FreshBooks vs Zoho Invoice Comparison

Freshbooks is ideal for a small service-based startup or agency. It handles the client cycle from estimates, project time tracking, invoicing, payments, and satisfaction. It lacks a CRM but that's a matter of sticking to their strengths. Instead it integrates with several CRMs. It's easy enough you can have someone running it with almost no training.

A main consideration in choosing Freshbooks is how closely you want CRM to be integrated with invoicing. Other in-class software like Zoho CRM+ Zoho Invoice is tight, but requires more setup.

Great looking invoices and templates, flexible and industry proven in consulting and technology industry

Limited integrations, control of automated billing reminders limited, price not as competitive for what you get. Zoho invoice integrates better and is free for automated reminders and invoices so unnecessary to even pay for freshbooks

I did like the interface and it was relatively easy to use. The reporting was also reasonably good (although no better than Zoho Invoice, the solution I moved to.)

As a freelancer, I used Freshbooks for several years. However, after they dropped PayPal support it became useless to me. As someone who works internationally 99% of my clients prefer to pay via PayPal so I had no choice but switch.

Easy invoice creation. Easy project creation. Track past invoice with ease.

None yet.

Being able to invoice clients and maintain their payment history is easy. I've had clients say they've already paid for an invoice or never got the invoice. The invoice history shows everything. Such a time-saver.

Many times I'm unable to download the invoice. Happens mostly around the beginning of the month.

The tracking functionality especially when you are issuing invoices. you can tell if the party on the other end has Opened the invoice as well as when payment was posted. You can create drafts and change them into real invoices as well and as a sales company the quote functionality is key. As well you can set up different services in your profile so when you create your invoices regularly it will auto populate prices for you as well as taxes, mileage etc.

I feel that this software needs to expand and create other apps that can connect with different aspects of your business. I.e connecting directly with payment processing providers to help with book keeping.

- Simple to setup - Good pricing for small business - Nice integration for payments - There's an iOS App - Its Cloud based

- Invoice customisation

Freshbook keeps tracking sent invoices to customer and keeps send automatic reminder to customer with overdue.

Freshbook is accessible,reliable and faster in invoicing and billing there no problem found while using it.

Clean, sleek looks. Super easy interface. Love the recurring invoice thing and the ability to invoice over email.

It's just not enough to get rid of Quickbooks and I don't really see the need in paying for both. I would love to use this one alone if I thought it would do everything.

I like to use Freshbooks for it is quite polished, intuitive website that supports invoices and estimates, expenses and hours logging. I can easily set invoice due dates, billing, bookkeeping/accounting etc. If you're looking for strong invoicing and billing features, I will recommend Freshbooks for easy and hassle free use.

No cons were added to this review

Besides the invoicing templates, it is a simple straight forward package that is usable by a small business. The expense categories are simople enough for non accountants to work with

The use of single entry accounting which Freshbooks uses may lead to the business outgrowing the accounting package. That is a fear we have.

Ease of use, user friendly, great design. This software helped me keep track of billing my clients, all of my invoices, etc. This was extremely helpful in my days as a freelance graphic designer.

No cons were added to this review

Very easy to invoice.

Time tracking methods/tool are totally lacking.

Hi Kent! Tim from FreshBooks here, thanks for taking the time to leave us a detailed review. I'm happy to hear that you're enjoying using the auto-bill, recurring invoicing aspect of the software! I definitely hear you when it comes to the lacking experience for time tracking. I'm not too sure if you've tried the new FreshBooks yet, but we did improve upon time tracking section so that you'll...

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Freshbooks is great for small businesses and people doing self-employed/freelance work. It makes it super easy to track time, expenses, and revenue, as well as send invoices and receive payments. There is also a mobile app to track time and input expenses/receipts on the go. In addition, the expense report and profit and loss make tax season a breeze. Overall, Freshbooks makes accounting straightforward and stress-free.

You can't have any duplicate invoice numbers, which is very frustrating after an invoice has been deleted. If you delete an invoice and then want to reuse that invoice number (so all your invoices are sequential and not skipping a number), you must undelete the original invoice, change the invoice number, delete it again, and then change your new invoice to the original number. It's just a lot of extra steps that could be avoided if duplicates were allowed only for deleted invoices.

The most Impactful feature in FreshBooks is the General Ledger where it holds the account data of your business. It is very important to have this feature because you can track the growth of your business.

I have nothing to complain about using FreshBooks. Everything I need for my business are here. I can easily track my financial records and this helps me to identify where could this business go in the future.

This program is designed for entrepreneurs to be able to manage accounting without having to be experts in finance. This application is focused on the monitoring of time, the generation of invoices, and the monitoring of the expenses of the company. allowing me to have organized the accounting of my business

There is the limitation of needing an Internet connection, but that is a minor problem nowadays. And finally, it does not allow you to make quarterly tax payment estimates

Helps in both invoicing and time tracking. Great overall quality and definitely easy to use. Several platforms integration for ease of payment.

Pricing is not too affordable, but all worth whatever the price is

Can build custom,well designed invoice for clients.Easy and simple to use even for a non-accountant type.It allows to track time and track expenses.Excellent customer service and connectivity to bank and financial institutions in a excellent manner.It has an easy access on mobile device also.

