Wave alternatives, now that your bank feed is behind a paywall.

Bank sync

Wave's free plan imports nothing automatically; SuperBooks keeps one live bank connection on the free plan and never treats it as a trial.

This is the whole reason you are reading this page. Wave's legacy FAQ is unusually direct about it: to keep bank connections for transaction imports, upgrade to the Pro Plan. The Starter Plan keeps manual bank-statement upload, which means downloading a CSV from your bank every month and pushing it into Wave by hand — the exact job the software was there to remove.

SuperBooks connects through Plaid, read-only, and the free plan keeps one connection. Not for fourteen days. Not until we finish a growth experiment. One connection, on the free plan, is a positioning commitment: it is the single thing that makes this page worth writing, and cutting it would make the page a lie.

Three honest caveats. First, the same cost pressure that moved Wave's feed behind a paywall is real for everyone — bank data aggregation is not free, and any vendor promising unlimited free connections is either subsidising you or about to change their mind. One connection is the number we can hold. Second, our bank connections are configured for the United States and Canada only. If your bank is anywhere else, this product cannot import from it today, and nothing else on this page changes that. Third, even inside those two countries Plaid does not reach every institution — Wave publishes the same footnote — so check your own bank on the free plan before you cancel anything.

What you get on top of the import is categorization. Each transaction comes back with a proposed category, and where the model is not confident enough the transaction is written back with no category at all rather than a guess. That blank is deliberate. It is the honest version of what "AI bookkeeping" means here, and the AI section below gives the threshold and its limits.

Invoicing

Wave wins on volume — unlimited invoices on a free plan is genuinely hard to beat. SuperBooks free caps at five a month.

Wave's Starter Plan lets you create unlimited invoices, estimates and bills for nothing, and has done for years. If invoicing volume is your binding constraint and bank feeds are not, Wave's free plan is a better deal than ours and you should stay on it. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise on a page you can fact-check in one click.

SuperBooks Free issues five invoices a month; Starter fifteen; Pro fifty. Those are the ceilings the application enforces, not marketing ranges. The trade we are offering is narrow and specific: fewer invoices, but the bank feed and the categorization that go with them stay free.

Where the plans converge, the invoice itself is comparable — your logo, your brand colours and a customer portal. Wave sends late-payment reminders automatically on a schedule you set; ours is a button you press. Wave also puts attachments, reusable email templates and removal of Wave's own branding behind Pro.

Two things we do not do, stated before you find them yourself. SuperBooks has no estimates and no vendor bills; Wave has both, free. And our public invoice page carries a small "Powered by SuperBooks" line on every plan — Wave lets Pro subscribers remove theirs, and we do not offer that at any price yet. If quoting is central to how you sell, or an unbranded invoice is non-negotiable, those gaps are real and they are ours.

Receipts and OCR

Wave sells receipt capture as an $8-a-month add-on unless you are on Pro. SuperBooks includes capture on every plan, but has no email-in address and no automatic text extraction running today.

Wave's pricing page lists unlimited receipt capture with OCR as an optional add-on at $8 a month or $72 a year in US dollars, included at no extra charge if you are already paying for Pro. That is a defensible way to price it — OCR costs real money to run — but for a free-plan user it is a second subscription on top of the first.

SuperBooks includes receipt capture on every plan: upload from the app, or drop a file into the vault. The free plan processes fifty inbox items a month and paid plans lift that. Two limits stated plainly, because they are exactly the kind of thing a comparison page usually leaves out — there is no email-forwarding address for receipts, and automatic text extraction from a receipt image is not running in production today.

A captured receipt is only useful if it finds its transaction, and today that step is yours. Matching needs the receipt's date, and with text extraction off nothing reads one off the image, so an uploaded receipt is neither matched nor suggested on its own. It waits in your inbox until you pick its transaction — a limit an accountant would rather be told about than discover.

Multi-currency

Level on the currency model, and Wave is ahead on the reporting: it computes foreign-exchange gain and loss, and we do not.

Wave's help centre documents three distinct currencies — the one your business reports in, the one an account is held in, and the one a given transaction happened in — and computes foreign exchange gain and loss against them. That is the correct model, it is on the free plan, and nothing about the June change touched it.

SuperBooks keeps the same three layers apart: every account, transaction and invoice holds the currency it happened in, and invoice and customer totals convert to your business currency at the day's published rate.

Where Wave is ahead: it computes realized foreign-exchange gain and loss as a reportable figure. We do not. A transaction stays in the currency it posted in, with no converted amount stored beside it, and there is no FX gain-and-loss line to hand your accountant. If your business runs materially on foreign currency, that gap is real and it is ours.

Collaborators and your accountant

Neither tool gives you a free accountant seat. Wave now requires Pro to invite an Admin, Editor or Viewer; SuperBooks includes two seats on Starter and ten on Pro.

Wave's collaborator article states it plainly: only Pro Plan subscribers can invite Admins, Editors and Viewers. A free Starter account can still add a payroll manager or a Block Advisors tax pro, neither of whom can see the books — Wave's own permissions table gives both no access to sales, purchases, accounting or reports. For a legacy free business, the change arrived as a hard cut — Wave's FAQ says that as of 1 June 2026, existing collaborators lost access. If your bookkeeper was in your Wave file in May, they were not in June unless you started paying.

SuperBooks does not have a free accountant seat either, and we are not going to dress up a seat count as generosity. Your accountant uses one of your plan's seats: two on Starter, ten on Pro, one on Free — which means Free is genuinely single-player.

