What QuickBooks costs now

Read from Intuit’s own pricing page on 14 September 2026: Simple Start $38 a month, Essentials $85, Plus $140, Advanced $340. There is also a free ledger tier, which is new.

Those headline numbers are usually shown next to a half-price introductory offer, which is where people get caught. You sign up at $19 and renew at $38. Simple Start at full price is $456 a year.

For a business with inventory, payroll and an accountant in the file every month, that can be money well spent. For one person sending a dozen invoices, it is not, and that gap is what every tool below is aiming at.

QuickBooks alternatives compared

Cheapest paid tier and what the free tier really allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 14 September 2026.

Why accountants are lukewarm on it

This is a real search, and the answer is more specific than “it is expensive”.

The recurring complaints from bookkeepers are that the Online version diverged from Desktop and lost depth, that the automatic categorisation confidently miscodes transactions in ways a client will not notice, that bank feeds duplicate or drop entries, and that undoing a bad reconciliation is harder than it should be.

None of that means QuickBooks is bad software. It means the work the software does not do still lands on a human, and that human is usually the accountant. Worth asking yours which tool they would rather receive, before you pick on price.

Decide what your books actually have to do

The best advice in the r/quickbooksonline thread on this was not a product name. It was to write down what you do every month before you shop.

Connect the bank. Categorise transactions. Capture receipts. Produce a profit and loss and a balance sheet your accountant accepts. Handle VAT or sales tax. Run payroll, if you have staff. Track stock, if you hold any.

Most people need the first four. QuickBooks charges for the full set. Once your list is written down, the shortlist usually collapses to two options, and one of them is often free.

Whatever you choose, the underlying obligation does not change: you must keep records that support what you file. The IRS sets out what small businesses are expected to keep, and the equivalent rules in other countries are similar in substance. Software makes that easier; it does not make it optional.

The new AI-native cohort

Something genuinely new appeared in this category this year. Puzzle, Digits and Kick all start from the assumption that categorisation and reconciliation should happen without you.

The June 2026 thread on r/quickbooksonline asking about exactly these three drew fifty-five replies, and the tone from accountants was cautiously positive: they have clients running on them, they work, and they suit some entity structures better than others.

Two cautions. Newer products have shorter track records for the one thing accounting software must never do, which is lose or mangle history. And priced by transaction volume rather than per seat, they can cost more than QuickBooks at scale while costing much less at the start. Model your own volume.

Moving your books without breaking them

Switch at the start of a financial year if you possibly can. Mid-year migrations mean two sets of books for one filing period, and your accountant will charge you for the reconciliation.

Export before you cancel: chart of accounts, customers, suppliers, opening balances, and a trial balance as at your switch date. Most tools import customers and invoices cleanly and struggle with historic transactions, so plan to carry forward balances rather than every line of history.

Keep the QuickBooks subscription live for one month after the switch, read-only, and keep the exported files somewhere permanent. Records outlive software.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 14 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. Where a headline price is an introductory offer, we quote the renewal price as well, because that is what you will actually pay.

For accounting software we check four things that matter more than feature counts: whether it is genuine double-entry, whether bank feeds work in your country, what the free tier caps, and what an export produces if you leave. We also note where a tool is priced by transaction volume rather than per seat, since that changes the maths as you grow.

This page is comparison, not accounting advice. We read current Reddit threads for each tool, so the views here are from this year. No vendor pays for a place on this list.