Wave Vs QuickBooks Comparison 2021
Over the years, technological innovations have reformed our reality and everyday lives. These innovations have made astounding instruments and tools for making our day-to-day activities more comfortable and faster to carry out.
Families, businesses and people generally require monetary and financial management. There are some financial management software out there that can help you, your family, or your business track and significantly manage your resources.
We will be taking two of the most common and essential financial management software in the world of finance and management, Wave and QuickBooks, as well as their differences or similarities, assuming there are any.
If you are looking to select a financial management software, this review should help you pick the one that best suits your requirements.
Wave Vs Quickbooks
They are financial management and accounting software, which have similar functions that include tracking and managing income and expenses for similar businesses, individuals and families. However, Wave was the first to offer an integrated lending feature coming to the scene a whole year before QuickBooks’s online lending platform.
The Wave was initially owned and founded by Wave Financial Inc. and was launched in 2009. H&R Block now owns Wave. On the other hand, QuickBooks is owned by Intuit and was first released in 1983; its stable release was 2019.
To have a clearer picture and understand this comparison better, this article will be divided into segments.
- General overview
- Features
- Pricing
- Reviews
General Overview of Wave and Quickbook
Wave is an accounting and financial management software designed for entrepreneurs, specialists, families and individuals. It gives features including bookkeeping, creating professional invoices, billing, instalment tracking, payroll management, credit card management, finance management, and receipt scanning- all for free. It is only available on desktop versions of windows and mac, as the apps are not stable and there is none yet fully supported by android and iOS operating systems.
QuickBooks, with its different versions, is specifically for small businesses. It is a full-featured financial management and accounting tool for double-entry bookkeeping, inventory, payroll, managing expenses, budgeting and many more.
QuickBooks is web-based, and you can have access to your account from anywhere as long as there is an internet connection. It costs a lot more than Wave and has four different plans to select from. The most popular version of QuickBooks is QuickBooks Online.
Features of Wave and QuickBooks
Wave
As mentioned earlier, Wave is a free financial management software used to track personal finance and small business finance for businesses with employees ranging from 1-9. Let us take a look at some of its features, starting with its functions;
- Automated expense tracking
- Cash-basis accounting
- Tracks budgeting and loans.
- Creates invoices
- Generates financial statements.
- It is a desktop program.
- Directly-integrated lightweight e-commerce feature with PayPal, Etsy and Shoeboxed.
- It supports a Zapier integration that connects it to over a thousand add-ons.
- Customer Support is available.
Quickbooks
QuickBooks is solely for small business accounting, and here are some of its features;
- Tracks business income and expenses from multiple accounts.
- Sorts transactions automatically into tax categories.
- Organizes receipts
- Tracks mileage automatically.
- Allows you to capture your receipt.
- It can send and track invoices and lets you customize your invoices to suit your brand.
- Your accountant can access your account.
- Has integrations with over 600 third-party apps and also has built-in integrations with some Intuit apps.
- It is cloud-hosted
- It has a mobile app available on Android and iOS devices.
- Customer support is also available via calls and chats.
- Its most common version, QuickBooks Online, has four different subscription plans.
Pricing of Wave and Quickbook
Wave is available online for free, while QuickBooks operates on paid subscriptions. However, QuickBooks runs on a monthly subscription that you can cancel anytime you wish.
Wave
Wave is free and without limits on invoices, contacts and other features in contrast to freemium apps. The only thing you will need to pay for is adding payroll services, professional bookkeeping services and payment processing services. If your business is on a small scale and doesn’t require these extra services, then you can use Wave at no cost at all.
Quickbooks
For QuickBooks Online, there are four different plans you can choose from; the plans differ in extra features but have these features in common;
- Unlimited invoices
- Unlimited estimates
- Expense tracking
- Mileage tracking
- Reports
- Integrations with over 600 third-party apps
The plans available are;
- Simple Start: $25 (1 user plus accountant)
- Essentials: $40 (3 users plus accountant)
- Plus: $70 (5 users plus accountant)
- Advanced: $150 (25 users plus accountant)
You can choose to integrate your QuickBooks accounts with other QuickBooks services like QuickBooks Payroll and the likes but at additional costs.
QuickBooks Online also offers a 30-day free trial. Before you get excited, you might want to reconsider. The 30-day free trial is fair because you don’t need to input your payment details before accessing it. You don’t have to worry about sudden and unplanned withdrawals, but you have to subscribe to a plan once the trial is over because you’ll no longer qualify for discounts. QuickBooks is way more expensive than Wave, which costs nothing.
Reviews Wave and Quickbook
These two software serve similar purposes; however, we can easily see that each software has its pros and cons.
Pros of Wave
- Free.
- Easy to use.
- It has attractive invoice templates.
- Numerous features.
- Help from expert accountant available
- Good support material
Cons of Wave
- It is unsuited for large businesses.
- It has poor customer support.
- Multiple users cannot be added.
- No project management feature
- There’s a limited time tracking.
- There’s also limited inventory.
- Poor mobile apps
Pros of Quickbooks
- It is cloud-hosted, which means you will always be on the latest version as updates happen automatically.
- It makes accounting very easy.
- Ideal for small business and has features that can support medium-large sized business (Advanced plan)
- Wide integration capacity
Cons of Quickbooks
- Slow customer support
- Very expensive
- Might have excess to features that are not necessary for small businesses
- No access to discounts once the 30-day trial has been used.
With all the analysis made, the difference between Wave and QuickBooks is clear and below is a table that summarises it;
| Wave | QuickBooks | |
| Personal Finance | Yes | No |
| Business Accounting | Yes (Small employee business between 1-9 employees) | Yes |
| Create invoice | Yes | Yes |
| Track Mileage | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Integrations | Limited | Wide (over 600) |
| Customer Support | Yes | Yes |
| Subscription | Free | Monthly |
| Mobile App | Limited | Yes |
With Wave Vs Quickbooks serving the same purpose, choosing one can be quite confusing. Wave can easily be used as an alternative to QuickBooks because it is free and has a wide range of features that users have unlimited access to.
However, it has drawbacks, such as not being ideal for medium-scale to large scale businesses and not being as encompassing and stable as QuickBooks. This gives QuickBooks an edge over Wave, although the latter is still the best free financial management software. Whichever one you decided to go for, make sure it suits your business’s size, budget, and financial management needs.
We hope you thoroughly enjoyed reading this insightful comparison of Wave Vs Quickbooks. Read more of our blog for even more business tips!