QuickBooks Online vs Wave: Pricing, Features, and Which One Fits (2026)

QuickBooks Online and Wave sit at opposite ends of the small-business accounting market, and for most owners the choice comes down to one question: has your bookkeeping outgrown free. Wave gives you real double-entry accounting and unlimited invoicing at no monthly cost, which is hard to beat for a freelancer or a micro-business with simple books. QuickBooks Online costs money every month, but it adds inventory, deeper and more customizable reporting, payroll through a paid add-on, and a large network of U.S. accountants who already work in it. If free covers what you do, Wave usually wins; if you need those extras or expect to grow, QuickBooks tends to be worth the bill.

The quick version:

• Wave's core accounting and invoicing are free, while QuickBooks Online starts at $20 a month for Solopreneur and $38 for Simple Start at current prices.
• Wave makes its money on payment processing and payroll rather than a subscription, so its real cost depends on how much you invoice and whether you run payroll.
• QuickBooks handles inventory, more customizable reports, and a five-tier plan range that scales with a growing business, where Wave keeps things simpler with fewer features.
• Neither moving to Wave nor cancelling QuickBooks preserves your full QuickBooks history with its attachments and audit trail, so archive that history before you cancel.

QuickBooks Online vs Wave at a glance

Prices are U.S. list prices in 2026 and change often, so confirm the current figure on each company's pricing page before you decide.

Pricing compared

Wave uses a two-tier model at current U.S. prices in 2026: a free Starter plan that covers unlimited invoicing, expense tracking, and bookkeeping, and a Pro plan at $19 a month, or $190 a year, that adds automatic bank feeds, receipt scanning, auto-categorization, and lower payment fees. The subscription is not where Wave earns its keep. It charges 2.9% plus $0.60 per standard card transaction when a customer pays an invoice online, and its payroll add-on runs $40 a month plus $6 per active employee in the United States. So a business that invoices heavily or runs payroll through Wave is not really using free software; it is paying by usage instead of by month.

QuickBooks Online has five plans at current U.S. prices in 2026: Solopreneur at $20, Simple Start at $38, Essentials at $75, Plus at $115, and Advanced at $275 per month. Payroll and payment processing are billed on top of those figures. Intuit has raised prices most years, which is one of the reasons owners look at free tools like Wave in the first place.

Line the two up and the gap is real at the low end. A freelancer paying nothing on Wave, against the $38 Simple Start plan, saves around $456 a year on the subscription alone. The comparison narrows once you need features Wave does not offer, or once your invoice volume makes the payment fees a bigger line than a QuickBooks plan would have been.

Is Wave really free?

The accounting and invoicing are genuinely free, with no trial clock and no forced upgrade, which is unusual in this market and the main reason Wave is popular. What is free is the software you use to record and send. Wave earns on the transactions that flow through it, so the honest way to read the price is to add up what you expect to pay in payment processing and payroll, then compare that total to a QuickBooks plan. For a business that sends a handful of invoices a month and takes payment by check or bank transfer, Wave can stay close to free. For one that collects most of its revenue by card through Wave, the percentage fees add up.

Support is the other place the free plan shows its price. According to NerdWallet's review, live support is limited to paying customers, so a free Starter user leans on help-center articles rather than a person.

Where QuickBooks Online pulls ahead

Both tools cover the daily basics well: invoicing, expense tracking, bank reconciliation, and financial statements. The distance opens up past the basics.

QuickBooks tracks inventory on its Plus and Advanced plans, and Wave does not offer inventory at all, so a product business that needs to track stock and cost of goods will find Wave thin. Reporting is the other clear gap. QuickBooks reports are deep and customizable, especially higher up the range, while Wave's reports are more limited and cannot be filtered by dimensions like department, location, or customer. QuickBooks also carries a large third-party app marketplace and a five-tier plan range, so it scales as a business adds people and complexity, where Wave holds at two plans.

The softer advantage is the accountant network. Far more U.S. bookkeepers and accountants work in QuickBooks every day than in Wave, so if you ever hand the books to a professional, finding one who already knows the software is easy in the United States.

Where Wave pulls ahead

Wave wins on simplicity and on price for the right business. A solo owner or a micro-business with straightforward books gets real double-entry accounting, unlimited invoices, and a clean mobile app without a monthly fee, and there is less to learn than in QuickBooks. For someone whose bookkeeping is a few invoices, some expenses, and a year-end handoff, Wave does the job without charging for capability they will not use.

