Honest comparison

Comparisons

Free browser tools compared against the paid products people search for — what the paid product does that we do not, first and plainly, then what you can do here for nothing.

7 comparisons · every one opens with what we cannot do

A comparison page written by the people selling one of the two things is worth what you paid for it. So these are written to a rule we can be held to: the paid product’s advantages come first, in our own voice, before the table and before a single link to anything free.

The other rule is that we do not state anything about somebody else’s product that we cannot check. We have no way to see what a competitor charges today, which plans exist or what shipped last month, so no page here says. Where that matters, the page points at the vendor’s own site or at the authority — gov.uk, EPFO, the GST portal — rather than at us.

The comparisons

Tally alternativeWe are not a replacement for Tally. Tally is accounting software — a book of record. These are free browser tools that read and write the XML it imports and exports, so the retyping around it stops. If you need a different book of record, you need another accounting package, not us.Capium alternativeCapium is practice software for accountants. This site is free browser tools for the sums inside the work. We do not file, we do not hold clients, we carry nothing from one year to the next and there is no support desk. Here is the whole gap, before anything else.Free VAT return softwareThe nine boxes worked out from the spreadsheet you already keep, with every row behind every box, for nothing. It cannot submit them: under Making Tax Digital a VAT return has to go through software HMRC has recognised, and this is not on that list.Free payroll software (India)One salary sheet in, and the whole month out: a payslip per employee, a combined PDF, the bank transfer file and a register workbook. Free, and the sheet never leaves your machine. It does not compute TDS, it does not file a return and it does not watch the compliance calendar.Free timetable software for schoolsThe subject allocation your school already writes, turned into a clash-free week in seconds — a grid per class, a grid per teacher, doubles kept together, and a plain list of anything that would not fit. It is not a school management system, and this page is honest about the difference.Free invoice generatorInvoices, quotations, proformas and delivery challans as clean PDFs, with the tax worked out, no watermark, no account and no limit. They are documents, not a system: nothing is stored, nothing is numbered for you and nobody is chasing on your behalf.MTD bridging softwareBridging software is the recognised category for a program whose job is to take figures out of a spreadsheet and submit them to HMRC without being a full accounting package. This explains what that means, what HMRC requires of it, what to ask before you buy one — and exactly where we stop.

What we are, in one paragraph

Free browser tools that do specific jobs. A file is read, some arithmetic happens and a file comes back, all on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored.
Not a system of record. There is no ledger that survives the tab closing, no client list, no history and no prior year.
Not able to file anything. Not a VAT return, not a set of accounts, not a payroll return. Filing needs software a tax authority has recognised, and none of ours is.
Not somebody you can ring. If you are running a limited company with a bookkeeper, or a school with a safeguarding duty, you should probably buy the real thing — and these pages say which one of us is right for which job.