Price
Both services have gone up in price over the years. QuickBooks Plus now goes for $99 per month and supports up to five users, while FreshBooks Premium costs $60 per month (plus $11 per additional team member). I think it's unlikely that the service-based small businesses FreshBooks targets will have more than five employees that need access to the site. As such, FreshBooks is likely to be more affordable in many cases. Both companies offer less expensive versions with fewer features.
Winner: FreshBooks
Setup
You need to jump through similar hoops to set up both applications. You create an account, answer some questions about your business, and set up connections to your financial institutions. Both have settings pages where you can specify preferences for how they operate and put some of the same options on record and transaction pages. QuickBooks offers two setup aids that FreshBooks doesn't: a global transaction categorization tool and free setup help by phone.
Once you complete these early steps, the sites take you to dashboards with an overview of your finances. QuickBooks has an edge here since it shows a to-do list and bank account balances.
Winner: QuickBooks
User Experience
Accounting is a dreary discipline that involves a lot of data entry and repetition. And it often falls to small business owners, who should instead be spending time on management and creative work. The good news is that accounting application developers strive to make their software as aesthetically pleasing and easy to use as possible.
QuickBooks offers professional and attractive pages, but its designs aren't as cutting-edge as you get with FreshBooks. It's also not as simple to use. Because QuickBooks can support larger, more complex businesses, some pages provide many options that smaller businesses simply don’t need. Navigation works fine in both.
Winner: FreshBooks
Viewing and Editing Your Transactions
When you set up connections to your online bank and credit card companies, these sites import cleared transactions (mostly expenses)—typically about 90 days. Both are very good at transaction management. They pull some of the details from the actual bank transaction (such as the date, payee, and amount). You can fill in additional fields of data, including the category (both guess at this, but neither is particularly good at it) and billable customer or project. Both allow you to apply categorization rules to similar transactions going forward and attach files.
QuickBooks does more overall. For example, you can split transactions and assign products or services to them. That said, FreshBooks' transaction pages look more appealing and better suit the needs of simpler businesses.
Winner: Tie
Organizing Your Contacts
Both applications allow you to create databases of customers and vendors to use in transactions. Each also provides record templates for customers (FreshBooks calls them clients). FreshBooks builds better homepages for its clients, but QuickBooks supports more details, such as credit limits and price rules. Both create dedicated pages for customers and clients with contact details, sales information, and links to related actions.
You can also build records for vendors and designate contractors, for example, as recipients of IRS Form 1099s. QuickBooks supports printing and e-filing of these forms if you pay an extra fee, while FreshBooks keeps a running tally of vendor payments so you can fill out the IRS forms yourself.
Winner: Tie
Selling Products and Services
QuickBooks' standard sales forms, like invoices, allow for more depth and customization, as well as more types (like sales receipts and sales orders). That said, FreshBooks lets you create retainers and proposals in addition to common sales forms. Both support multiple languages and currencies and allow you to accept online payments. They also provide status pages for accounts receivable, where you can easily see which invoices are in draft form and overdue, for example.
Here, as in other elements of the applications, FreshBooks tailors its feature set to smaller businesses (especially service-based ones), while QuickBooks takes things a step further for more complex companies.
Winner: QuickBooks
Paying Bills and Documenting Expenses
QuickBooks has one advantage over FreshBooks here: It supports online bill-pay for an extra fee. But both sites allow you to manually enter bills and receipts and mark them as paid. You can also upload scanned bills and expenses (or even email them to a special personal address). The apps will then extract some of the documents’ details and use OCR to fill in a form on the site. You can categorize bills and other expenses (which is critical for income taxes) and assign them to customers or projects.
Winner: Tie
Inventory Tracking
You can create simple item records in FreshBooks and turn on inventory tracking. Then, if you try to sell more of an item than you have, it warns you.
QuickBooks, on the other hand, has more robust inventory tools, including the ability to create item assemblies. You can record both the sales and purchase price of an inventory item, enter a starting value and reorder point, and see the quantity on purchase orders. When you create an invoice, a pop-up window shows the quantity on hand and on a purchase order.
Winner: QuickBooks
Mobile Access
Both FreshBooks and QuickBooks offer apps for Android and iOS that replicate much of the charts, records, and transaction forms you get via the browser experience. You can do most of your accounting work from them, except generate reports. I slightly prefer the design of QuickBooks apps overall.
Both apps allow you to snap photos of receipts and pull in some fields to use on forms. FreshBooks even lets you take multipart pictures of long receipts. You can also track mileage as you drive with either.
Winner: Tie
Support Options
FreshBooks and QuickBooks are fairly even when it comes to support. Both have 24-hour-per-day bots, online communities, and extensive documentation. Limited phone hours are available, too. QuickBooks also offers live chat during the week.
Winner: Tie
The Verdict: It Depends on Your Business
Here are the final win totals for each service:
- FreshBooks: 2
- QuickBooks: 3
- Tie: 5
Although QuickBooks technically comes out ahead, you should really take a close look at the categories it does better in to see if they matter for your business. And if you're struggling to choose between the two, here's our general advice:
- Pick FreshBooks if you want a cutting-edge user experience and features ideal for small, service-based businesses. It won't overwhelm you with options and features you don't need.
- Choose QuickBooks if you want more detailed records, reports, and transactions. Its flexibility and deep features make it a good fit for companies with advanced needs (especially in inventory).
And while you are thinking about money, make sure to check out our roundups of the best payroll, personal finance, and tax software.