FreshBooks is the go-to software for tracking expenses and invoices for small businesses, but it is quite expensive. Even if you are not a struggling small business or a freelancer, you probably are looking for cheaper or free alternatives. You don’t have to look too far – there are quite a lot of free or cheaper FreshBooks alternatives. It depends on what you need them for – not all of them have all of the features of FreshBooks, but if you don’t need all these features, you should be fine with their limited functionality. Here are five of these Freshbooks alternatives.
1. Wave
If you are looking for a free FreshBooks alternative, start your search with Wave. It’s a cloud-based software with double-entry accounting. It has invoicing, receipt scanning, payment processing, and payroll functionality, as well as extensive financial reporting. The downside is that being free could mean slowness at peak times, and you also might need support (only email support is free).
2. ZipBooks
ZipBooks is another free alternative with all the basic features and more. Its basic features include online accounting, invoicing, time tracking, and payment processing. The only paid feature of the program is Invoice Instant Payments where you can pay immediately (before the client pays the invoice), and you pay ZipBooks a small fee for the service. If you want to see how exactly ZipBooks compares to FreshBooks, check this comparison with FreshBooks.
3. Street Invoice
If you need mainly invoicing and don’t care much about advanced features, then Street Invoice is an option to explore. It doesn’t have all the perks of FreshBooks and other apps, but for simple billing and invoicing, payments tracking, and reports, it works well. It has a free version limited to fifteen invoices per month, a stripped-down feature set and three other paid plans (from $4.99 to $14.99 a month) with more advanced features.
4. Invoice Home
Invoice Home is another app to try if you are mainly after invoicing. What’s great about it is that it comes with tons of invoice templates. It doesn’t have a plethora of features as that is not its main focus. For simple invoicing, this app really works well. Invoice Home has a free and a paid version, though I couldn’t find publicly-accessible information about the features and the fees of the different plans.
5. GnuCash
GnuCash is an open source FreshBooks alternative, and it is very popular among open source enthusiasts. It’s free and you can use it either to manage your personal finances or to run your small business’ financial/accounting operations. GnuCash is a desktop application available for Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. You can use it to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses, or as a checkbook register. It also has quite a lot of reports and graphs to visualize your financial activity.
All these alternatives, especially the free ones, make you wonder why you ever used FreshBooks. It’s true, they don’t have all the features of FreshBooks, but how many of these numerous features do you never use (but you pay for)? Check out these five FreshBooks alternatives and see if they work for you. If they do, switch to one of them and use the money you would have paid to FreshBooks for better purposes.
I am a fulltime freelancer who loves technology. Linux and Web technologies are my main interests and two of the topics I most frequently write about.
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