FreshBooks vs QuickBooks – Which One is Better for your Business?

Accounting software is a must-have!

In 2025, FreshBooks and QuickBooks are two of the most prominent accounting platforms. But how do you determine which one is right for your business?

We’ll detail the key features, pricing, and the best use cases for each accounting software solution. Keep reading!

Overview of FreshBooks

FreshBooks is an online accounting software purpose-built for solopreneurs, freelancers, consultants, and small service-based businesses. It emphasizes an intuitive interface and features designed to ease billing and invoicing, time tracking, expense management, and simple financial reporting.

Below is a summary of some of the primary features provided by FreshBooks:

Time Tracking

Good time tracking is important for seo service providers or consultants of any kind who use a billable hours model. With FreshBooks, it’s easy to track time:

• Track time directly against invoices and projects
• Set up hourly rates
• Add timer widgets to track your time have fun
• Create detailed timesheets
• Automatic generation of invoices for hours worked

The FreshBooks mobile app also allows you to track time wherever you are, whether that’s with manual time entry, stopwatch timers or automatic time capture using your location.

Invoicing

Creating professional invoices in seconds is the bread and butter of FreshBooks. You can:

• Generate, personalize and deliver invoices on the go
• Create repeating invoices that charge clients on a schedule
• Take online payments via credit card, PayPal, and more
• Streamline payment collections and late fees
• Other time-saving features include mileage invoices, deposit acceptance and credit card preauthorization for expedited payment.

Expense Tracking

Like many small business owners, you probably have all sorts of expenses associated with your work, from business travel to office supplies and software costs. FreshBooks enables you to:

• Take pictures of receipts and enter expenses on mobile app
• Complete list of organized expenses
• Mileage log for business vehicle expenses
• Export Transaction Data for Tax Season

If you also use the FreshBooks debit/credit card, you can make expense tracking even easier, as all purchases you make with the card are automatically imported to your account.

Project Management

FreshBooks is not a full-blown project management solution, but it offers useful tools for tracking projects, including:

• Creating projects and assigning tasks
• Setting project budgets
• Entering hours and expenses for each project
• Schedule job profitability report generation
• The monitoring of progress by means of project dashboards

For team cooperation, you can add clients and contractors to particular projects.

Reports and Financial Insights

FreshBooks includes a number of essential reports, among them:

• Profit and loss statement
• Accounts receivable aging summary report
• Expense reports
• Summary of transaction that have yet to be billed and are not categorized
• Customize raw accounting reports fields for your accountant

Your dashboard gives an overview of your income, expenses, account balance, account receivables, and expenses. FreshBooks will also look at your accounting data and provide you with financial insights and recommendations to optimize your billing for services like marketing.

Support for Accountants

FreshBooks includes features that make it easy to collaborate with accountants, like:

• Option for team member invitation, add accountant
• Accountant-specific reports
• Export accountant for use in tax preparation
• Bank transaction auto-import (higher tiers)

This lets your accountant get the data they need while keeping control of your own books.

What FreshBooks is Best For

FreshBooks is built for solopreneurs, freelancers, consultants, and small service businesses that want to:

• Send invoices to customers and receive payment more quickly
• Log billable time on projects
• Manage expenses on-the-go
• Teach high-level lessons in financial statements
• Collaborate with accountants seamlessly

It can’t compete with larger accounting platforms for advanced tools bigger businesses demand, however, it does a stellar job of the fundamental functions most small businesses need.

FreshBooks Pricing

FreshBooks has four paid subscription plans:

• Lite – $5.70/month
• Plus – $9.90/month
• Premium – $18/month
• Select – Custom pricing

The difference between the tiers is mainly in the number of clients you can bill and how many accounts the platform can connect with. One user account is included in all tiers — you can add more people from your team for $11/month each.

You can also get a free 30-day trial to try FreshBooks for yourself.

