QuickBooks Online vs. Zoho Books

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
QuickBooks Online
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
QuickBooks Online is a SaaS version of the QuickBooks product. It contains all of the features found in the local version. Higher-priced plans include greater automation, payment management, inventory and time tracking, and analytics features.
$38
per month
Zoho Books
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Zoho Books is an accounting solution that is designed to help small businesses manage their finances. This solution includes dashboards and a wide variety of reports. Business users can automate tasks and set up custom workflows. Zoho offers a 14 day free trial.
$0
For businesses with turnover <50K USD per annum
Pricing
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Editions & Modules
Simple Start
$38
per month
Essentials
$75
per month
Plus
$115
per month
Advanced
$275
per month
Free
$0
For businesses with turnover <50K USD per annum
Standard
$20
per month per org
Professional
$50
per month per org
Premium
$70
per month per org
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsZoho Books is available for both monthly and yearly plans. Users who sign up for the annual plan get a discount.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Features
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Payroll Management
Comparison of Payroll Management features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Zoho Books
-
Ratings
Pay calculation7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Benefit plan administration7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Direct deposit files9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Salary revision and increment management9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Reimbursement management9.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
8.3
Ratings
8% above category average
Zoho Books
7.8
Ratings
2% above category average
API for custom integration8.70 Ratings7.80 Ratings
Plug-ins8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
9.7
Ratings
15% above category average
Zoho Books
9.2
Ratings
10% above category average
Single sign-on capability9.60 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Role-based user permissions9.70 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
8.1
Ratings
3% above category average
Zoho Books
8.7
Ratings
10% above category average
Dashboards8.60 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Standard reports8.20 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Custom reports7.50 Ratings9.00 Ratings
General Ledger and Configurable Accounting
Comparison of General Ledger and Configurable Accounting features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
8.5
Ratings
9% above category average
Zoho Books
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Accounts payable9.20 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Accounts receivable9.40 Ratings8.20 Ratings
Cash management8.70 Ratings7.00 Ratings
Bank reconciliation9.10 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Expense management8.70 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Time tracking6.90 Ratings8.80 Ratings
Fixed asset management8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Multi-currency support7.00 Ratings9.20 Ratings
Multi-division support9.20 Ratings00 Ratings
Regulations compliance9.20 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Electronic tax filing9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Self-service portal8.80 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Global Financial Support8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Primary and Secondary Ledgers8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Intercompany Accounting8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Localizations8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Journals and Reconciliations9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Enterprise Accounting8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Configurable Accounting7.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Centralized Rules Framework8.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Standardized Processes8.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Inventory Management
Comparison of Inventory Management features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
7.5
Ratings
2% above category average
Zoho Books
7.0
Ratings
5% below category average
Inventory tracking8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Automatic reordering7.00 Ratings5.00 Ratings
Location management8.10 Ratings00 Ratings
Manufacturing module7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Order Management
Comparison of Order Management features of Product A and Product B
QuickBooks Online
8.4
Ratings
8% above category average
Zoho Books
8.7
Ratings
12% above category average
Pricing8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Order entry8.00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Credit card processing8.60 Ratings6.70 Ratings
Cost of goods sold9.30 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Order Orchestration8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
End-to-end order visibility9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Order exception Resolution8.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Small Businesses
QuickBooks Self-Employed (discontinued)
QuickBooks Self-Employed (discontinued)
Score 8.9 out of 10
QuickBooks Self-Employed (discontinued)
QuickBooks Self-Employed (discontinued)
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Zoho Books
Zoho Books
Score 9.0 out of 10
Accounting Seed
Accounting Seed
Score 6.3 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
SAP S/4HANA Cloud
Score 8.6 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.2
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
1.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.8
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Availability
2.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
1.1
(0 ratings)
5.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
3.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Configurability
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
1.3
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
1.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
QuickBooks OnlineZoho Books
Likelihood to Recommend
I appreciate the ability to auto-generate invoices for recurring transactions, which saves time, as well as the option to set up auto-generated transactions. The report option is super helpful when reviewing information, as you can click to view the details in the report without having to go back and forth.