What is free is getting data to them. Transactions export to CSV from either role and at no charge. A Xero connection is in progress, so for an accountant who works in Xero the CSV is the way in today. Wave restricts export by role — its own article says Viewer and Editor cannot run one — but Wave hands over more when it does: four accounting files and a receipts ZIP against our single CSV. If your accountant wants the whole year in one zip, Wave still does that better than we do.

Reports

Wave's statutory reporting is mature and free. SuperBooks adds operating numbers Wave's plan comparison does not list — burn rate and runway on every plan, forecasting on Pro.

Wave produces the statutory set an accountant asks for — profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flow, trial balance, account transactions for a date range — has been shipping them for over a decade, and gives them away on the free plan. We do not match that. SuperBooks produces profit and loss, revenue, expenses by category, burn rate, runway and cash balance; there is no balance sheet, no cash-flow statement and no trial balance. If your accountant works from those three, we cannot hand them over yet.

What we add is the other half — the ledger as something you steer with rather than only file. Burn rate, runway, top customers, and profit and loss over an arbitrary window rather than a fixed fiscal one, plus revenue forecasting on Pro. Wave's published plan comparison lists a dashboard and key reports; it does not list runway or forecasting. So the split is real but it is a split, not a win: Wave for the statutory pack, us for the operating numbers.

Revenue forecasting and shareable report links with an expiry are both here — you send an investor or a lender a number without sending them a login. Both are on the Pro plan.

One caution, and it applies to us as much as to Wave. A report is only as good as the ledger under it. If you switch mid-year and only bring the current year across, your prior-period comparatives will be empty until you backfill. Plan that with whoever files your return before you move, not after.

The AI, described honestly

SuperBooks categorizes with a model and computes with a ledger. Below 0.7 confidence it writes no category at all rather than guessing — and there is no review queue holding those for you.

Accountants have a specific objection to AI bookkeeping, and it is not that the model is stupid. It is that AI-produced books look categorized and reconciled, so you trust them right up until something that should balance does not. Any vendor selling “no review needed” is selling you that failure mode.

So, precisely, with the threshold named. The model reads a transaction and proposes a category with a confidence score. The ledger does the arithmetic — deterministic code, not a model. Below 0.7 confidence the proposal is discarded and the transaction is written back blank: no guess, and no manufactured certainty. At or above it, the category is applied.

Now the part most pages in this genre would skip. That is not a review queue. There is no separate lane holding low-confidence items for you, and we are not going to describe one that does not exist. What you get is an uncategorized transaction sitting in your list, which you find the way you would find any other gap in your books — by looking. A tool that guessed instead would leave you nothing to find, and that is the failure your accountant is actually worried about.

There is also an assistant you can ask about your books in plain language, answering from your ledger. It is not the support channel. If you need help from a person you get a person; putting a chatbot between customers and human support is a mistake we have watched this whole category make.

Wave's published plan comparison lists no AI assistant on either tier. That is a statement about what Wave advertises, not a claim that Wave does no machine categorization — Wave's Pro plan does auto-categorize a connected feed.

API, CLI and MCP

Both have a real API. Wave's is GraphQL and needs a Pro or Advisors subscription before a third-party app can connect; ours is an HTTP API with an MCP server on every plan, and no outbound webhooks.

Credit where it is due: Wave runs a proper developer portal with a GraphQL endpoint, an API playground, webhooks, OAuth and application management. It is a real API, not a marketing page. Wave's own documentation notes you can build and test against your own business without a Pro subscription, but a business connecting to a public third-party app needs an active Pro or Wave Advisors subscription.

SuperBooks exposes an HTTP API with published TypeScript and Python SDKs and OAuth for third-party apps. Everything the web application can do, the API can do, because the web application is built on it. One gap worth naming against Wave: we publish no outbound webhooks, so an integration has to poll where Wave's would be pushed.

The part with no Wave equivalent is the MCP server, so Claude, Cursor or any MCP client can read transactions, draft invoices and pull reports as tools rather than by scraping screens. The client lists two tools, search_tools and execute_typescript, and through them reaches 244 SuperBooks tools, every feature of the app, each with its own permission check. If part of why you are leaving is that you want your finance stack reachable by an agent, this is the concrete difference.

Export and getting out again

Wave exports more than we do — four spreadsheets plus a receipts ZIP — but closes it to Viewer and Editor roles. Ours is one transactions CSV, open to every role, with a Xero connection in progress.

The reason to care about export on the way in is that it is the only thing that makes the next switch cheap. You are reading this page because a vendor changed the terms on you. Assume we might too, and check the exit before you use the entrance.

Wave's export article describes what you get: an accounting export of four XLS or CSV files — journal entries and transactions, bill items, customers, vendors — plus a ZIP of receipt images in their original formats, and Canadian payroll files where applicable. It is a genuine full-data export. Two limits worth knowing: it covers the business profile you are currently in, one at a time, and Viewer and Editor roles cannot run it.

SuperBooks exports your transactions as a CSV file, on any plan and from either role. No export fee, no retention call, no tier you have to buy in order to leave. A Xero connection, for an accountant who would rather stay in the tool they already know, is in progress; until it ships, the CSV is how your books get there.

Wave's export is broader than ours and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. Wave hands you four accounting files covering journal entries, bills, customers and vendors, plus every receipt image in a ZIP. Ours is one flat CSV of transactions, with no bulk download of receipt images. If a complete self-serve archive is what you are optimising for, Wave wins this section outright.