this guide, we followed specific metrics to measure QuickBooks and FreshBooks against each other. Here they are:

• Software attributes – How intuitive the software is
• Bookkeeping – How many bookkeeping features are available
• Accounts payable – How many accounts payable features are available
• Accounts receivable – How many accounts receivable features are available
• Advanced features – How many features like budgeting, forecasting, and project accounting are available
• Pricing factors – How much it costs and how many plans it offers
• Financial reporting – How many analytics tools are available
• Help & support – How available the customer support team is

Our testing team ranked every category, depending on the number and quality of core features offered. For more information about our methodology, check out our research guide to see how we rate and rank these business resources.

Accounting Software Alternatives

FreshBooks is the best QuickBooks alternative, but if you don’t want either, there are options. Here are a few other providers that may be a better fit for your business, including Zoho Books, which is one of our top picks.

QuickBooks vs FreshBooks: FAQ