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Zoho Books is good for a company or organization that wants to keep track of invoices, payments, and cash flow. If you do not have a full-time accountant in your organization, it can work well as whenever you hire one or have someone check your books, the information they need will be there, provided it has been entered into Zoho Books. It works as a one-man operation or a small team. For larger teams, it would depend on how much information needs to be input on a daily basis.
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Pros
  • It enables me to do a P&L for each specific program as requested by the county for the grant money that they give us.
  • It enables me to do [an] organizational budget as well as a budget for each specific program
  • It enables the accountant and the auditor access at any time for transparency
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  • The projects feature is what we use a lot it helps setting up projects as well as tracking expenses and bills for the whole project. The budgeting feature is very developed, allowing you to budget by total project cost, total project hours, hours per task, or hours per staff.
  • Customer Estimates and Invoices are very easy to setup and send directly from the app (it also has a very nice and customizable reminder option).
  • Stock and pricing listings is very intuitive and easy and makes it a very helpful and time saving feature.
  • Bank reconciliation and Financial reporting are very developed and make it easy to share information with bookeepers and accounting specialists.
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Cons
  • Purchase Orders cannot be linked to multiple bill payments which makes tracking purchase orders in QuickBooks Online obsolete. Without the function we have to track this within a different more manual spreadsheet.
  • Would be helpful if you could "split" bank transactions directly from the "review" downloads from the bank. Currently, to split transactions to multiple accounts we need to first categorize, then review after assigning to 1 account.
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  • Printing checks - they only offer one vendor and they are expensive compared to QuickBook alternatives.
  • Their interface for bids - retainers and applying them against income could be improved, but once you know how it's easy.
  • Their recurring fees don't seem to always work the way I'd want. But overall they work.
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Likelihood to Renew
QBO needs better integration with non-Intuit products and developers need to use Intuit's open API to develop better add-ons. Clients are having a great deal of problems with their data importing from the bank and this takes time away from better revenue producing activities. Although the efficiencies are there, they are outweighted by the shortcomings of the product. When we ran a parallel of QBO versus other cloud accounting products, we had more issues with the QBO product than any other
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No answers on this topic
Usability
I had very little trouble setting up the program and migrating from our old accounting system. The daily usage is also very intuitive and easy. Anytime we run into minor trouble with the program, there are always tons of help available on YouTube, so we don't even look up the online manual anymore.
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Customization is the biggest struggle for us and most of the time we need to involve a tech person. The chat support is a great feature and very helpful. It would be great to be able to customize and create invoices and correspondence (templates) such are reminders in multiple languages within one organization. The currency (USD) would be the same. We have clients in different countries that don't speak English but pay in USD.
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Reliability and Availability
We have rarely had outages in the last 10 years. I can only recall 2 times in the last 10 years where we were not able to access our client files.
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No answers on this topic
Performance
Everything process has its bugs lately with the new interface. Nothing has worked smoothly since this all began last month.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
In my experience, most representatives keep me on the phone for hours, literally, for a single issue and then usually cannot resolve it satisfactorily. I have 10 open cases that need resolution and, in my experience, there has been NO follow-up communication on any of them.
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The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.
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Implementation Rating
The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
QuickBooks Online is an accounting software package that allows companies to use a cost-effective and efficient software package. QuickBooks Online allows companies to prepare their balance sheets and income statements. It connects with a variety of other applications, which allows you to be efficient. We are very pleased with QuickBooks Online, and we would highly recommend it.
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Cloud vs. desktop, this and the fact that Zoho Books syncs with our other Zoho apps were the most pressing reasons for switching to Zoho Books. As mentioned previously, we consider our accounting software to be an integral part of doing business efficiently, and we can now do that considering our systems are all integrated.
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Scalability
As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere
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No answers on this topic
Return on Investment
  • I think the help function is cumbersome and hard to use. When I go to refresh myself on a function, say quarterly, I feel like I have to cast about just looking for it.
  • The account reconciliation works, but in this place that could benefit from messaging, there are no easy helping functions flagging things like amounts that fit the discrepancy.
  • Even styling invoices and documents is more cumbersome than it should be.
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  • I was able to cut my costs for a more complete and easy to use tool.
  • Many transactions, and accounting tasks on 1 platform, reduction in time by a lot.
  • Clients can pay without leaving your website (less drop-off, better conversions).
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ScreenShots

QuickBooks Online Screenshots

Screenshot of the accounting and bank transactions interfaceScreenshot of an overview of the accounting inventoryScreenshot of book marksScreenshot of the business tax overviewScreenshot of the customer hubScreenshot of the dashboard

Zoho Books Screenshots

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