Our Take
3.8
NerdWallet rating
The bottom line:
Wave is best known for its free accounting software. But the company has moved many features to a paid plan in recent years. Unfortunately, that plan doesn’t address Wave users’ biggest complaint: customer service. We still think Wave’s free plan is worth a try for simple operations. We especially liked its straightforward invoicing in our tests. However, if your needs aren’t basic, you’ll likely want to consider alternatives with more robust support.
Wave Accounting
Starting at
$0 Additional pricing tiers (per month): $16
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on Wave's website
Pros & Cons
Pros
- Free plan available.
- Straightforward invoicing.
Cons
- No built-in third-party integrations or advanced features (e.g., mileage tracking, time tracking, inventory management) to increase functionality.
- No live support unless you pay for the Pro plan or another paid service.
- No audit trails.
Full Review
Wave is a small-business accounting software company that was founded in Canada in 2009. H&R Block acquired it in 2019. Initially, Wave was known for its free accounting software. The company introduced a subscription option (Wave Pro) in January 2024, though. Unsurprisingly, it moved some of the best features behind that paywall.
For the most part, we still like the free version of Wave best. The software is user friendly and equipped with all the basics, including income and expense tracking, invoicing and reporting.
However, like most free plans, Wave’s has limitations. Its paid plan fills in some gaps. But it’s still missing more advanced capabilities found in the best accounting software, like built-in inventory tracking, audit trails and report filters.
Overall, Wave can work for contractors, freelancers and other service-based micro businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Growing business, on the other hand, will likely need a more powerful solution.
Wave is best for:
✔️ Very small businesses and solopreneurs.
✔️ Transacting mostly via invoice.
✔️ Keeping costs low.
Not a fit? Consider these competitors
NerdWallet rating 5.0/5.0 | NerdWallet rating 4.7/5.0 | NerdWallet rating 4.8/5.0 |
Starting at $20/month Additional pricing tiers (per month): $47, $80. | Starting at $0 Additional pricing tiers (per month): $20, $50, $70, $150, $275. | Starting at $21/month Additional pricing tiers (per month): $38, $65, custom. |
Promotion 90% off for 6 months. | Promotion 14-day free trial of the Premium plan. | Promotion 70% off for 4 months. 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. |
at Xero | at Zoho Books | at FreshBooks |
Xero: Better for more robust reporting. Xero has more reports and report filtering options than Wave does. These are important for entrepreneurs who need to analyze how particular segments or areas of their business are performing. Read our full Xero review.
Zoho Books: Better for a free plan with email support. Unlike Wave’s free accounting software plan, Zoho Books’ free option comes with email support. Paid plans also include phone and chat support with a human. Read our full Zoho Books review.
FreshBooks: Better for freelancers. FreshBooks’ client portal and customizable invoicing tools makes it a great option for freelancers. It doesn’t have a free plan like Wave does, but it’s less expensive than alternatives like QuickBooks Online. Read our full FreshBooks review.
Wave plan pricing and features
Starter plan | Pro plan |
|---|---|
Free. | $16 per month (or $170 billed annually). |
| All features in the Starter plan, plus:
|
In addition to its two plans, Wave has add-ons for payroll and bookkeeping support. Wave Payroll starts at $20 per month, and online bookkeeping assistance starts at $149 per month. You can also add the mobile receipt scanning feature to your free plan for $8 per month if you don’t want to commit to the Pro plan.
What users say about Wave
NerdWallet checked online forums like Reddit and reviews from sites like TrustPilot, the App Store and Google Play to gauge how users feel about Wave. We used an AI tool to help analyze this feedback. Here are the major trends we spotted.
👍 Price
Positive reviews of Wave often mention its free plan option. Sole proprietors and very small businesses with tight budgets can’t always afford to spend extra money just to organize their books and invoice clients. While Wave now charges extra for certain features, like automatic bank feeds, its free plan still delivers on the basics.
👍 Mobile app
For the most part, users on the App Store and Google Play seem satisfied with Wave's mobile app. It makes it easy to invoice clients on the go and accept online payments.
