Harvest vs Xero
Harvest and Xero are both accounting software. Harvest is a commercial product from Harvest. Xero is a commercial product from Xero Limited.
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 Xero when
- A small business in New Zealand, Australia or the UK wants mainstream cloud accounting that local accountants support.
Side by side
Time and expense tracking with project budgets, reports and invoicing from tracked hours, integrated with QuickBooks and Xero.
Cloud accounting for small businesses with bank feeds, invoicing, bills, payroll in some countries, GST/VAT and a large app marketplace.
Resource planning needs the separate Forecast product, and per-seat pricing adds up for larger teams.
Plans cap invoices and bills on lower tiers, and multi-entity consolidation needs add-ons.
Production-ready (both)
Cloud service, mobile app, desktop app and browser extension
Cloud service and mobile app
Not published (both)
Closed source, sold by Harvest
Closed source, sold by Xero Limited
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code. (both)
503 Wikipedia readers a month on phones
1.4k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
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.