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QuickBooks is a better accounting software provider than Sage because it offers better features across the board, as well as a stronger customer support team. But Sage is no slouch as it does beat QuickBooks in one key area: pricing.
We know that nobody starts a business for the paperwork. So, to save you time and money, Tech.co’s researchers tested and ranked all of the top accounting software available today, pitting QuickBooks vs Sage in the process.
Here’s how each service compares with the other in top categories, including pricing, support, features, and ease of use.
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| Businesses needing advanced financial insights and customization | Best for micro businesses, invoicing | |||||||
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| 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT, M-F | 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. CST, M-F |
Sage vs QuickBooks: Battle of the Accounting Software Providers
QuickBooks is best for small businesses, while Sage is best for micro businesses on a budget. This is because QuickBooks has the best accounts payable and receivable features, but Sage has the lowest monthly pricing. Sage’s cheapest plan, Start, is just $12 per month, while the cheapest plan from Quickbooks, Self Employed, starts from $20 per month, or $2 per month for the first seven months.
While the available features vary by plan, QuickBooks handily beats Sage across the board because it offers better tools, including bookkeeping, financial reporting, advanced features, extra software functionality, and it includes mobile use and integrations. QuickBooks also has better support than Sage because the QuickBooks Advanced plan has 24/7 phone and email support, while Sage doesn’t offer either on any of its plans.
QuickBooks offers higher plan limits than Sage. Even though both Sage and QuickBooks offer unlimited clients and invoices across all plans, QuickBooks is the only one to include unlimited estimates across all plans, while Sage only includes estimates in its Standard plan. Sage does offer higher user limits overall, with unlimited users on its Standard plan.
Pros
- Extensive analytics template customization
- Automatic alerts for mismatched balances
- Built in cash flow projection tools
Cons
- Steep learning curve for advanced functionality
- Limited customer support resources for self-help
- No time tracking features
- Solopreneur: $20/month
- Simple Start: $35/month
- Essentials: $65/month
- Plus: $99/month
- Advanced: $235/month
- 50% off for first 3 months
Pros
- Easy to use
- Integrates with Microsoft 365
- 30-day free trial
Cons
- App selection is limited
- Additional users cost extra
- Price from: $12/Month
- 30-Day Free Trial
- Deal: 70% off the first 6 mos
Sage vs QuickBooks: Pricing Plans
QuickBooks offers five plans with monthly costs ranging from $20 to $235 per month, while Sage only offers two plans, which are $12 and $23 per month.
QuickBooks’ first plan, Solopreneur ($20 per month), supports one user and offers a strong range of features, including some that Sage’s cheaper starter plan doesn’t. These features include receipt scanning, estimate creation, and custom reports. The Sage Start plan ($12 per month) is also for one user and has similar features, plus four tools QuickBooks Self Employed doesn’t have: an ability to record fixed assets, a supplier database, a client database, and overdue client payment tracking.
Next up is the $35 per month QuickBooks Simple Start plan, which adds those four Sage plan tools but not much else despite a price hike that puts it above the next Sage plan, Standard, which for just $23 per month adds two users and a host of accounts payable tools that QuickBooks reserves for its $65 per month Essentials plan. Sage Standard supports up to 5 users, but you’ll be charged another $3 per month for each user after the first two.
QuickBooks also has the $99 per month Plus plan, which supports 5 users and adds project accounting and forecasting tools that no Sage plan has, as well as the QuickBooks Advanced plan, which for a big $200 per month price tag supports 25 user but adds no core functionality.
In addition to QuickBooks’ main plans, businesses may want to get the QuickBooks Payroll add-on: Core is $50 per month, plus $6 per employee per month; Payroll Premium is $85 per month, plus $9 per employee per month; and Payroll Elite is $130 per month, plus $11 per employee per month.
Below is a comparison table covering all of the Sage and QuickBooks plans. QuickBooks has a 50% off deal for the first three months for those who skip the free trial, which is reflected in our table.
| Price | Users | Bookkeeping Does it include bookkeeping functions? | Accounts payable Does it include a range of accounts payable functions? | Accounts receivable Does it include a range of accounts receivable functions? | Project accounting Does it offers tools to track different projects? | Financial reporting Does it offer financial reporting tools? | Budget & forecasting Does it offer budgeting and forecasting tools? | |||
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| Sage | Sage | |||||||||
| Start | Standard | |||||||||
| $12 per month | $23 per month | |||||||||
| 1 | 1 | 1 | Unlimited | 3 | 5 | 25 | ||||
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Sage vs QuickBooks: Which has the best free plan?
Sage and QuickBooks do not offer a permanent free plan. However, both services offer a 30-day trial of their software for free, for any plan tier and the number of users typically allowed for that plan.
In addition, QuickBooks offers 90% off the first seven months, even if users are paying monthly. It’s worth noting that it won’t offer a 30-day free trial to users who sign up to this offer.
Best for Business Features: QuickBooks
QuickBooks and Sage both offer plenty of accounting features, but QuickBooks takes home the prize in every category. Here are the features each software does or doesn’t offer, including our researchers’ five-point scores for each.
Bookkeeping
QuickBooks (5/5) and Sage (3.8/5) both offer functionality for manually adding transactions, importing bank statements, and automatic bank reconciliation. They both reserve inventory management for their more expensive plans. QuickBooks offers receipt scanning and fixed asset recording, but Sage does not.
Accounts Payable
QuickBooks (5/5) offers a supplier database across all plans, while Sage (4/5) only includes this with the Standard plan. Both QuickBooks Essentials and Sage Standard let users track bills and expenses, set up recurring bills, and record payment in multiple currencies.
