TaxHacker vs Xero
TaxHacker and Xero are both accounting software. TaxHacker is open source under MIT, with 6.8k GitHub stars. Xero is a commercial product from Xero Limited.
Which to pick
- Pick TaxHacker when
- A freelancer or small business wants self-hosted expense capture from receipts and has an LLM API key or local model.
- Pick Xero when
- A small business in New Zealand, Australia or the UK wants mainstream cloud accounting that local accountants support.
Side by side
Uses an LLM to read photos of receipts, invoices and PDFs, extracting amounts, dates, merchants and taxes into a searchable table with currency conversion.
Cloud accounting for small businesses with bank feeds, invoicing, bills, payroll in some countries, GST/VAT and a large app marketplace.
The author calls it early development, it is not double-entry accounting, and extracted figures need checking.
Plans cap invoices and bills on lower tiers, and multi-entity consolidation needs add-ons.
Usable
Production-ready
Self-hosted server
Cloud service and mobile app
TypeScript, Next.js, Prisma and PostgreSQL
Not published
Open source, MIT (permissive)
Closed source, sold by Xero Limited
You can build it into a product you sell, as long as you keep its copyright notice.
Closed source: you use it under the maker's terms and cannot change or resell the code.
6.8k GitHub stars
1.4k Wikipedia readers a month on phones
Young: started 20 months ago, latest release v0.8.5.
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.