Best accounting software for small business in 2026

The same job costs $144 or $900 a year, depending on how they count people

Three people need to see the books. That is the most ordinary requirement in this category, and it is where the six products stop resembling each other:

Product	How users are priced	3 users a year	A fourth user
Akaunting, self-hosted	10 included on the $72 licence	$144	$0
Zoho Books	3 included, then $2.50 a month	$180	$30 a year
Wave	Unlimited	$190	$0
Xero	Unlimited	$300	$0
FreshBooks	Owner only, then $11 a month	$540	$132 a year
QuickBooks Online	Gated by tier	$900	$480 a year

Akaunting’s figure includes the Double-Entry app at $72 a year, because without it the software is not a ledger. Per-tier rates are the vendors’; the annual totals are arithmetic.

The QuickBooks row is the one worth staring at. Simple Start at $38 a month covers one user, so three people means Essentials at $75, and a fourth means Plus at $115 - $480 a year for one more login. On Xero, Wave and Akaunting the fourth person costs nothing at all.

Hours or things: the question that decides the shortlist

If you sell hours, time tracking that becomes an invoice saves you money every week. FreshBooks does this best, and inventory is irrelevant to you.

If you sell things, you need inventory, which removes Wave and FreshBooks entirely and pushes the rest up a tier: Zoho Books Professional at $40 a month, Xero Established at $90 a month, or QuickBooks Plus at $115 a month.

Almost every bad choice in this category comes from ignoring that split and buying on brand.

Xero’s US prices rise on 1 October 2026

This is published on Xero’s own site and applies to new and existing US subscribers:

Plan	Before 1 October 2026	From 1 October 2026	Change
Early	$25 a month	$27	+$2
Growing	$55 a month	$59	+$4
Established	$90 a month	$97	+$7

The same page adds that from that date the multi-organisation discount begins to be phased out. Meanwhile the advertised price was 90% off for six months for new US customers buying by 30 September 2026 - so a buyer signing in September pays $2.50 a month until March and $27 after that, an eleven-fold step.

Every figure in this guide’s tables is the left-hand column, verified on 20 August 2026. Read this after 1 October and Xero’s row becomes $27 a month rather than $25, which takes three users from $300 a year to $324 a year and changes nothing else: it stays fourth on cost, behind Akaunting, Zoho Books and Wave, and its rubric total still rounds to 4.7.

Both facts are the vendor’s. Neither is on the price card you see first.

Free tiers, as counts

Product	Free users	Free invoices	Other hard limit	Double-entry
Wave	Unlimited	Unlimited	US and Canada only for payments and payroll	Yes
Zoho Books	1 plus an accountant	1,000 a year	Revenue under $50,000 a year	Yes
QuickBooks Online	1, no accountant access	2 a month	1 connected bank account	Yes
Akaunting	2, by licence	1,000	1 company, and no rebranding	No, $72 a year extra
Xero	None	-	-	-
FreshBooks	None	-	-	-

Wave’s free plan is the outlier and the reason it tops this ranking: unlimited users, unlimited invoices, real double-entry, no revenue test. Its limit is a map rather than a feature list.

Nobody includes payroll, and the bases differ by 2.4x

Every one of these charges for payroll on top of the subscription, so the number that matters is the base fee plus the per-employee fee:

Product	Payroll base a month	Per employee	Files taxes
Zoho Payroll	$29 billed annually	$5	Yes, separate product and bill
Xero, powered by Gusto	$36	$6	Yes
Wave	$40	$6	Yes, all 50 US states
FreshBooks	$40	$6	Yes
QuickBooks	$88, bundled with Simple Start	$7	Yes
Akaunting	$5, or $60 a year	Not published	No - payslips only

QuickBooks does not sell payroll on its own: the cheapest bundle including it is Workforce Payroll with Simple Start at $88 a month, against $38 for Simple Start alone. Akaunting’s app is the cheapest and the odd one out - it prints payslips and files nothing, which is a different product from the other five.

One of these is not open source, whatever its homepage says

Akaunting describes itself as “online, open source and free accounting software”. The licence file in its repository is Business Source Licence 1.1, and the grant that matters reads:

You may make production use of the Licensed Work, provided you do not use it in any of the following ways: (1) Use the Licensed Work with a total of more than two users or one company or one thousand invoices.