Accounts Receivable
QuickBooks (5/5) and Sage (4.3/5) share many accounts receivable features: Both will track overdue client payments, have a client database and online client payments, have invoices and estimates, can set up recurring invoices, will track invoices, and can send invoices via mobile. But QuickBooks lets users send payment reminders, while Sage does not.
Project Accounting
QuickBooks (4.5/5) supports time tracking, employee labor cost calculations, project-specific expenses, and project profitability tracking, while Sage (1/5) doesn’t offer any of these project accounting tools on either of its plans. Sage Standard does support time tracking, but only as a paid-add on for an additional $8 per month.
Reporting and Forecasting
Both QuickBooks (5/5) and Sage (4.2/5) support income statements, balance sheets, sales reports, and an uncommon accounting feature, cash flow statements. But QuickBooks supports custom reports while Sage does not. QuickBooks Plus offers more functionality that Sage doesn’t have: a budget management interface and the ability to set up multiple budgets.
Sage’s invoicing interface.
Best for Ease of Use: QuickBooks
Both Sage and QuickBooks are set up for easy navigation, with a main dashboard that displays the key stats to know and it is accompanied by a sidebar that links to further categories. Each of these categories offers in-depth stats, files, templates, and reports, along with settings that can be adjusted.
The main dashboards are customizable, letting managers predetermine which stats are most important to see first, from Receivables and Payables to the year-to-date’s revenue.
Best for Help & Support: QuickBooks
Our researchers score QuickBooks an above average 3.25/5 for its onboarding process, although this loses to Sage’s solid score of 4.25/5. Both offered a knowledge base and video tutorial, but only Sage had an in-software tutorial guiding users through each feature as it came up.
So why does QuickBooks have better help than Sage? It’s simple: because of its support options. The QuickBooks Advanced plan has 24/7 live support for phone, email, and live chat, while Sage only offers live chat support, with no 24/7 options and no phone or email help.
| Starting price | Free trial | Best for | Pros | Cons | Try now | ||
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| 14 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | 30 days | ||
| Managing sales and inventory | Experienced accountants and established businesses with complex financial needs | Businesses needing advanced financial insights and customization | Budget-conscious businesses | New businesses | Professionals requiring robust MTD-compliant tax support for VAT Return Self-Assessments | ||
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| Try Zoho Books | Try Xero now | Try QuickBooks | Get Quotes | Try FreshBooks | Get Quotes |
QuickBooks remains at the top of our list, but the other heavy hitters include Xero (4.5/5 overall), which starts at $12 per month and offers great integrations and mobile functionality.
Another top choice is Freshbooks (4/5), which is our pick for the best retail accounting software due to its inexpensive $19 per month plans, automated invoicing, and strong profit and loss comparisons. Alternatively, there is also Wave (4/5), which has a useful free plan.
Zoho Books (4/5) is another option because it offers plenty of automated features, from sending invoices and estimates to autoscanning documents to the cloud.
At Tech.co, we take our impartial research and analysis seriously, so you can have complete confidence that we're giving you the clearest, most useful recommendations.
After conducting an initial investigation to identify the most relevant, popular, and established accounting tools in the market, we conducted further research, including testing six major accounting software platforms.
Based on years of market and user needs research, we've established an accounting software testing methodology that scores these platforms against six main categories, and 25 subcategories - with a total of 1512 areas of investigation being considered overall.
We also put the platforms through their paces with hands-on testing to gain a deeper grasp of their average user experience. We dedicated 57 hours to carrying out 37 user tests, with a total of 555 tasks being completed in total.
Our main testing categories for accounting software are:
- Core accounting features - We check how adept a platform will be at managing accounting tasks, focusing on key bookkeeping features like invoicing, tax preparation, journal entry, time tracking, financial transactions, and payment support.
- Operational efficiency - We determine how capable a system is at ensuring day-to-day processes run seamlessly, paying close attention to third-party integrations, collaboration tools, AI automation, and customization options.
- Financial planning - We assess how capable a system will be at measuring income, profits, and losses. Specifically, we check for the presence and quality of forecasting and budgeting, inventory management, reporting, and compliance tools.
- Help and support - We asses how useful and reliable a platform's support system is, focusing on support options, whether it's 24/7, knowledge center accuracy, as well as cloud backup, and security safeguards.
- Pricing - We compare the overall cost of each platform, taking factors like monthly costs, set-up fees, hidden fees, and free plans into account. We also measure how strict contracts are, and how much it would cost for a business to terminate them early.
- User experience - An overall judgment of how easily users can interact with the platform. We tested each accounting platform and got our team to report how easy they were to use, how they felt when they were using them, and how likely they were to recommend the platform to another business.
When it comes to calculating a product's final score, not all testing areas are weighted evenly, with factors like ‘core accounting features’ and ‘operational efficiency’ being prioritized for small businesses, while sector-specific features are valued more highly for businesses across different industries.
We understand that accounting software is always evolving. That’s why at Tech.co, we have full-time product researchers to re-run this testing process regularly. It’s the only way to ensure our results remain reflective of the present day.
Learn more about our research.
Verdict: Which Accounting Software Is Better?
We recommend QuickBooks over Sage, due to its better features and support. QuickBooks is a great pick for small businesses, due to its reasonable price and sturdy accounts payable and receivable features, which are a core need for any business.
However, Sage does offer all the features most small businesses will need, and is available at a lower monthly cost, which makes it a good pick for an even smaller operation with a limited budget. You’ll need to be self-sufficient to pick Sage over QuickBooks, as Sage lacks the 24/7 phone and email support that you will benefit from with the higher-cost QuickBooks plans.
In the end, though, either software might be the right accounting solution for your business. To figure out which choice is best, take the next step and fill out our quick quotes form.
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