Fava vs Paisa
Fava and Paisa are both plain-text accounting software. Fava is open source under MIT, with 2.6k GitHub stars. Paisa is open source under AGPL-3.0, with 3.2k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Fava when
- You keep double-entry books in Beancount and want reports and editing in a browser.
- Pick Paisa when
- You keep or want to keep personal books in ledger format and want visual reports on top.
Side by side
A web interface for Beancount ledgers with balance sheets, income statements, charts, queries and an editor.
A personal finance app that reads ledger-format plain-text accounts and shows dashboards for spending, budgets, investments, allocation and tax harvesting.
Only as useful as your Beancount file, and importing bank data is a separate job.
Assumes you are comfortable with plain-text accounting, and it is largely one developer's project.
Production-ready
Usable
Self-hosted server and command line
Desktop app and self-hosted server
Python, TypeScript, Svelte and Beancount
Go, TypeScript, Svelte and SQLite
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Open source, AGPL-3.0 (network copyleft)
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Use inside your business is unrestricted. If you change it and let customers use it over the internet, you must publish your changes.
2.6k GitHub stars
3.2k GitHub stars
Established: started 11 years ago, no tagged release yet.
Established: started 4 years ago, latest release v0.7.8.
Other comparisons
More plain-text accounting tools
Both sides were judged on 2026-11-03 from each project's README and GitHub data. License, age and popularity lines are worked out directly.