Wave vs Salesforce
Side-by-side comparison of features, pricing, ratings, and alternatives.
Wave offers genuinely free accounting and invoicing software aimed at freelancers and micro-businesses, making money on payments and payroll add-ons. It is a popular starting point for solo operators.
Salesforce is the market-leading customer relationship management platform, used by enterprises to manage sales pipelines, customer service, marketing, and increasingly, custom business applications built on its underlying platform. Its Sales Cloud and Service Cloud products are the core of most implementations. Salesforce's highly configurable architecture, built on its own Apex programming language and declarative tools like Flow, lets organizations extensively customize workflows, objects, and automation to match complex business processes rather than adapting their processes to fit the software. Einstein, Salesforce's AI layer, adds predictive lead scoring, generative email drafting, and conversational AI assistance across the platform, while AppExchange offers thousands of pre-built integrations and add-on applications for extending functionality further.
Core accounting and invoicing are free; payments and payroll are paid.
No free tier; Starter plans from $25/user/month, Enterprise plans scale much higher.
- Genuinely free core features
- Easy for beginners
- Good invoicing
- No subscription for basics
- Extremely configurable for complex enterprise needs
- Massive AppExchange ecosystem
- Strong reporting and forecasting tools
- Industry-standard, well-supported platform
- Fewer advanced features
- Support is limited on free tier
- Payroll/payments cost extra
- Steep learning curve and implementation cost
- No free tier, relatively expensive per user
- Often requires dedicated admins or consultants to configure well
What reviewers say
Wave Reviews
4.0 (3)Great accounting
Wave has been part of our stack. Easy for beginners. No real complaints. Would recommend.
Good, not perfect
Been using Wave for a while. Upside: no subscription for basics. Downside: support is limited on free tier.
Solid choice
Been using Wave for a while. Genuinely free core features. Minor gripe: payroll/payments cost extra. Would recommend.
Salesforce Reviews
4.3 (4)Works, with some caveats
Mixed feelings about Salesforce after using it for a while. On the plus side, strong reporting and forecasting tools. That said, steep learning curve and implementation cost, which held us back from rating it higher.
Does exactly what we need
Been a daily user of Salesforce for a while now. Extremely configurable for complex enterprise needs. One minor gripe: often requires dedicated admins or consultants to configure well, but it hasn't been a dealbreaker. Would recommend to anyone considering it.
Solid choice
I switched to Salesforce last quarter and haven't looked back. Massive AppExchange ecosystem. No major complaints so far. Would recommend to anyone considering it.
