NetSuite vs QuickBooks: Price, Features & What’s Best in 2019

We evaluated pricing, features, and user reviews to compare QuickBooks Online vs. NetSuite. Both products go beyond accounting to include key performance indicators (KPIs) and budgeting and forecasting tools. If you’re looking for an accounting solution, choose QuickBooks Online. However, if you’re looking for a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or integrated solutions, choose NetSuite.

When to Use QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online (QBO) is ideal for businesses that sell products or services and that have fewer than 25 users needing access to their data. With QBO, you can keep track of income and expenses, connect bank and credit card accounts, track inventory, and create detailed financial reports such as the profit and loss (P&L) statements and balance sheet reports. QuickBooks Online starts at $20 per month, it’s easy to set up and use, and most accountants are familiar with the program.

Visit QuickBooks

When to Use NetSuite

NetSuite is ideal for businesses looking for a software program that goes beyond accounting to integrate CRM, human resources, travel and expenses, and other business segments. NetSuite is a robust product that allows access for up to 999 users. The base price is a one-time fee of $999 plus $99 per user, per month. Unlike QuickBooks Online, NetSuite is much more difficult to set up and use.

Visit NetSuite

When to Use an Alternative Accounting Software

If you’re a freelancer looking to simplify your accounts receivable (A/R) process, consider FreshBooks. FreshBooks is a great alternative to QuickBooks, NetSuite, and more robust accounting software because it has a seamless customer invoicing and payment process that lets users create and email custom invoices. You can also accept online payments so that you can get paid faster. Plus, you can keep track of paid bills in FreshBooks.

Visit FreshBooks

QuickBooks vs NetSuite at a Glance

How We Evaluated QuickBooks & NetSuite

The best accounting software allows you to track the financial activity for your business, including the ability to manage accounts receivable and accounts payable (A/P). Quality programs should integrate with financial institutions so that you don’t have to enter bank and credit card transactions manually. Ideally, you should be able to share your data with your accountant or bookkeeper and access detailed financial reports to see the overall health of your business.

We took into consideration the features most important to small businesses and evaluated NetSuite vs QuickBooks based on the following criteria:

• Cost: Affordable pricing plans are available for most small businesses.
• Ease of setup and use: The software is intuitive so that someone without bookkeeping or accounting knowledge could set it up and learn how to use it.
• Ability to manage accounts receivable: You can create invoices, apply customer payments, and generate an A/R aging report to stay on top of unpaid invoices.
• Ability to manage accounts payable: You can unpaid bills and make bill payments by check, automated clearing house (ACH), or credit card.
• Integration with financial institutions: Connect all bank and credit card accounts to the software so that transactions automatically download into the software.
• Access for multiple users: The ability to give other users such as an accountant, bookkeeper, or investor access to your data.
• Production of financial reports: You can generate a profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, and other detailed reports in just a few minutes.

Based on our research and evaluation of NetSuite vs QuickBooks on the above criteria, we choose QuickBooks Online. QBO is our top pick because it offers budget-friendly plans that start at $20 per month vs NetSuite, which starts at a flat rate of $999 plus $99 per user, per month. QBO is much easier to use and can be set up in a few hours, whereas NetSuite generally takes a month to set up and learn how to use.

NetSuite vs QuickBooks: Pricing & Features

When it comes to pricing and features, NetSuite is a lot pricier than QuickBooks Online. NetSuite’s base price is $999 plus an additional $99 per user, per month, while QuickBooks Online runs between $20-$150 per month. NetSuite customizes its software to meet your business needs. In contrast, QBO is much more limited when it comes to customization.

QuickBooks Pricing & Features

QBO has four pricing plans that cost between $20-$150 per month. Simple Start is the basic plan that runs $20 per month and has the fewest features included. The top tier plan is QBO Advanced and costs $150 per month. It is the most robust and includes advanced reporting, the ability to create hundreds of invoices simultaneously, and customized online training to get your team up to speed quickly.

QuickBooks Tiered Features

QuickBooks Simple Start

QBO Simple Start is ideal for businesses that pay their bills online or use a credit card. Because Simple Start does not have accounts payable functionality, you cannot manage your unpaid bills with this plan. In contrast, QBO Essentials, Plus, and Advanced include A/P processing. Simple Start includes A/R and bank integration and gives access to two accountants. Businesses that need A/P have to upgrade to QBO Essentials.