Lots of negative reviews say the app’s receipt scanning feature produces blurry photos. Wave said it released a new app update in March 2025 aimed to address the issue.
👎 Customer support
An overwhelming number of Wave reviewers criticize its customer support and say it’s caused them to switch products altogether. This doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. If you don’t pay for any services through Wave, you can’t get in touch with a human for assistance. Other accounting software products, like Zoho Books, offer email support with free plans.
Furthermore, Wave eliminated its forums in 2022. You can join Wave communities elsewhere, most notably on Reddit and Facebook. But those lack the direct connection to the company that competitors like Zoho and Xero provide.
But apparently, support isn’t just a problem for free plan users. Online commenters who subscribe to Wave’s paid plan also complain that issues raised via email or chat take multiple business days to resolve. Plus, there’s no inbound phone number.
👎 Overall reliability
Some users say core features, like the auto-categorization tool, cause headaches instead of making life easier. Recently, I chatted with a small-business owner who told me that Wave also duplicates transactions erroneously.
Other users say they’ve experienced bank feed delays and even account closures or freezes. And due to the company’s lack of phone support, these issues don’t sound like they’re easy to solve.
Our experience testing Xero
👋 I'm Hillary Crawford, a lead writer and content strategist for NerdWallet. I've been covering small-business accounting software since 2021 and am QuickBooks certified. I did the testing for Wave.
To do that, I created my own Wave account and evaluated key components within the Starter plan in March 2025. Here’s what stood out.
My take: It could be more intuitive.
Personally, I’m not a fan of how Wave organizes some of its main tabs on the dashboard. For example, I initially didn’t know what to make of the “payouts” option within the “banking” tab. I wasn’t sure how it was different from the options within “sales and payments.”
Wave dashboard.
After visiting Wave’s help center, I learned that “payouts” refer to customer payments minus processing fees. It makes sense, but I don’t usually see accounting programs use that terminology.
My take: Simple and straightforward.
Setting up invoicing within Wave was as easy as it gets. You can upload your logo, add brand coloring and choose from three different template styles.
Invoice setup page.
The same goes for filling out your invoicing fields. There’s nothing fancy, which may actually come as a relief for very small business owners who need just the basics.
Creating an invoice.
My take: Customization options are very limited.
As you can see below, Wave’s report customization options are limited to date range and report type (e.g. accrual or cash basis). More robust accounting software solutions, like QuickBooks Online, let you choose how you’d like to display columns (e.g. by customer, employee or vendor) and filter results by differentiators, like customer or account type.
Profit and loss statement.
If you run a very small business and don’t need to drill down into your reports, this shouldn’t be a problem. If you’d like to compare results in one area of your business versus another, however, you’re better off opting for a more detailed solution.
» MORE: Wave vs. QuickBooks Online
My take: Demo account would make these processes easier to learn.
Unlike competitors such as QuickBooks Online and Xero, Wave doesn’t provide a full demo business account for new users. (Though it does use fake numbers to model visuals for certain business insights on the dashboard.) This makes it difficult to understand how processes like transaction categorization and reconciliation work.
Typically, though, your business bank and credit card accounts would show up in the “account” dropdown menu below.
Creating a transaction.
Fully functioning demo accounts are valuable because they give you reference points when you’re setting up your own account for the first time. They help you understand how reconciliation and transaction tagging work before you commit to importing all of your bank feed.
My take: Easy to read, even if you’re new to bookkeeping.
The chart of accounts is at the heart of your accounting system, and Wave makes it a little less overwhelming to scroll through. Instead of displaying all of the rows at once, Wave lists the five major account types up top. Then, you click on each tab to see which accounts are included in them. This makes it much more digestible, in my opinion.
Wave's chart of accounts.
My take: The chatbot isn’t ideal for major issues, like account freezes.
If you need help figuring out how to do something specific, like adding billable expenses to an invoice, the chatbot quickly provides a step-by-step solution. That way, you don’t need to visit the Help Center and spend time searching for the most relevant article.