So the free download is licensed for production use up to two users, one company and 1,000 invoices. Beyond that you buy an on-premise plan - a legitimate model, and not what open source means. Each version converts to GPLv3 four years after publication, so today’s release becomes open source in 2030.

The second thing to price: double-entry accounting is a separate app at $72 a year. Without it, a self-hosted Akaunting is an invoicing and expense tracker, not a set of books. With it, three users on your own server cost $144 a year - still the cheapest figure on this page, and not the $0 the download implies.

We record this because it is exactly the kind of claim a comparison repeats from a vendor’s homepage. The licence is one click from the repository, and it disagrees.

What we did not measure, and why it is not in the ranking

Accountant familiarity. In the United States most accountants and bookkeepers work in QuickBooks, and a ledger yours has to learn can cost more in fees than the software saves. It is probably the single most important factor for a US business with an external accountant - and we have no data on it. The previous version of this page gave “accountant compatibility” 20% of the ranking weight and scored QuickBooks 10 out of 10 on it, which implied a measurement nobody had made. So it sits here instead, as a question to put to your own accountant: what do you charge to work in Xero, or Zoho Books, rather than QuickBooks? Their answer is worth more than this ranking, and it is free.

Ease of use. Nobody here has closed a month in any of these six. Reading a pricing page tells you nothing about whether reconciliation takes ten minutes or an afternoon.

Geography. This ranking prices a US or Canadian business. Wave’s payments and payroll serve those two countries only, so outside North America Wave is not first and Zoho Books and Xero are the real contenders.

Migrating books is a date, not an export

The commonest planning error in this category is treating a switch as a file transfer. It is not. What actually moves between accounting systems is a conversion balance - a trial balance as at one chosen date, plus the invoices and bills still open on that date, plus your bank balances. Almost everything else stays behind.

What this means in practice:

• Historical transactions usually do not come with you. Plan to keep read-only access to the old system, or export the ledgers and statements as files, for as long as your jurisdiction requires you to retain records. Cancelling the old subscription the day you go live is how businesses lose their own history.
• Bank feeds are re-authorised, not migrated. You reconnect each account to the new provider, and feeds typically backfill only a short window. Anything older than that window has to be imported from statements.
• Reconciliation restarts. Every transaction from the conversion date forward has to be reconciled in the new system, whether or not you reconciled it in the old one.
• Mid-year payroll is the hard case. Moving payroll part-way through a tax year means re-entering year-to-date figures for every employee, and an error there surfaces at year end when it is expensive.

The rule that follows: migrate on the first day of a financial year. If you cannot wait, migrate at a quarter end and accept that the year’s reporting spans two systems. Migrating in month seven because a discount expires is a false economy, and the discount is usually worth less than the bookkeeping it costs you.

A trial that finds the ceiling instead of the features

Trials get spent clicking through features all six products have. The useful version looks for the wall you will hit in month six:

1. Import one month of your real bank transactions. Demo data is clean; yours is not. This is where feed coverage and duplicate handling show themselves.
2. Raise your three most awkward invoices. The one paid in two instalments, the one in a foreign currency, the one drawn down against a retainer. Not the simple one.
3. Add every person who will actually need access, and note what the total became. On FreshBooks that is $11 each; on QuickBooks it may force a tier change worth $480 a year; on Xero, Wave and Akaunting it is nothing. This step changes the decision more often than any feature comparison.
4. Run the report your accountant asks for each quarter, and send it to them. Their reply is worth more than your own assessment, and it is free.
5. Check your caps against last month’s real volume. Xero Early stops at 20 invoices and 5 bills a month; FreshBooks Lite stops at five billable clients; Zoho Books Standard stops at 5,000 invoices a year; QuickBooks’ free plan stops at two invoices a month. Caps force more upgrades in this category than features do.

Steps three and five are the two people skip, and they are the two that decide what you pay a year from now.

The promotional pricing, plainly

Three of the six are advertising a discounted rate rather than their list price:

• Xero: 90% off for six months for new US customers, until 30 September 2026, with the vendor’s own code and deadline published in its offer terms.
• QuickBooks: 90% off for three months, offered instead of the 30-day trial rather than in addition to it. Intuit publishes no end date.
• FreshBooks: 90% off for three months, badged a limited-time offer with no date attached.
• Wave: Pro at $9.50 a month for the first three months.

All real, all temporary. Every figure in the tables above is a list price, because that is what you pay from month four - and in Xero’s case, more than that from October.