Harvest vs TaxHacker
Harvest and TaxHacker are both accounting software. Harvest is a commercial product from Harvest. TaxHacker is open source under MIT, with 6.8k GitHub stars.
Which to pick
- Pick Harvest when
- An agency or consultancy bills by the hour and wants staff to track time easily against project budgets.
- Pick TaxHacker when
- A freelancer or small business wants self-hosted expense capture from receipts and has an LLM API key or local model.
Side by side
Time and expense tracking with project budgets, reports and invoicing from tracked hours, integrated with QuickBooks and Xero.
Uses an LLM to read photos of receipts, invoices and PDFs, extracting amounts, dates, merchants and taxes into a searchable table with currency conversion.
Resource planning needs the separate Forecast product, and per-seat pricing adds up for larger teams.
The author calls it early development, it is not double-entry accounting, and extracted figures need checking.
Production-ready
Usable
Cloud service, mobile app, desktop app and browser extension
Self-hosted server
Not published
TypeScript, Next.js, Prisma and PostgreSQL
Closed source, sold by Harvest
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
503 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
6.8k GitHub stars
Not known
Young: started 20 months ago, latest release v0.8.5.
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.