Invoice Ninja vs Wave vs QuickBooks Simple Start: Invoicing for a Small Business
Every freelancer or small business eventually needs to send professional invoices and track whether they’ve been paid, and the three tools that come up most often sit at very different points on the self-hosted/cost spectrum: an open-source tool you can run yourself, a free hosted app that makes its money on payment processing, and a full accounting suite that costs real money but does far more than invoicing.
Quick take
- Want to self-host and control your own data, and don’t mind a technical setup: Invoice Ninja (self-hosted).
- Want a free hosted tool that includes real double-entry bookkeeping, not just invoices: Wave.
- Need full accounting — payroll, inventory, multi-user roles, tax prep integration — and the budget supports it: QuickBooks Online Simple Start.
The three options
Invoice Ninja is open-source and self-hostable for free — install it on your own server or homelab box and there’s no software cost beyond your own hosting, with a paid white-label self-hosted option available for $40/year if you want to remove Invoice Ninja branding. The hosted version (invoiceninja.com) changed its pricing structure on January 1, 2026: the Free plan still covers 5 clients with unlimited invoices, Pro is $14/month for 1 user ($140/year), and Enterprise tiers scale by user count from $18/month (2 users) up through $300/month (100 users), confirmed directly on Invoice Ninja’s own pricing-update announcement. For a solo freelancer or very small team willing to self-host, this is the only genuinely $0-ongoing-cost option of the three.
Wave has historically marketed itself as fully free, and its Starter plan still is — unlimited invoices, estimates, bills, and full double-entry bookkeeping at no cost, confirmed on Wave’s own pricing page. What’s changed is that Wave now also sells a paid Pro plan at $19/month ($190/year, with a $9.50/month promotional rate for the first three months) that adds automatic bank-transaction importing, categorization, and payment reminders — features that used to differentiate Wave from paid competitors are now partly behind that tier. Wave’s actual revenue model, on both plans, is payment processing: 2.9% + $0.60 per card transaction on Starter (2.9% + $0 for the first 10 transactions/month on Pro, then $0.60 each after), plus optional add-ons for receipt scanning ($8-11/month), payroll (from $25-40/month), and bookkeeping advisory services (from $149-199/month).
QuickBooks Online Simple Start is the entry tier of Intuit’s full accounting suite, and by far the most expensive of the three at roughly $38/month per multiple 2026 pricing trackers, reflecting a 15-20% price increase Intuit applied across QuickBooks Online plans in mid-2025 that carried into 2026 renewals (Intuit’s own pricing page didn’t resolve on an automated fetch — verify the live rate at quickbooks.intuit.com/pricing before committing, since promotional first-months discounts are common). In exchange for the higher price, Simple Start includes proper accrual/cash accounting, mileage tracking, 1099 contractor management, and a direct upgrade path to higher tiers (Essentials, Plus, Advanced) that add multi-user access, inventory, and project profitability tracking — none of which Invoice Ninja or Wave’s free tiers attempt to match.
Cost compared (2026)
| Invoice Ninja | Wave | QuickBooks Simple Start | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free tier | Yes — 5 clients, unlimited invoices (hosted); fully free if self-hosted | Yes — unlimited invoices/bookkeeping (Starter) | No — paid only |
| Entry paid tier | $14/month (Pro, 1 user) | $19/month (Pro) | ~$38/month |
| Self-hosting option | Yes, free (open source) | No | No |
| Revenue model on free tier | N/A (self-hosted) or limited hosted free tier | Payment-processing fees (2.9%+$0.60/card txn) | N/A — no free tier |
| Full double-entry accounting | Limited (invoicing-focused) | Yes, included free | Yes, core product |
Which one should you actually pick?
- Comfortable running a Docker container and want zero recurring software cost: Invoice Ninja, self-hosted — see Portainer vs Yacht vs Dockge for a web UI to manage it, and Caddy vs Nginx Proxy Manager to put it on your own domain with HTTPS.
- Want free real bookkeeping without self-hosting anything, and can live with card-processing fees on payments: Wave Starter.
- Need payroll, inventory, or multi-user accounting and the higher price is worth it: QuickBooks Online, starting from Simple Start.
- Already comparing CRMs to track the leads that turn into these invoices: see Twenty vs EspoCRM vs HubSpot Free.
- Want to auto-create an invoice when a workflow trigger fires (e.g. a signed contract): see n8n vs Zapier vs Make — all three integrate with Wave and QuickBooks’ APIs.
- Need the contract signed before you invoice against it: see Documenso vs DocuSeal vs PandaDoc for e-signatures.
- Billing clients by the hour and need tracked time to feed these invoices: see Clockify vs Toggl Track vs Homebase.
- On QuickBooks Online and need to run payroll next: see Gusto vs OnPay vs QuickBooks Payroll — QuickBooks Payroll syncs natively if you picked Simple Start above.
- Invoicing for booked appointments or sessions, not one-off projects: see Cal.com vs Calendly vs Acuity Scheduling — a booking tool is the natural upstream step before invoicing for time-based work.
Accounting software referral placeholder — swap for a real affiliate link once a program is confirmed, for readers signing up for a paid Wave or QuickBooks plan.
Bottom line
Invoice Ninja is the only genuinely free-forever option if you’re willing to self-host; Wave is free for real bookkeeping too, but now nudges serious users toward its $19/month Pro tier and always earns from payment processing either way; QuickBooks Simple Start costs the most by a wide margin but is the only one of the three built to grow into full small-business accounting rather than just invoicing.