Assembly Line

Bill.com vs InvoiceShelf

Bill.com and InvoiceShelf are both invoicing software. Bill.com is a commercial product from BILL Holdings. InvoiceShelf is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 1.9k GitHub stars.

Which to pick

Pick Bill.com when
A US small or midsize company or its accounting firm wants to automate bill approval and payment runs.
Pick InvoiceShelf when
You need straightforward invoicing on your own server and do not need full accounting.

Side by side

What it does

Accounts payable and receivable automation for US businesses: capture bills, route approvals, pay by ACH or card, and send invoices, synced with accounting systems.

A self-hosted invoicing app for freelancers and small businesses: estimates, invoices, payments, expenses and customer records, forked from Crater.

Watch out

Transaction fees on top of seat pricing, and it is centred on the US.

No double-entry accounting or tax filing, and AGPL licensed.

Ready for

Production-ready

Usable

Runs as

Cloud service and mobile app

Self-hosted server

Built with

Not published

PHP, Laravel and Vue

Source code

Closed source, sold by BILL Holdings

Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)

What the license allows

Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.

Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.

How widely known

363 Wikipedia readers a month on phones

1.9k GitHub stars

How established

Not known

Established: started 2 years ago, latest release 2.4.7.

Other comparisons

More invoicing apps

Every invoicing product and project, ranked

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.