QuickBooks Essentials

QBO Essentials is ideal for businesses that need accounts payable processing and want to give access to more than two accountant users. You can manage all of your unpaid bills in the Essentials plan. This includes entering and paying bills and running an A/P aging report to stay on top of due dates. Unlike Simple Start, Essentials gives up to three users access to your data. Businesses that need inventory tracking have to upgrade to QBO Plus.

QuickBooks Plus

QBO Plus is ideal for businesses that sell products. Unlike Simple Start and Essentials, QBO Plus lets you can track inventory purchases and sales. QBO Plus also allows you to give up to five users access to your data―in addition to two accountant users. Plus, you can track all payments made to 1099 contractors. This makes it a breeze to complete 1099 reporting at the end of the year.

QuickBooks Advanced

QBO Advanced is ideal for growing businesses that are quickly becoming more complex. Its Fathom Smart Reporting tool provides in-depth reporting on key performance indicators to give you insight into every aspect of your business. Unlike QBO Plus, which limits you to five users, QBO Advanced has a maximum of 25 users. User permissions are much more granular with this plan, meaning people only have access to what they need.

QuickBooks Online is far less expensive than NetSuite, but it’s not the cheapest product out there. There are many free accounting software options to consider if the cost is your top concern.

Based on our minimum criteria, here is how QuickBooks stacks up against NetSuite.

Ability to Manage Accounts Receivable

QuickBooks Online allows you to manage your entire A/R process, similar to NetSuite. You can create invoices and customize them with your company logo. To stay on top of open invoices, you can generate an A/R aging report to see which customer invoices are coming due or are past due. Customers can pay their invoices online with a credit card or remit payment via check.

Ability to Manage Accounts Payable

QuickBooks Online Essentials, Plus, and Advanced include the ability to manage unpaid bills. When a bill is coming due, QuickBooks alerts you so that you can write a check or set up an electronic funds transfer (EFT) payment. Similar to NetSuite, QBO lets you generate an A/P aging report to stay on top of your unpaid bills. This helps you maintain a good credit history with your vendors and suppliers.

Integration with Financial Institutions

Because QuickBooks Online is cloud accounting software, you can connect your bank and credit card accounts to the program. Once connected, transactions automatically download into QuickBooks on a daily basis. This allows you to reconcile your bank and credit card accounts at any time instead of waiting for the bank statements while eliminating the need to manually enter these transactions into QuickBooks, ensuring your financial statements are always up-to-date.

Multi-User Access

Each QBO plan allows two accountant users and at least one additional user. Simple Start includes one user, Essentials includes three users, Plus includes five users, and Advanced includes up to 25 users. If you need more than 25 users, you may want to choose NetSuite because it allows a maximum of 999 users. However, each user costs an additional $99 per month when you add them to NetSuite.

Detailed Financial Reports

QBO has the main reports most businesses need: profit and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statement. The Simple Start plan includes more than 20 reports that you can run in just a few clicks, and the Advanced plan offers more than100 reports. Unfortunately, consolidated reports on subsidiary and parent companies are not available in QBO like they are in NetSuite.

Track Project Profitability

You can track labor costs, payroll, and expenses by project in both QuickBooks Plus and Advanced. This is a relatively new feature that allows you to manage all of your projects in one place. You can access dashboards and reports that show all income, expenses, and profitability for each project.

Track Inventory

As with NetSuite, you can keep track of inventory in QuickBooks Online. This includes the ability to create purchase orders, record inventory received, and make adjustments for shrinkage or inventory loss. The FIFO inventory costing method is used to value inventory in QuickBooks Online.

Manage 1099 Contractors

QBO makes it easy to manage payments to 1099 contractors. You can track payments made throughout the year with checks, cash, or EFTs. At the end of the year, you can run a 1099 report that lists all of the contractors who need to receive a 1099 form. QBO also makes it easy to issue 1099 forms at the end of the year.

Smart Reporting

QuickBooks Online Advanced includes Fathom smarting reporting that provides businesses with a visual representation of their financial data. Similar to the reporting NetSuite offers, the Fathom Smart Reporting in QuickBooks Online Advanced has key performance indicators, such as cash flow, profitability, accounts receivable, and accounts payable. Business owners who require this type of reporting should choose QBO Advanced because it runs $150 per month vs NetSuite which costs a flat fee of $999 plus $99 per user, per month.

