QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online is Intuit's product, a Nasdaq-listed US company founded in 1983, trading in the UK as Intuit Limited from an office in Victoria. Its UK line-up is the mirror image of Xero's: a per-plan user count instead of unlimited users, inbound phone support instead of a callback, and CIS included instead of a £5 add-on.

Prices are in pounds, and the page says "All prices + VAT @20%", read on 8 September 2026, monthly billing only, with the same 90 per cent off for six months as Xero. Sole Trader Plus is £10 a month for one user, marketed for Making Tax Digital for Income Tax rather than VAT. Simple Start at £16 adds VAT returns and CIS but is still one user plus a free accountant seat. Essentials at £38 is the plan we score: three users, multi-currency, employee time tracking and everything below. Plus at £56 adds inventory, budgets, purchase orders and project profitability for five users; Advanced at £123 gives twenty-five users, custom reports and workflow automation. Extra seats beyond a plan's allowance are not priced on the page ("call us"), and payroll comes in three tiers, Core, Premium and Elite, whose prices we could not find on any public Intuit page: they appear only in the checkout flow. QuickBooks Payments takes 2.99 per cent on card payments through invoices according to secondary sources, and GoCardless direct debit costs 1 per cent. Intuit raised UK prices in January 2024, August 2024 and again in August 2026, and its own community forum carries complaints about the size of the latest rise.

HMRC lists QuickBooks on both Making Tax Digital lists, for VAT and for Income Tax with UK property. Bank feeds cover a long published list of UK banks including Starling, Monzo, Tide, Mettle, Wise and Revolut, with the caveat that pots and spaces cannot be connected. Intuit brands its AI as Intuit Intelligence: a chat assistant in beta, Accounting AI for feeds and anomalies, VAT AI for pre-filing checks on Simple Start and up, Customer AI on Essentials and Finance AI on Advanced. The official QuickBooks MCP server on GitHub runs locally with 145 tools over 29 entity types, and the API is one of the oldest in the category. Support is where QuickBooks beats Xero outright: phone 8am to 7pm on weekdays and 8am to 6pm at weekends, messaging until 10pm, a free 45-minute onboarding call, and a switching service. Certifications reported for the platform are ISO 27001, SOC 2 and PCI DSS, though we read them from secondary sources rather than Intuit's compliance portal.

The reasons it is second rather than first: a company with one employee beyond the director has to jump from £16 to £38 to get a second login; Intuit's UK GDPR page reserves the right to store and process personal data in the United States and anywhere else it operates, and says Intuit acts as a data controller that uses customer data to improve its services; there is no in-product Corporation Tax or Companies House filing that we could find; and Trustpilot is 3.7 on 16,902 reviews, with recent one-star themes of a broken Shopify integration, invoices lost in a forced migration and a Tide bank feed that will not connect.

Not yet tested by Saaskly: assessed on published pricing, HMRC's software lists, vendor documentation and third-party reviews.