Stacko vs Wave
Updated July 4, 2026 · Stacko team
An honest comparison for Canadian self-employed people choosing between Wave’s free accounting suite and Stacko’s receipt-first expense tracking.
Wave is a broad, invoicing-centred accounting suite with a free tier; Stacko is a narrow, paid, receipt-first expense tracker. If you need to send invoices and keep a ledger, Wave is the better fit. If your real problem is receipts and tax-time expense records, that’s the whole of what Stacko does — and it goes deeper on it.
What Wave is
Wave is Canadian-founded accounting software (now owned by H&R Block, a US company) aimed at small businesses and freelancers. Its free Starter plan covers invoicing, estimates, and bookkeeping records; the paid Pro plan (about CA$25/month at the time of writing) adds automatic bank-transaction import and categorization. Receipt scanning with OCR is a paid add-on rather than a core free feature.
Where Wave fits better
- You send invoices and want payments, estimates, and income tracking in one place.
- You want a free general ledger and formal bookkeeping records.
- You want bank feeds doing the transaction capture.
Where Stacko fits better
- Your actual pain is receipts: capturing them, reading them, and keeping the proof attached to every expense record.
- You want GST/HST/PST pulled off each receipt and expenses mapped toward CRA/T2125 categories.
- You want business and personal spending cleanly separated without running a full accounting system.
- You want to ask an AI assistant about your own expenses (Stacko’s MCP connection, in beta).
The honest bottom line
These tools solve different problems and some people use both: Wave for invoicing and income, Stacko for the receipt-and-deduction side. Stacko has no free tier — the trade is a narrower tool that does the receipt job properly, with your records exportable at any time.
Tax and legal disclaimer
This page is general information, not tax, accounting, legal, financial, payroll, or investment advice. Stacko provides informational tools and organized records. Review your records and consult a qualified professional for your situation.
Try Stacko
If receipts are the job, try Stacko for the receipt side — and keep whatever handles your invoicing.