One boundary is worth knowing before you commit. Wave Payments and Wave Payroll are built for the United States and Canada, so a business operating outside those two countries will run into limits that QuickBooks, sold in many markets, does not have.

Who should choose which

Choose Wave if you are a freelancer, contractor, or micro-business with simple books, you want to stop paying a monthly accounting bill, and you do not need inventory, heavy reporting, or a deep bench of integrations. For that owner, free and simple is exactly the right trade.

Choose QuickBooks Online if you track inventory, rely on customized reports, want payroll from the same vendor as your books, or expect to grow into more users and more complexity. The plan range and the accountant network are what usually tip a scaling business toward QuickBooks even when Wave would have been cheaper today.

Either way, one thing does not change: the decision to switch accounting software is separate from the decision about what to do with the history sitting in QuickBooks right now.

Switching from QuickBooks to Wave? Export your history first

Moving to a free tool is a sensible answer to a climbing QuickBooks bill, but a move and a complete record are not the same thing. Wave is built around bringing in recent transactions through connected bank accounts and uploaded statements to set up your balances, not lifting years of QuickBooks detail into Wave intact. That leaves a bigger gap than a full conversion would, and the records left behind tend to be the ones you are most likely to be asked for later.

Three things routinely stay in QuickBooks after a move to Wave:

• Your attachments, meaning the receipts and documents attached to transactions, along with the link showing which transaction each file belongs to. QuickBooks' own export separates the files from their transactions, and a Wave import does not carry them at all.
• The audit log, the record of who entered or changed each transaction and when. Wave does not keep an audit trail of its own, so this history has nowhere to land.
• Your full multi-year general ledger and year-by-year reports in the form QuickBooks kept them.

That gap only becomes a real loss because of what happens next. When you cancel a paid QuickBooks Online subscription, Intuit keeps the company in read-only mode for 12 months and then deletes it permanently. After that deletion the company is gone, and resubscribing opens a new, empty company rather than restoring the old one. A free trial gets only 90 days. The read-only year explainer covers exactly how much time you have.

The safest time to build the archive is while QuickBooks is still live, before you move to Wave and before you cancel. Get a complete, verified copy of the QuickBooks company first. If you would rather not spend days rebuilding receipts and reports by hand, that is the service we run. We build one complete, audit-ready archive of your QuickBooks Online company: the full general ledger in both cash and accrual basis, every financial report for each year, every attachment still linked to its transaction, and the audit log, delivered as a single download so you can move to Wave and cancel with your whole history preserved. Our step-by-step guide to making a complete backup before you move to Wave walks through the same sequence.

If you are closing the business rather than switching, the same archive can help support a future IRS request for records, long after the subscription is gone.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wave cheaper than QuickBooks Online?

On the subscription line, almost always. Wave's core accounting and invoicing are free, while QuickBooks Online's Simple Start plan is $38 a month at 2026 U.S. list prices. The fuller comparison depends on usage: Wave charges 2.9% plus $0.60 per online card payment at current prices and bills payroll separately, so a business that collects a lot of revenue by card or runs payroll may find the totals closer than the free label suggests.

Can I move my data from QuickBooks Online to Wave?

You can bring your recent activity and account balances into Wave, but it works more like re-establishing your books than lifting your full QuickBooks history across. Import capabilities change, so check Wave's current help pages for what it supports, and plan to keep a separate, complete copy of your QuickBooks history rather than assuming the move preserved everything, including your attachments and audit log.

Will I lose my QuickBooks history if I cancel after switching to Wave?

You can. A cancelled QuickBooks Online company goes read-only for 12 months, then Intuit deletes it permanently, and resubscribing does not bring a deleted company back. Anything the move to Wave left behind is erased on that schedule unless you archived it first, which is why the archive should come before the cancellation.

Do I still need my old QuickBooks records after moving to Wave?

Usually. The IRS generally expects business records to be kept for at least three years, with longer periods in some cases: four years for many employment tax records, six years if income was substantially understated, seven years for a worthless-securities or bad-debt claim, and no limit at all for a fraudulent or unfiled return. Those windows outlast what a Wave import carries by a wide margin, and your CPA can tell you which one applies to you.