At the time of our last review, pricing started at $349.99/year for a single user. Join the thousands of people like you already growing their businesses and knowledge with our team of experts. We deliver timely updates, interesting insights, and exclusive promos to your inbox. However, if you own a big business, prefer locally stored software, or want industry-specific reports, QuickBooks Desktop could be a better fit for your business. QuickBooks Online’s month-to-month subscription service starts at $30 a month (totaling $360 a year). Or, to save money, you can try QuickBooks’ typical offer of 50% off for three months (though choosing the discount waives your free trial).
Compare QuickBooks Online to Desktop
One is sleek and modern, and the other seems to have been designed for a cubicle. The company has updated its help centers to be more user-friendly, but there’s still no email support. Both options, however, are working to reduce long hold times on the phone by now offering a callback feature. In addition to having more integrations, QuickBooks Online also has better integrations. QBO’s integrations cover more business needs and include multiple payment gateway options. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro offer a good number of helpful integrations and add-on products.
That being said, large businesses may be ok with sacrificing some ease of use for advanced capabilities. As businesses increasingly embrace digital transformation, many are opting for QuickBooks Online and other cloud-based solutions that offer accessibility, obtaining an employer identification number for an exempt organization flexibility and collaboration across devices and users. Probably not, unless your business absolutely needs advanced inventory management features, barcode scanning, or assembly builds.
QuickBooks Online VS Desktop: Features
If you invoke the guarantee, QuickBooks will conduct a full n evaluation of the Live Bookkeeper’s work. Work from anywhere with the power of the cloud and real-time, secure collaboration. The key difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is how the data is stored and hosted — cloud vs. desktop. Meaghan Senn is a writer from North Carolina with experience in B2B, technology and digital marketing topics. Throughout her career, Meaghan has worked with B2B, software and digital marketing businesses. Some accountants dislike QuickBooks Online’s limited functionality, accounting control definition limited report customization, and dependency on the internet.
- For example, it may be more suitable for businesses with complex inventory management needs or those wanting offline access to their financial data.
- QuickBooks Online integrates with over 750 third-party apps, and we highlighted the most notable integrations in our guide to the best QuickBooks Online integrations for small businesses.
- While they share many of the same features, QuickBooks Desktop’s features are often more developed, except when it comes to invoicing.
- The compensation may impact how, where and in what order products appear, but it does not influence the recommendations the editorial team provides.
By providing feedback on how we can improve, you can earn gift cards and get early access to new features. Let us know how well the content on this page solved your problem today. All feedback, positive or negative, helps us to improve the way we help small businesses. This easy-to-use and feature-rich software is ideal if you have no bookkeeping experience and want top-notch customer support. Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro and Premier have notoriously poor customer support (QuickBooks Enterprise support has better priority support). The online version of QuickBooks is much easier to use than the desktop version.
Over 2.3 million Desktop customers have made the switch to QuickBooks Online.1
QuickBooks Online is optimized to be as user-friendly as possible and very easy to navigate. The side menu categorizes features for easy access, for example, aggregating sections for employees, their taxes, and compliance details under the Payroll category. It takes a bit of time to click around and understand where everything is, but a quick using balance sheets in accounting run-through is more than enough to familiarize yourself with what QuickBooks Online can do.
QuickBooks Online vs. Desktop pricing
QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop share the same basic functionality of organizing your accounting processes and automating much of the manual data entry work. It has faster load times and quicker response rates, all while requiring minimal local processing power. QuickBooks Desktop is a better fit for businesses that prefer to store their data locally and are less dependent on real-time updates or extensive collaboration.