Xero vs MYOB vs QuickBooks: Honest Comparison

Almost every Xero vs MYOB vs QuickBooks comparison online is published by someone who resells one of them. We work in all three and take no margin on any, so here is the version with the numbers in it, including the part that costs us project work.

The unwelcome answer first. For most Australian small businesses, the choice between these three matters far less than how the file is set up. We open files most weeks where the owner is certain the software is the problem, and in roughly four cases out of five it is not. If you are reading this because your reports are useless or nothing reconciles, changing platform will move that problem, not solve it.

With that said, they are genuinely different, they are priced on completely different logic, and there are situations where one is clearly right. Here is how to tell which situation you are in.

What the three actually cost

Headline prices are close to meaningless here, because the three vendors meter different things. Xero charges by payroll headcount. MYOB charges a base fee plus a per employee fee. QuickBooks charges by the number of system users, which is not the same as the number of staff you pay. Two businesses of identical size can find a different platform cheapest depending on which of those three numbers is largest.

Pricing applies for the 2026-27 financial year. Xero and MYOB figures are the vendors’ published rates. The QuickBooks figures are drawn from published summaries rather than the vendor page, so confirm those on the QuickBooks Australia pricing page before you rely on them. Whether QuickBooks Australia caps payroll employees separately from system users is worth confirming if payroll size is your deciding factor.

What that means for a real business

Take a business paying eight staff. On Xero you need the Ultimate 10 tier to cover ten payroll employees, so $143 a month. On MYOB Business Pro you pay $70 plus eight lots of $3, so $94 a month. On MYOB AccountRight Plus payroll is unlimited and included, so $165 a month regardless of whether you hire two more people.

Now take a sole trader with no employees. MYOB Solo at $99 a year is roughly $8 a month. QuickBooks Simple Start is $33 a month. Xero’s entry plan still carries payroll for two people you do not have.

Same three platforms, opposite answers. This is why a generic recommendation is worthless and why you should price your own headcount before reading anyone’s verdict, including ours.

Where Xero earns its place

Best for: most Australian small businesses starting fresh, and anyone whose industry depends on a specific connected app.

Xero’s two real advantages are bank reconciliation and the app ecosystem. The matching, the bank rules and the cash coding screen are the best of the three and make routine work genuinely fast, which matters if you or a staff member are doing the coding rather than paying someone. The Australian app ecosystem is not close either. If a niche tool for your trade, clinic or worksite connects properly to one accounting platform, it is usually this one.

Where it needs help: complex award payroll is usually better served by a dedicated rostering and time capture app feeding Xero than by Xero alone. Inventory is basic and not sufficient for serious warehousing. And watch the headcount tiers, because hiring one person can step you up a plan. Going from ten staff to eleven does not cost you $3, it moves you to the next Ultimate tier.

Where MYOB earns its place

Best for: payroll heavy businesses with complicated awards, and anyone with a long MYOB history worth keeping.

MYOB has been unfashionable for a decade and that is not entirely deserved. For businesses with layered award conditions, shift penalties and complicated entitlement setups, AccountRight handles natively what other platforms often need a third party app and an integration to manage. One fewer integration to reconcile every month is a real and underrated advantage.

The per employee pricing model also rewards a particular shape of business. If you have a small number of staff and want full featured accounting, MYOB Business Pro at $70 plus $3 per head is hard to beat. If you have thirty staff, AccountRight Plus at a flat $165 with unlimited payroll becomes the cheaper structure.

There is also the depth of history. A business fifteen years into an AccountRight file has comparatives and an audit trail that no migration will fully carry across.

Where it needs help: fewer niche app connections than Xero. And if you are on an old desktop only file with no bank feeds, that is genuinely worth moving, though quite possibly to a current MYOB version rather than to a different brand.

Where QuickBooks earns its place

Best for: sole traders and small teams where cost is the deciding factor and payroll is simple.

