Bigcapital vs Harvest
Bigcapital and Harvest are both accounting software. Bigcapital is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 3.9k GitHub stars. Harvest is a commercial product from Harvest.
Which to pick
- Pick Bigcapital when
- A small business or developer wants a self-hosted QuickBooks-style ledger with an API.
- Pick Harvest when
- An agency or consultancy bills by the hour and wants staff to track time easily against project budgets.
Side by side
Double-entry accounting with invoices, bills, expenses, inventory, bank transactions and financial reports, also usable headless through its API.
Time and expense tracking with project budgets, reports and invoicing from tracked hours, integrated with QuickBooks and Xero.
Still pre-1.0, AGPL licensed, and it lacks the bank feeds and tax filing integrations of Xero or QuickBooks.
Resource planning needs the separate Forecast product, and per-seat pricing adds up for larger teams.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service, mobile app, desktop app and browser extension
TypeScript, Node.js, React, MySQL and Redis
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Harvest
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
3.9k GitHub stars
503 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Established: started 5 years ago, latest release v0.25.45.
Not known
Other comparisons
More accounting software
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from makers' descriptions, Wikipedia, READMEs and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.