Wave vs QuickBooks Cost: A Year of Each, Priced

Wave is cheaper than QuickBooks on subscription at every level. Wave Starter is $0 and Wave Pro is $190 a year, while QuickBooks Online Simple Start costs $399 in a new customer's first year and $456 after that, and Essentials costs $847.50 in year one and $1,020 a year once the August 2026 price increase reaches your seventh invoice. On payment processing the gap narrows and can flip: Wave charges 2.9% plus $0.60 per card payment and QuickBooks Payments charges a flat 2.99% on invoices, so QuickBooks is cheaper per invoice below about $667 and Wave above it.

Most comparisons stop at the sticker price, which is the least useful number here. What a year of accounting software actually costs is the subscription, plus the processing fees on the invoices your clients pay through it, plus whatever you pay someone else to fill the gaps. This article prices all three for Wave and QuickBooks Online using figures read from waveapps.com, quickbooks.intuit.com and the QuickBooks Payments rates page on September 18, 2026. The full Wave fee list, including payroll and the Canadian prices that get mixed into US roundups, is on our Wave pricing page.

Wave vs QuickBooks cost, plan by plan

The QuickBooks first-year figures assume you take the 50% off for three months that the pricing page offered on September 18, 2026, instead of the 30-day trial; you get one or the other. They also account for a detail most price lists skip. Intuit raised Essentials, Plus and Advanced to $85, $140 and $340 for renewals on or after August 1, 2026, but its public pricing page still shows $75, $115 and $275 to new customers. Intuit's own announcement explains the gap: new subscribers keep their starting price for the first six months, and the updated price applies from the seventh invoice. So the number on the page is real, it just is not the number you will pay in month seven. Simple Start was not part of the increase.

What each subscription actually buys

The price gap exists because the products are not the same size. Wave is invoicing and bookkeeping for a small service business. Starter gives you unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records, but you add bank transactions yourself. Pro adds automatic bank imports, matching and categorization, unlimited receipt capture and automated late payment reminders. That is roughly the whole product.

QuickBooks Online Simple Start covers the same core for one user and adds things Wave does not offer at any price: sales tax tracking across jurisdictions, a large app marketplace, and free Intuit connectors for Shopify, Amazon and eBay. Essentials adds bill management and three users. Plus adds inventory, project profitability and five users. If you need project profitability, note that it starts at Plus, which is $1,680 a year once the new price applies, three tiers above the plan QuickBooks is usually recommended at.

QuickBooks Solopreneur, at $20 a month, is the closest thing Intuit sells to Wave's price point. It is built around a single person's Schedule C and quarterly estimates rather than a full ledger, so it competes with Wave Starter on price but not on bookkeeping depth. Our QuickBooks Solopreneur pricing page covers what it replaced and what it leaves out.

Payment processing: where the cheaper product can flip

If your clients pay invoices by card through the software, processing fees will usually cost you more over a year than the subscription does. The two rate cards look similar and behave differently.

Wave's fixed $0.60 makes small invoices expensive and large ones slightly cheaper. Set the two formulas equal and they cross at about $666.67. Below that, QuickBooks Payments costs less per invoice; above it, Wave does. On Wave Pro the first ten card payments each month carry no fixed fee at all, which makes them cheaper than QuickBooks at any size, but the waiver is capped at $6 a month, so it never pays for Pro by itself.

Both charge 1% on bank payments, and that line matters more than the choice of software. A $5,000 invoice paid by bank costs $50 on either platform, against roughly $146 to $150 by card. If your invoices are large, making bank transfer the default payment option saves more than switching products ever will.

Wave vs QuickBooks cost for three real setups

Here is what a first year costs, subscription plus card processing, for three common freelance and small-business patterns. Each assumes clients pay by Visa or Mastercard through the software and the QuickBooks customer takes the three-month discount.

Wave Starter is the cheapest line in every row, and the QuickBooks premium lands between about $380 and $450 a year across these setups. That is the honest price of the things QuickBooks adds. Whether it is worth paying comes down to three questions, not to the fees.

When QuickBooks is worth the extra money

Your accountant works in QuickBooks. Most US bookkeepers and CPAs do, and handing one a Wave file can cost more in their billable time than a year of the subscription difference. If you already pay someone to do your taxes or your monthly close, ask them first. Their answer usually settles it.

You sell on marketplaces. QuickBooks Online includes free Intuit connectors for Shopify, Amazon and eBay that post orders, fees and payouts into the books. Wave has none, so every marketplace payout lands as one net deposit you break apart by hand. Our Shopify QuickBooks integration and Amazon accounting software pages cover what those connectors do and where they stop.

You collect sales tax in more than one place, or you need more than one user. Wave is built for a small service business in one location. Once sales tax or a second person with their own login enters the picture, QuickBooks is the tool built for it.

If none of those apply, you invoice named clients, and you are comfortable reconciling your own books, Wave is the cheaper and perfectly adequate choice. Start on Starter and move to Pro when typing in bank transactions starts costing you more than $19 a month of your time.

Switching from Wave to QuickBooks, and what it costs

There is no official one-click migration between the two. Wave lets you export transactions, customers and reports as CSV files, and QuickBooks Online imports customers, vendors, a chart of accounts and bank transactions from CSV. Most people move their open invoices and balances, then start clean from a chosen date rather than rebuilding years of history. If you do need older bank activity in QuickBooks and only have the statements as PDFs, you can convert those PDF bank statements into QBO files and import them the same way a bank feed would arrive. Plan for an afternoon if your books are simple and a bookkeeper's invoice if they are not.

Where neither one fits: income from platforms

Both products assume your income arrives as invoices you send. If yours arrives as payouts from YouTube, Twitch, Patreon, Etsy, Gumroad or Stripe, both record the net deposit that reached your bank, while the platform's 1099-K reports the gross. The fees in between are both revenue you under-report and deductions you never claim.

That is the part Earnly handles. It puts every platform payout on one board as gross, then fees, then take-home per source, with a payout calendar showing when each platform pays next. It is not accounting software and does not replace Wave or QuickBooks; plenty of creators run it next to either one. If you are still choosing the ledger, our Wave alternatives and QuickBooks alternatives comparisons cover the rest of the field with current prices.