The report can be little improved to make more flexible and strong.Offer more flexible for the estimating module layout.

The user interface is very simple to use. I mostly work 4 hours daily on this and never get feel tried and it saves my time also. There are many inbuilt features that I used to create business flow charts which helps me to focus on weak areas.

It should add more feature to transfer invoices automatically. I hope this will be fixed soon in next version.

I like that has the ability to generate your own invoice letterhead and invoice numbers starting from whatever numbers you want

The version I had to use didn’t have a link to my bank account

I am using the free version and never had an issue with it. I've been using it for almost 10 years. The interface is clean and simple, and I love that I can track my projects using the computer and also on my phone with the timer feature. I don't do enough with my business to need to upgrade to a paid version but I would consider it if I went freelance full-time.

The invoice template is a little dated looking, but it doesn't bother me enough to figure out how to change that.

Most important is Billing Invoice Ledgering

It can be slow at times. I don't know if it has to do with the amount of memory

It has great invoice management options.

Some options on the platform can be simplified and made easier to understand how to use.

Invoice services and paytm services are good.

You should improve the history of invoice.

It is fast and easy to use. Allows me to quickly invoice clients. Nothing else is this easy to use. I only do this a few times a year. The ability to e-mail and collect via credit card is a great feature.

I have no issues with the software. I only use about 5% of the features so for what I want to do it works out perfect.

Zoho is a solid piece of software. Love that they have a client portal! Clients can login and see their amount due on a project and make payments. They can accept estimates and change orders and pay immediately. This helps us get our money fast!

We ended up choosing Freshbooks, but only because Freshbooks was more intuitive. This is a great software for anyone that doesn't like Freshbooks.

Dear Justin, Thanks for reviewing us. We are happy to know that you liked the client portal that Zoho Invoice offers. However, it's unfortunate for us that you chose to leave. If you can spare a few minutes and drop an email to support@zohoinvoice.com, we could know more details on the reasons behind your decision. We would love to have you with us! Regards, Harikrishna The Zoho Invoice team

Easily produces professional invoices and reports for the light user. Faster, simpler and cheaper than the competition. Highly recommended.

Recurring invoices could be easier. I need to set a manual schedule with a changing number of hours (items). Have not figured that out yet.

For simple recurring monthly invoices Zoho invoices provides a great free service in which it enables me to send monthly invoices at no charge. It works well with no issues.

That the user interface is not as friendly as some other products on the market like freshbooks. But who can complain when it is for free!

Full featured, simple to use and set up, excellent documentation, integrated with popular payment platforms. I moved from Freshbooks to Zoho, I can honestly say that I prefer Zoho. And, you can't beat the price.

Nothing - it really meets all of my needs.

My small consulting firm has used Freshbooks for a couple of years. Recently they "upgraded" their product and I lost very basic functionality that I relied on day-to-day. While not perfect, Zoho Invoice provides most of that functionality and at an over 50% drop in price. I really like the previous FreshBooks solution, and would have eagerly embraced the new, but you cannot release a new version...

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Three things. But keep in mind that even with these three things I find Zoho Invoice better suited to my needs over my current solution; Provide the option to include the expense date on the invoice!!!!! This is very basic and very needed. I see from reviews that people have been asking for this for several years. Provide a field for expense vendor. Sure I can setup a custom field, but when...

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It was fantastic for the price. You have a full suite of features for a fraction of what something like Freshbooks or Quickbooks cost. While it had significant limitations, the features are far and above what you would expect for the monthly fee

My review my be a little outdated as I have switched over to Quickbooks paired with an industry specific invoicing system. The main issue I had was that it was missing a strong estimation software that they had implemented in their CRM module. That baffled me as the CRM had a more customizable and robust system than their actual invoicing system did. What's more, it didn't translate over as cleanly as I would have wanted. This might have been fixed by now but the disparity between their different modules can be problematic.

Zoho Invoice had almost everything we needed. The customization was great, the way they had line items setup was perfect. They accepted both Paypal and Stripe right out of the gate with no wonky overlays. It is a little bit of a no-frills system visually but it does everything you want it to do. Then there's the price, for what you pay you really cannot beat this platform.

The only reason we switched away from the Zoho Invoice service was integrations. When we implemented Proposify it didn't integrate with Zoho Invoice but had a seamless integration with Freshbooks. If Zoho Invoice had more integrations (non-Zapier) it would be great.

Hi Shane, Thanks for the review. It's good to know you liked the online payment integrations we have. Regarding the integration with Proposify, we are sorry that it's not available right now. But, if we roll it out in the future, we shall let you know. That said, if you are interested, we can discuss how can set up the connection between these apps using our APIs. Cheers, Harikrishna

When I was researching Invoicing software to replace my long term use of FreshBooks I came across Zoho. I like how simple it was and how it was targeted to small business. I really liked their customer portal to send invoices to clients and have them review their accounts.

I wish Zoho would offer a little more flexibility with their free tiered account, I don't have high enough volume for their next paid feature set but their free version was limiting.

Simplicity, intuitive, and to fit into individual needs of different kind of businesses.

Lack of 'Custom Invoice Templates' and customs fields are okay, however i'd prefer the ability to customize it bit more., and giving different kind of businesses even more control.