Accelerated Invoicing

If you send out hundreds of customer invoices, you can automate this task by using accelerated invoicing. Similar to smart reporting, accelerated invoicing is only available in the QBO Advanced plan. This feature allows you to import hundreds of customer invoices instead of creating them one-by-one manually.

Custom User Permissions

Custom user permissions is a feature that is only available in QBO Advanced. Like NetSuite, this feature lets you create very granular permissions for sensitive areas of the software such as banking and payroll. This allows you to give users access to the areas they need without revealing the financial state of the company.

Premium Customer Support

In addition to the live telephone and chat support that’s included in all QBO plans, the premium customer support plan―available only in QBO Advanced―also has a dedicated success manager. Getting premium customer support moves you to the front of the line when you call or chat with tech support and includes five specialized online QBO classes that have a value of $2,000.

NetSuite Pricing & Features

NetSuite is a robust accounting software that cost a one-time fee of $999 plus $99 per user, per month. It includes many of the features you find in QuickBooks Online Advanced as well as some facilities QBO doesn’t have. You can manage A/R, A/P, and integrate all of your bank and credit card accounts in NetSuite. Plus, you can track income and expenses for all parent and subsidiaries located in the United States and abroad. This is a feature that you won’t find in QBO.

Ability to Manage Accounts Receivable

Similar to QuickBooks Online, NetSuite can manage your A/R process. You can create invoices that include only the fields you need and upload your logo to customize invoices. You can also keep track of unpaid invoices by generating an A/R aging report, and you can accept all forms of payment, including checks, cash, and credit card payments.

Ability to Manage Accounts Payable

You can manage all of your bills in NetSuite through the accounts payable module. This includes tracking unpaid bills and reviewing the A/P aging report to see what bills are coming due. You can also record bill payments made by check, cash, or credit card.

Integration with Financial Institutions

NetSuite allows you to connect your bank and credit card accounts like QuickBooks does. Additionally, you can download unlimited transactions into NetSuite instead of entering them one by one manually. This ensures that your financial statements are always up to date with the most recent transactions.

Multi-User Access

When it comes to adding users, NetSuite is much more robust than QuickBooks Online. You can add up to 999 additional users in NetSuite, whereas the maximum users are 25 for QBO. However, adding users to NetSuite is a bit pricey at $99 per user, per month. QuickBooks does not charge for each user but has a maximum number of users in each plan.

Detailed Financial Reports

Both NetSuite and QuickBooks include all of the standard financial reports most small businesses require. However, NetSuite knocks it out of the park by offering even more. NetSuite’s extensive library of reports includes profit and loss, cash flow, budget vs actual reports, revenue forecasting, and parent and subsidiary reports. In a nutshell, if you want a report, there is a 99.99% chance that you can run it in NetSuite.

Parent & Subsidiary Tracking & Reporting

Unlike QuickBooks, NetSuite tracks income, expenses, and all financial activity for parent and subsidiary companies. Because NetSuite has a multicurrency feature, you can also report the data in the home currency or the currency where the subsidiary is located. Consolidated reports that include all parent and subsidiary activity and individual subsidiary reports can be generated in NetSuite.

Fixed Asset Management

Businesses with fixed assets to track can add them to NetSuite. The fixed asset module allows you to track the asset value, useful life, and depreciation expense. While you can track fixed asset purchases in QuickBooks Online, you have to calculate depreciation expense outside of the software manually and record it in a journal entry.

Key Performance Indicators

NetSuite has built-in technology that gives you access to more than 75 KPIs, and you can set up a dashboard with KPIs that are relevant to your role. For example, an employee whose title is collections specialist might have sales, open balances, and receivable turnover KPI data on their dashboard.

Sales Tax Tracking

NetSuite supports sales tax for more than 51 countries. You can track all collected sales tax, make payments, and run detailed reports. This data can be used to report and pay sales tax collected from customers. Besides tracking sales tax in the U.S., NetSuite tracks other sales taxes, such as value-added tax (VAT), goods and services tax (GST), and harmonized sales tax (HST). By comparison, tracking sales tax is a manual process you have to set up in QuickBooks Online.

