# Stacko vs Wave

Updated: 2026-07-04

An honest comparison for Canadian self-employed people choosing between Wave’s free accounting suite and Stacko’s receipt-first expense tracking.

## Short answer

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.


## Links

- This guide: https://stacko.ca/stacko-vs-wave
- Product overview: https://stacko.ca/
- AI info: https://stacko.ca/ai-info
- Support: mailto:support@stacko.ca

This page is general information, not tax, accounting, legal, or financial advice.