The best QuickBooks alternatives for small business in 2026

What changes when you move to Imprest?

Start with your history. From QuickBooks Online, every transaction comes back to your first one, attachments included. That matters at tax time, when someone asks for the invoice behind a number from three years ago.

Your accountant gets a seat at no charge on every plan. On Starter, it’s you plus your accountant. Pro and Scaling have unlimited users, so adding a bookkeeper or a second person in the office doesn’t add a seat fee.

AI is making us more efficient, and we believe those savings should be passed on to small businesses in the form of stable everyday low pricing. Our plans are on the pricing page.

Day to day, Imprest’s AI sorts your bank transactions and drafts entries for you to approve. A few things post without you touching them. Bank rules you’ve set to post, payouts from Stripe, Shopify and Square, and Gusto pay runs all do. So does anything you enter through Claude or ChatGPT, which you can connect to your Imprest books on every plan. You can also ask questions about your books in your own words.

If you sell online, Imprest connects to Stripe, Shopify and Square and books each sale and payout. It sends invoices and takes card payments through your own Stripe account, and adds no fee on top of Stripe’s. Inventory starts on Pro, with FIFO (first in, first out: your oldest stock is costed first) or average cost, plus assemblies and location or department tags. If you run more than one company and want one combined report, which accountants call consolidated, that’s on Scaling, and we turn it on for you, company by company.

When do businesses start looking at other software?

A new hire or a second company is a natural time to look again, and QuickBooks may well still be the answer. Start with how each tool counts seats. QuickBooks Online Simple Start has one user, Essentials three, Plus five and Advanced 25, with accountant seats on top of every paid plan. Zoho Books Standard has three users, and Xero has no per-user license fees.

Then look at how each tool handles a second company. Each QuickBooks Online company has its own subscription, and so does each Zoho Books organization, FreshBooks business and Xero organization.

If you’re on Desktop, Intuit stopped selling new Pro Plus, Premier Plus and Mac Plus subscriptions to US customers after September 30, 2024. Existing subscribers can still renew, so you can pick the moment to move to the cloud.

How does the move work?

You don’t have to stop QuickBooks to try Imprest. QuickBooks Online stays your system of record until the day you switch. What you enter there copies over every day or two, or sooner when you press Sync Now. So you can keep working the way you do now and check your own numbers in Imprest before you switch, starting with the 30-day trial.

Before you switch, Imprest checks each account against your QuickBooks trial balance. A trial balance is the list of every account and its balance on one date. When the two lists tie out, your balances came over, and if one is off you can look into it while QuickBooks is still your system of record.

The switch is final. QuickBooks syncs one last time and then stops for good. That’s by design. If both systems kept pulling in the same bank transactions, every dollar would be counted twice. A common choice is the first of a month, once the month before it is closed, so the cutover lines up with a clean period end.

On QuickBooks Desktop for Windows, a small tool reads your company file and brings your full history in one move. You then compare a trial balance in both for the same date. There’s no side-by-side period for Desktop, so pick the day ahead of time.

You’ll set up recurring templates, sales tax rates and bank feeds again. Estimates, purchase orders, past reconciliations and the audit log stay in QuickBooks. Payroll costs come over as journal entries, while your payroll records stay in QuickBooks. Moving your books costs nothing extra on any plan, and the 30-day free trial doesn’t need a card. The full list is on the switching page.

Whatever you choose, ask whether your open invoices and bills come over as open items, so your receivables and payables still show who owes what. And export your reports before you cancel. The guide to exporting everything from QuickBooks Online says what to save first, and how to switch from QuickBooks Online walks through the whole move.

How do the options compare?

Six tools, same questions. Every fact comes from the vendor’s own site or help center, and the sources at the bottom carry the dates. Imprest publishes this page and sits in the first row.

Cost and seats

Fit and history

Inventory, companies, payroll and AI

How have QuickBooks prices changed?

Price is one of the first things owners compare. Here are QuickBooks list prices for the last six years, set beside U.S. inflation. The notes under the table give the date and source of every figure.

When will another option suit you better?

If you want to pay nothing, start with Wave Starter, Zoho Books Free or QuickBooks Online Free, each with a $0 plan. Imprest has no free plan. Zoho Books Free is for revenue under $50,000 a year, and QuickBooks Online Free is for one user.

For books on your own computer, you have four routes. GnuCash is free and has no subscription, and you set it up yourself. AccountEdge is $20 a month for Pro and runs on a Mac or Windows. Sage 50 Pro is $72.92 a month on Windows, with a one-year minimum. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise starts at $2,210 a year for Gold and keeps your Desktop file and workflows. More on that route is in leaving QuickBooks Desktop.

A company that needs a full ERP (enterprise resource planning system), meaning one system for accounting, purchasing and warehouses across several companies, should look at Oracle NetSuite or Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. NetSuite sells an annual license by quote, with a one-time implementation fee on top. Business Central starts at $80 per user a month, paid yearly, through a Microsoft partner.

Startups that want software built around AI from day one can also look at Digits and Puzzle. Digits lets you add extra entities free up to 250 transactions a year, and Puzzle’s Core plan has five seats, which suits a founding team.

Would you rather someone else did the books? A bookkeeping service such as Pilot will. Pilot’s Essentials plan is $99 a month for up to $100,000 in monthly expenses. It keeps the books on the cash basis, which records income and expenses when the money moves, not when you send or receive the bill.

And stay on QuickBooks when it’s working. That’s true when your accountant works in QuickBooks, or an app you rely on connects only to QuickBooks. It’s true if you run QuickBooks Payroll and want your pay history in one place. And if you’re mid-year, it can make sense to wait for the start of the next one. Current plans are in QuickBooks Online pricing 2026.

Data and methodology

Prices are US list prices before promotions, taken from each vendor’s own site on the date in the sources list. A few prices only appear after the page loads in a browser, so we read them there. Where a vendor’s pricing page didn’t answer a question, we used its help center and said so in the sources.

Suggested citation: Imprest, “The best QuickBooks alternatives for small business in 2026,” published November 2, 2026, imprest.ai/learn/quickbooks-alternatives.