QuickBooks Online Review 2024: Features, Pros & Cons

quickbooks desktop vs quickbooks online

QuickBooks Enterprise is designed for large businesses or small enterprises and starts at $1,481/year or $142/month. You can add payroll, more users, and cloud hosting for additional fees. Not only is QuickBooks Online easier to use, but it offers additional support — for a fee. QuickBooks Online users can sign up for QuickBooks Live Bookkeeping to assist with getting the books up to date and managing bookkeeping tasks. As far as other add-ons, QuickBooks Online integrates with over 750 business apps and programs — well over twice the number of integrations you’ll find with Desktop. As a QuickBooks ProAdvisor, Mark has extensive knowledge of QuickBooks products, allowing him to create valuable content that educates businesses on maximizing the benefits of the software.

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QuickBooks Online wins for pricing because it’s essentially more affordable than QuickBooks Enterprise. For instance, if you have five members, you can purchase the Plus plan for only $90 monthly, whereas with Enterprise, you need to pay $427 monthly for five users. Today’s leading accounting platforms offer standard security features such as data encryption, secure credential tokenization and more. While human error will always play some role in security breaches, you can be confident in your accounting platform when it comes to keeping your information safe.

Which is better for small businesses?

  1. QuickBooks Desktop also has several additional features you won’t find with QBO, including sales orders and lead management.
  2. Whereas one is completely online and cloud-based, the other operates locally on your computer.
  3. QuickBooks Desktop Premier and Quickbooks Desktop Enterprise have even more reports (especially if you opt for the industry-specific versions of these programs).
  4. Other popular merchant processors don’t require this, making collecting payments more difficult.

Both versions offer automatic syncing with your bank so you can categorize transactions. Add payroll to QuickBooks Online starting personal and business banking twin cities at $45 per month, or to Desktop starting at $50, plus $2 per employee, per month. The two versions are independent of each other, which means the data you enter on Desktop doesn’t sync to the Online version and vice-versa. The dashboard is super intuitive with large, easy-to-understand charts, and the mobile app is similarly easy to use. The maximum amount of users you can have with a QuickBooks Online subscription is 25 (plus an accountant).

Work from anywhere with the power of the cloud and real-time, secure collaboration. QuickBooks Online is cheaper than QuickBooks Desktop if you need multiple users. For instance, QuickBooks Online Plus only costs $99 per month ($1,080 per year) for up to five users as opposed to Desktop Enterprise, which costs $1,481 per year for only one user. Yes, but the only option is QuickBooks Enterprise, as Pro and Premier will no longer be available for new users after July 31, 2024. However, existing Pro and Premier users can still renew their subscriptions.

Compare QuickBooks products

In addition to third-party integrations, QuickBooks Online integrates with native products, such as QuickBooks Payments, QuickBooks Payroll, and QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets). QuickBooks Desktop can be integrated with QuickBooks Desktop Payroll and QuickBooks Time. Another notable difference between QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop is their integration capabilities.

Contact Management

quickbooks desktop vs quickbooks online

Additionally, all versions of QuickBooks Desktop allow you to set up cost estimates for projects and then compare them to actual expenses. In contrast, you need to upgrade to Advanced to be able to use QuickBooks Online’s budget vs. actual reporting feature. While QuickBooks Online and Desktop have their strengths and weaknesses, they ultimately balance out—which makes them tied in terms of overall features.

Both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Pro offer a good number of helpful integrations and add-on products. However, QuickBooks Online offers over 750 integrations to QuickBooks Pro’s 260+ integrations. Both include the basic reports you’d expect to find with accounting software, such as a balance sheet, a Profit & Loss report, a cash flow statement, etc. While QuickBooks Online boasts many of the features you’ll find with Desktop, some of its features, such as inventory management, aren’t quite as advanced.