Bigcapital vs QuickBooks Online
Bigcapital and QuickBooks Online are both accounting software. Bigcapital is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 3.9k GitHub stars. QuickBooks Online is a commercial product from Intuit.
Which to pick
- Pick Bigcapital when
- A small business or developer wants a self-hosted QuickBooks-style ledger with an API.
- Pick QuickBooks Online when
- A small business in the US, Canada or UK wants the accounting package most bookkeepers already know.
Side by side
Double-entry accounting with invoices, bills, expenses, inventory, bank transactions and financial reports, also usable headless through its API.
Cloud accounting for small businesses: invoicing, bank feeds, bills, expenses, payroll add-on, sales tax and reports.
Still pre-1.0, AGPL licensed, and it lacks the bank feeds and tax filing integrations of Xero or QuickBooks.
Intuit raises prices regularly, and multi-entity or inventory-heavy businesses outgrow it.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server and cloud service
Cloud service and mobile app
TypeScript, Node.js, React, MySQL and Redis
Not published
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
Closed source, sold by Intuit
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
1.8k 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.