QuickBooks Online is real accounting software, and that's the problem: time tracking, client visibility, and subcontractor pay are all bolted on as separate products or manual workarounds, not built into the core plan. Here's the honest, single-user comparison.
Rated against the things a small consultancy with occasional subcontractors actually needs day to day. "Full" means a real, dedicated mechanic built for that purpose.
| Differentiator | QuickBooks Online | Bizily |
|---|---|---|
| Bill client / pay worker independently, worker price-blind | ||
| Client portal with a real, logged-in delegate account | ||
| Custom / non-USD currency, non-monetary compensation | ||
| Proactive budget alert | ||
| Flexible billing: fixed / retainer / rolling balance with overage | ||
| Worker payroll statements (draft → finalized → paid) |
Bill/pay separation gets "Partial" because QuickBooks can do it: set one service item at the contractor's rate and a second, marked-up item at the client's rate. It works, but it's a manual two-item setup you maintain yourself, not a built-in markup workflow. Retainers get the same rating — QuickBooks has no dedicated retainer object, so firms bill them as recurring invoices instead.
QuickBooks prices the plan flat per business, not per seat, up to a per-tier user cap. The catch is that time tracking and contractor payments aren't part of that plan at all — they're separate subscriptions stacked on top.
QuickBooks Online
Nothing — there's no free tier. The cheapest plan, Solopreneur, runs around $20/mo, and it's deliberately stripped of double-entry accounting and a balance sheet, aimed at gig workers rather than a firm with clients and subcontractors.
Bizily Free
1 client, 2 projects, unlimited users on the business, and every feature Bizily has: client portal, bill/pay split, flexible billing structures, all included. The free plan is capacity-limited, never capability-limited.
Nothing at that price. Simple Start, the entry accounting tier, runs around $35/mo and still has no time tracking at all — that first shows up one tier higher, on Essentials.
Basic clock-in/out timesheets need Essentials, around $70/mo. Real mobile or GPS time tracking needs the separate QuickBooks Time add-on on top of that: $20–40/mo base plus $8–10 per user, per month. Paying a subcontractor with next-day deposit and automatic 1099 filing needs a third subscription, Contractor Payments, around $15/mo for up to 20 contractors. None of that is bundled — it's three separately metered products stacked on top of each other.
Real double-entry accounting, a general ledger, balance sheets, bank feed reconciliation, tax-form filing, and a huge accountant/bookkeeper ecosystem built around it. Here's the honest gap list on Bizily's side:
QuickBooks Online raised prices again in May 2026, the latest in a run that's taken Essentials from around $40/mo in 2021 to roughly $70–75/mo today, and Advanced from around $150/mo to roughly $250–275/mo — on the order of an 80% increase over five years. QuickBooks Payroll, used by the large majority of QBO subscribers, has climbed a comparable amount over the same period. It's a bigger, longer-running version of the same pattern as Harvest's post-acquisition repricing and Clockify's 2026 free-tier cut: a platform tightening the economics once a business is already dependent on it.
QuickBooks Online's cheapest tier with any time tracking at all is Essentials, and that's just clock-in/out timesheets. Real mobile or GPS time tracking requires QuickBooks Time (formerly TSheets), a separate subscription on top of the QBO plan itself, priced at $20–40/mo base plus $8–10 per user, per month. A single consultant ends up paying for two subscriptions to get what Bizily includes in one.
QuickBooks has no client-facing portal. Clients get an emailed invoice link where they can view and pay it — that's the whole extent of native client access. On QuickBooks' own community forum, the standard answer to "where's my client portal" is that one doesn't exist: giving a client persistent visibility means adding them as a full user on the company file, which hands over accounting-system access rather than a scoped client view. Third-party tools exist specifically to bolt a real portal onto QuickBooks, which is itself a sign of how real the gap is. Bizily's client portal is a real login, free on every plan.
Project budgets exist starting at the Plus tier, but there's no built-in way to get alerted when a project crosses a spending threshold, at any tier. Asked directly about this on QuickBooks' own support community, the answer is to wire it up yourself with Zapier and a Google Sheet, or file a feature request. Bizily's budget alerts are native and proactive out of the box.
A subcontractor in QuickBooks is a vendor. Paying them means entering a bill or expense and paying it — there's no draft → finalized → paid pay-cycle concept the way real payroll has. Billing the client a marked-up rate for that same work is possible, but it means manually maintaining two separate service items: one at the contractor's cost, one at the client's price. It works, but it's a workaround assembled from general billable-expense tools, not a workflow built around the specific case of a client not seeing what a subcontractor is actually paid.
Free for your first client, flat per-business pricing after that. No stacked add-ons, no per-seat math.