NetSuite vs QuickBooks Online: Ease of Use

QuickBooks Online and NetSuite have initial home pages that are customized based on the user’s access privileges. However, the layout for each program differs. QBO has a left menu bar for navigating vs the menu tabs that are used to navigate NetSuite. QBO’s dashboard is a lot cleaner and not as cluttered as the NetSuite dashboard. However, NetSuite’s dashboard includes KPIs that QuickBooks only offers in the Advanced plan.

QuickBooks Ease of Use

QuickBooks’ dashboard is similar to NetSuite in terms of having access to a lot of information on the initial home screen. Instead of menu tabs across the top, QBO has a left menu bar you can use to navigate to different areas of the program, such as banking, expenses, sales, and projects. Similar to NetSuite, QuickBooks lets you set privileges to determine what information users have access to.

In the screenshot below, this QuickBooks user can access information about invoices, expenses, profit and loss, and sales. You can drill down to the details simply by clicking on any area to get additional details:

QuickBooks online dashboard

NetSuite Ease of Use

The NetSuite dashboard can be a bit more intimidating than the QBO dashboard because it has a lot of information on it. The information you see on your dashboard depends on your user access rights. Regardless of the kind of information you see, the format remains the same. There are menu tabs across the top so that you can navigate to various areas within the program easily such as sales and marketing, expenses, and reports.

Below is the NetSuite dashboard that includes global financial ratios, top five customers by profitability, weekly orders trend, and key performance indicators for a CEO/chief financial officer (CFO) role:

NetSuite dashboard

NetSuite vs QuickBooks: Customer Service

Customer service and support are included in both NetSuite and QuickBooks Online. Support for both products can be summarized into four categories: live tech support, user training, online support, and user groups. QuickBooks offers tech support Monday through Friday between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. Pacific time, whereas NetSuite provides telephone support 24/7. Both products have extensive support articles and user groups located across the U.S.

QuickBooks Customer Service

Similar to NetSuite, QuickBooks Online includes live telephone support in all of their plans. Unlike NetSuite, QBO also offers live chat support Monday through Friday, 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PT. In addition to telephone and chat support, there is an extensive knowledge base that includes support articles to help troubleshoot issues or to get up-to-speed in QuickBooks.

One resource that you won’t get with NetSuite is the certified QuickBooks ProAdvisors located all over the U.S. Moreover, our free QuickBooks course is a great resource to help you learn how to use QuickBooks Online.

NetSuite Customer Service

NetSuite offers 24/7 telephone support to their customers, but they don’t have chat support like QuickBooks does. In addition to telephone support, you can use self-service tools, such as the knowledge base of articles on how to perform common tasks or troubleshoot issues. You can also join one of many local user groups comprised of accountants, bookkeepers, and other product experts.

NetSuite vs QuickBooks: Reviews

NetSuite and QuickBooks have positive and negative reviews. On the positive end, QuickBooks users like how affordable the software is and being able to access their data through the mobile app. NetSuite users appreciate how robust the software is but say there is a steep learning curve with NetSuite. The negative QuickBooks user reviews centered around QuickBooks desktop users who say they lost features when they converted to the online version.

QuickBooks Reviews

QuickBooks reviews are mostly positive. Users like how easy it is to perform tasks through the QBO app. They also appreciate that there are plans for every budget, and they can speak with a live tech support person. Most of the negative reviews are from customers who moved from QuickBooks desktop to online. Many said it was a bit of a learning curve. You can read all of our QuickBooks Online reviews to learn more.

NetSuite Reviews

NetSuite reviews are mixed. On the positive side, users like how robust the software is. They also shared that it’s easy to give users located all around the world access to the data because the program is in the cloud. On the negative side, users feel like there is a very steep learning curve. It can take up to a month to implement the software. Read all of our NetSuite reviews for more information.

Bottom Line

Choosing between NetSuite vs QuickBooks boils down to whether you’re looking solely for an accounting solution or one that goes beyond accounting to include CRM, human resources, and other aspects of your business. Choose NetSuite if you’re looking for the integrated solution. However, if you are looking for an accounting solution, QuickBooks Online is your best option.

QuickBooks Online allows you to keep track of all the financial aspects of your business. This includes accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory tracking, and detailed financial reports such as the profit and loss report, balance sheet, and statement of cash flows. Sign up for QuickBooks Online today, and you may qualify for up to 50% off your paid subscription.

Visit QuickBooks