Overview of QuickBooks

One of the most widely-utilised bookkeeping platforms is QuickBooks. Built by Intuit, it has more powerful accounting features, more robust reporting, and much greater scalability than FreshBooks.

Here is a shortlist of some of the features in QuickBooks:

Comprehensive Accounting

QuickBooks delivers complete double-entry accounting functionality with:

• Customizable charts of accounts
• Automated journal entries
• Transaction custom fields and tracking
• Transfer Easy to accountant`s copy
• Handle multiple currencies strictly

You also receive earned key accounting reports like profit/loss, balance sheets, statement of cash flows, etc.

Inventory Management

QuickBooks helps with advanced inventory and order management features for product-based businesses like:

• Real-time inventory tracking across multiple locations
• Create purchase orders and track backorders
• Set reorder point alerts and plan for seasonal demand
• Multi-location inventory tracking
• Barcode scanning from mobile devices
• Generate inventory reports

Enhanced Reporting

In-depth reporting features in QuickBooks such as:

• Profitability reports by customer, item, location, etc.
• Expenses and income trend analysis
• Budget vs actuals reporting
• Reporting features that can be customized and saved
• Visual graphing & dashboards

Payroll Management

You can run payroll straight in QuickBooks with these features:

• Payroll tax preparation and filings
• Direct deposit
• Processing payroll-related forms, W-2s, etc.
• Payments to contractors and 1099 paperwork

Time Tracking

Time tracking is offered in QuickBooks Plus and above plans. Features include:

• Create detailed timesheets
• Add hours by customer and project
• Bill customers directly for time and expenses
• Other time tracking app integrations
• Auto-attribution based on location and geofencing

User Permissions and Access

QuickBooks programs also allow you to add users and customize permissions. For example, you may assign:

• Read only view to online bookkeepers
• Limited access for sales representatives that need to issue Rechnungs
• Give the accounting team full admin access

So it grows well as your team grows.

What QuickBooks Is Best For

QuickBooks is best for medium to large businesses that require:

• Strong accounting tools to keep your books accurate
• Custom tracking and reporting
• Inventory management
• Almost the payroll integrated directly with accounting
• Multiple access for several users with scalability
• Third-party business apps integration

Ultimately, QuickBooks scales with you, then adds the right depth of features to manage more complicated financials.

QuickBooks Pricing

There are three core QuickBooks Online plans:

• Simple Start – $17.50/month
• Essentials – $32.50/month
• Plus – $49.50/month
• Advanced – $117.50/month

The higher tiers include such features as payroll, time tracking and more customizable reports. You can add more users to any plan for an extra monthly per-person fee. Additionally, QuickBooks provides a 30-day free trial.

Key Differences Between FreshBooks and QuickBooks

Now that we have explored an overview of FreshBooks and QuickBooks features, let’s compare them head-to-head on a few important criteria:

Final Verdict

So, which software actually gets it right? A few essential questions to ask yourself are:

Is your business mostly trading time and services?

If you charge clients by the hour or project, FreshBooks has an excellent interface for tracking billable time and invoicing customers.

Do you require more complex accounting features?

QuickBooks is most likely a better choice for nuanced accounting needs such as double entry bookkeeping, financial statement creation or even inventory support.

Are you going to outgrow basic accounting functions soon?

If you see yourself needing features such as payroll, advanced reporting or multi-currency in the future, QuickBooks scales right along with complex requirements.

Is ease of use the highest priority?

If you get paid through more straightforward books that you organize yourself, FreshBooks exhibits a sleeker expectation to absorb information to become practical rapidly.

What is the size of your business in revenue and headcount?

For businesses that need more complex reporting or have larger teams, QuickBooks would be the best choice, whereas FreshBooks is ideal for small business and startups.

Choose the best software by considering your present and future needs. We need a comparison chart that also interpolates for trials to see that both FreshBooks and QuickBooks have a free trial, which is a good way to balance out the pricing discussion by actually trying out both options before committing.