At $33 a month, Simple Start is the cheapest sensible entry point of the three for a business with one person in the system. It handles Australian GST, BAS reporting and Single Touch Payroll properly, and it is quick to get started with. For a sole trader who wants compliant books without paying for capacity they will never use, that is a legitimate reason to choose it.

Where it needs help: because the plans are metered on system users, the price jumps in large steps. Going from one user to two moves you from $33 to $60, which is an 82 percent increase for one login. Some defaults and help content are written for a global audience, so a handful of settings and GST codes want checking at setup. Award heavy payroll gets stretched.

The four questions that actually decide it

Forget feature lists. If you are choosing, these are the questions in the order they matter.

1. What does your industry software connect to? If your job management, POS, practice management or rostering system integrates properly with only one platform, that decides it before anything else. Retrofitting an integration is painful and expensive. Check this first.
2. How many people do you pay, and how complicated is their pay? A salaried team on uniform contracts can sit on any of the three. Casuals on a hospitality, retail or care award with layered penalties is where the platforms genuinely diverge, and where MYOB deserves a serious look.
3. What does your accountant use? If they are meaningfully faster in one platform, that has a dollar value on your invoice. Ask whether it is genuine efficiency or simply preference. Both are honest answers and knowing which tells you how much weight to give it.
4. What are you already on? If you have a working file with history, staying is usually right. The cost of moving is the project fee plus retraining plus disruption, and it is routinely understated in whatever business case someone is showing you.

Why your setup is probably the real problem

Since this is the actual answer for most people, it is worth being specific about what it means. These five faults account for the overwhelming majority of complaints we hear, and we hear them equally about all three platforms.

• A default chart of accounts nobody adapted. Your profit and loss groups things in a way that tells you nothing about how your business makes money. This is what people mean when they say the reports are useless.
• No bank rules. Every recurring transaction coded by hand every month, slowly, and slightly differently each time. This is what people mean by it takes forever.
• A suspense account with two years in it. Anything unclear went there and never came back out. This is what people mean by the numbers do not look right.
• An integration switched on and never reconciled. The ledger and the settlement report have been drifting apart since the day it was connected. This is what people mean by nothing reconciles.
• GST on the wrong side of recurring items. Repeated every quarter since setup, and nobody notices until someone checks the control accounts against what was actually lodged.

Every one of those follows you across a migration. You pay the project fee, absorb the disruption, retrain your team, and arrive at the same experience on different software. That is exactly how migrations earn their reputation. Our bank reconciliation and catch-up work exists mostly to fix these five things.

What a migration actually costs

If you do need to move, price it honestly. There are four components and most people count one.

• The project fee to reconcile the old file, build the new one and bring history across.
• Your time answering questions and checking the result, which is real even though nobody invoices you for it.
• Retraining for whoever raises invoices and approves bills. Skip this and the migration will be remembered as a disaster no matter how clean the data was.
• Two subscriptions for a period, because you keep the old file open and read only until the first year end after the move is signed off.

Timing changes the price. Done at the start of a financial year it is meaningfully cheaper than mid year, because payroll year to date figures are the fiddliest part of any move and on 1 July there are none to carry. If your reason for moving can wait until then, waiting will save you money. See how we handle migrations for what the process involves.

Our recommendation

Starting fresh with no constraints and no employees: QuickBooks Simple Start or MYOB Solo, on price, and you can move later once the shape of the business is clear.

Starting fresh with a handful of staff and ordinary payroll: Xero, on the strength of the app ecosystem and the reconciliation experience, priced against your headcount tier rather than the advertised rate.

Award heavy payroll, shift penalties, layered entitlements: look seriously at MYOB before assuming Xero plus an app is simpler. Count the integrations you would need to reconcile each month.

Already on one of them and frustrated: stay, and spend a fraction of a migration fee on fixing the setup instead. That is the advice that costs us project work and it is right most of the time.

If you would rather someone just looked, that is what the free consult is for. We will tell you which of the five faults above are in your file, and whether your platform is genuinely wrong for you.