QuickBooks vs Quicken: Which Should You Use? (2024)

Side-by-side comparison of Quicken and QuickBooks

Use QuickBooks if you need to:

• Manage your business bookkeeping
• Report on account balances and cash flow
• Log and categorize business expenses
• Track customer invoices and payments

Use Quicken if you need to:

• Manage your personal or family finances
• See your personal and business finances side by side
• Manage leases for rental properties and collect rent online

Here are other ways Quicken and QuickBooks are different:

Feature comparison: QuickBooks vs Quicken Business & Personal

On the whole, QuickBooks has more tools for business accounting than Quicken. Quicken’s Business & Personal plan (known as Quicken Home & Business in Canada) offers a few of the same business accounting features, like bank reconciliation, invoicing, and property management.

Here’s how some of those features compare:

Bank reconciliation

• Quicken can memorize which payees you’ve selected for certain types of transactions. When automatically categorizing transactions for you, Quicken will make suggestions based on your previous actions.

• QuickBooks lets you set more specific, “if-then” rules around how your transactions get automatically categorized.

Invoicing and payments

• Quicken’s invoice creator is in a more traditional, spreadsheet-like format and has limited design options. To record invoice payments in Quicken, you have to manually download the transactions from your bank.

• QuickBooks lets you customize your invoice layout, add payment terms like ‘net 30’, and see when a customer has viewed the invoice. Customers can pay their invoices by credit card or bank transfer directly from a QuickBooks invoice.

Property management

• Quicken simplifies financial management for landlords by tracking rental income, expenses, and lease details. The Quicken Rental Property Manager gives you organized financial reporting to save you time and prepare you for tax season.
• QuickBooks has the same property management tools, but finding and using them is difficult without detailed instructions.

Compare pricing plans

Quicken Business & Personal is the only Quicken plan that’s made for business accounting. Quicken’s other two plans, Quicken Starter and Deluxe, are for organizing your personal finances.

Meanwhile, QuickBooks offers multiple pricing plans for business accounting:

• QuickBooks Online EasyStart offers basic accounting tools for a single user. It’s the best place to start for solopreneurs, freelancers, or sole bookkeepers.
• QuickBooks Online Essentials supports up to three users, includes accounts payable tools, and offers multi-currency support. It also integrates with QuickBooks Time, a time tracking add-on.
• QuickBooks Online Plus supports up to five users and lets you track project profitability, inventory, and multiple business locations.
• QuickBooks Online Advanced supports up to 25 users and offers robust reporting and customization. Advanced also lets you build automated accounting workflows to save time, send invoices in batches, and sync your Excel spreadsheets.

| Wondering about QuickBooks Desktop plans? Read this guide to compare QuickBooks Online with QuickBooks Desktop

Only Quickbooks Online connects with Jobber to keep your service business organized

QuickBooks Online pairs with Jobber—a highly rated field service management solution—to keep your customer, invoice, and payment information accurate without any double entry.

By quickly and accurately syncing your important business information from Jobber to QuickBooks Online, you’ll cut hours of manual work every week and get back valuable time.

When you connect Jobber with QuickBooks Online, you can:

• Easily import existing clients, products, and services from QuickBooks Online to ensure both are accurate from day one
• Control when and how important information is synced from Jobber to QuickBooks Online moving forward
• Automatically sync your clients, products and services, timesheets, invoices, payments, refunds, tips, and payouts from Jobber to QuickBooks Online
• Approve timesheets in Jobber and sync them to QuickBooks Online to use for payroll
• Automatically reconcile payouts for payments and tips collected through online payments in Jobber