Bigcapital vs Xero
Bigcapital and Xero are both accounting software. Bigcapital is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 3.9k GitHub stars. Xero is a commercial product from Xero Limited.
Which to pick
- Pick Bigcapital when
- A small business or developer wants a self-hosted QuickBooks-style ledger with an API.
- Pick Xero when
- A small business in New Zealand, Australia or the UK wants mainstream cloud accounting that local accountants support.
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 with bank feeds, invoicing, bills, payroll in some countries, GST/VAT and a large app marketplace.
Still pre-1.0, AGPL licensed, and it lacks the bank feeds and tax filing integrations of Xero or QuickBooks.
Plans cap invoices and bills on lower tiers, and multi-entity consolidation needs add-ons.
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 Xero Limited
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
1.4k 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.