Here’s what the AI chatbot interface looks like:
Wave's AI chatbot, Mave.
However, if you need assistance solving a more pressing issue, like a frozen account, using the chatbot would be frustrating. Instead of simply letting you send an email to the support team yourself, it asks you to provide details so that it can do it for you. I can see how that process, as well as waiting for a response, could be more time consuming than picking up the phone.
How we evaluated Wave
NerdWallet independently reviews accounting software products, like Wave, across 10 categories and more than 30 subcategories. We collected the data from Wave’s public-facing website and from company representatives.
Our accounting software ratings range from one to five stars overall. But we also score individual features to help business owners understand a product's strengths and weaknesses. Here’s how Wave stacks up:
Wave is top of the line for the following:
- Monthly pricing: $0-$16 per month.
- Double-entry accounting: Yes.
- Chart of accounts customization: Yes.
- Cash- and accrual-basis reporting: Yes, you can change your report preferences.
- Pricing listed on website: Yes.
- Free trial period: There is no free trial of the Pro plan, but the Starter plan is free.
Wave is decent, but not the best, in the following categories:
- Bank reconciliation: Wave’s Pro plan automatically categorizes transactions and matches bank feed transactions to paid bills and/or invoices.
- Bank feeds: Wave’s Pro plan automatically imports your bank transactions. The free plan does not.
- Dashboard customization: No.
- User limits: Wave’s Pro plan allows you to add additional users. Its free plan does not.
- Capacity to support larger small businesses: No. Wave is a better fit for micro businesses and solopreneurs with 10 or less employees.
- Reporting: Wave has a little more than a dozen reports available, which is much less than competitors like QuickBooks Online and Xero. It includes the basics, like a profit and loss statement, balance sheet and aged receivables report. You can filter reports by date, but not by tag.
- Invoicing: All Wave users can convert estimates to invoices, customize invoices with brand logos and colors, and accept payments online. However, only Pro plan users can remove Wave’s branding from invoices and add attachments. Both plans also let you automate payment reminders, but you have to accept online payments to do so in the Starter plan.
- Inventory: Not available.
- Accounts payable: Yes, you can create bills in Wave and add products and services to them.
- Mobile app: All Wave users have access to a mobile app that lets you send estimates and invoices on the go. You have to subscribe to the Pro plan or receipt scanner add-on, however, to merge transactions via mobile app.
- Project tracking: Not available.
- Transaction categorization: Wave lets you categorize transactions by account, but lacks granular options — like department or location tags — for drilling further into reports.
- Industry-specific reports: Not available.
Wave is subpar in the following categories:
- Audit trails: No.
- Bookkeeper certification: No.
- Accountant access: Not available in all plans. You must subscribe to the Pro plan to add additional users to your account. You can, however, add a payroll manager or Block Advisors tax pro in the free plan.
- Payroll: Wave offers its own payroll software but doesn’t directly integrate with outside payroll services.
- POS: Wave does not have its own direct, built-in POS integrations. You can sync with POS systems, like Square and Shopify, through Zapier, but doing so may come with additional fees.
- Bookkeeping services: Wave Advisors offers a paid service that matches you with in-house bookkeepers.
- Additional integrations: You can use Zapier to sync additional software products with Wave, but it may cost extra.
- Phone support: No.
- Online support: You must pay for one of Wave’s services to access email and live chat support with a human. Otherwise, you’re limited to an AI chatbot.
- Help library: Yes.
None of Wave's features received 4 stars. For the most part, they're either average or excellent, but not anywhere in between.
Our evaluations also take user sentiment into account. This involves looking through individual reviews and feedback on sites like Trustpilot, Reddit, the Google Play store and the App Store. Then, we use AI tools to help spot larger trends within those comments. Since we cannot verify each user’s individual experience, we don’t incorporate user reviews in our star ratings.
However, we do test the product ourselves to evaluate commonly mentioned pain points and develop our own objective assessment. For more information on how we score accounting software products, see our full methodology.
Learn more
on Wave's website
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QuickBooks
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