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Which cloud accounting package should you actually use in 2026?

27 July 2026 · 5 min read · Xero vs QuickBooks Online vs Zoho Books

We get asked this every week, so we've written down what we think. No fence-sitting: we have scored all three.

We look after a lot of small and medium businesses, and we see these systems from the inside — not from a demo, but from doing real bookkeeping in them month after month, and from wiring them into other software. That's the view below.

QuickBooks Online 2 out of 5

We used to recommend QuickBooks. We don't any more.

Two things have changed. First, the price. Over the last couple of years the cost has climbed sharply, and the increases have kept coming. For a small business paying monthly, it adds up to a real number by the end of the year, and it's hard to point at what you're getting for it.

Second, and more importantly, the changes made in May, June and July 2026 have made the software harder to use. Screens that people knew have moved. Jobs that took three clicks now take six. We're not talking about one grumpy client here — most of our QuickBooks clients have said something. When your bookkeeping software starts costing your staff time rather than saving it, something has gone wrong.

There's a technical gripe too. QuickBooks is very fussy about what it will let another system write into it. Recurring invoices are the obvious example — you simply can't set those up automatically through the connection. So if you want to build anything clever around it, you hit a wall quite quickly.

Verdict: we no longer recommend it for new clients.

Xero 4 out of 5

Xero remains a genuinely good package. It's stable, it's well supported, the bank feeds work, accountants know it, and there's a huge range of add-ons that plug into it. If you're already on Xero and happy, there is no reason at all to move.

Our one real criticism is on the plumbing. Getting information out of Xero is fine. Getting information into it automatically is more awkward than it should be — in practice you often end up going through Zapier or something similar to do the writing, rather than connecting directly. That's an extra moving part, an extra subscription, and an extra thing to break.

For a business turning over £1m and upwards, Xero makes a lot of sense. It's grown-up software and it copes.

Verdict: a solid, safe choice. Four out of five.

Zoho Books 5 out of 5

This is the one that came out on top, and it surprised us a little.

Zoho Books is clean. It's quick to learn. The screens are uncluttered and things are where you'd expect them to be, which sounds like a small thing until you've watched someone struggle with software that isn't. And the pricing is among the best in the market — not "cheap and nasty" cheap, but properly good value for what you get.

Where it really pulls ahead is behind the scenes. We've built our own eTax AI system around these packages, so we know exactly where each one bends and where it snaps — and Zoho Books is by far and away the best of the three to connect to. We can read from it and write to it directly, without bolting a middleman like Zapier in between, and we can set our own automated processes running around it and trust them to behave. Neither Xero nor QuickBooks comes close on that.

We've put it through its paces properly rather than just having a look, and it took everything we asked of it.

Verdict: five out of five. This is what we now recommend to most small and medium businesses.

And if you are bigger?

If you're turning over £10m or more, none of the above is really the conversation. At that size we'd point you at the Sage range, which is built for that kind of complexity. We haven't reviewed Sage here — it's a different discussion, and we're happy to have it with you separately.

The short version

Zoho Books for most. Xero if you're already there or want the biggest add-on ecosystem. QuickBooks, at the moment, no.

If you'd like to talk through which fits your business — or you're on QuickBooks and wondering what moving actually involves — get in touch. Moving is less painful than people fear, and we've done it plenty of times.