Xero meters payroll. QuickBooks meters users. Both lodge your BAS. Neither keeps your data here.
Both lodge BAS from inside the product and both are in production at Kindra. Xero’s Australian plans run $78 to $143 a month including GST with no per-user fee; QuickBooks Online runs about $33 to $125 with users capped at 1, 3, 5 or 25. QuickBooks allows 500 API calls a minute; Xero allows 60. Your accountant decides.
Your accountant decides this one, and we mean it
We have built against both Xero and QuickBooks Online in production, which is unusual for a page like this and is the reason we can write about the API side with some confidence. It is not a reason to trust us on the accounting side. We have not audited either as an accounting package, and your bookkeeper uses one of them every day.
So this page does two things. It puts each vendor’s published Australian prices, user limits and BAS features side by side with dates, so you can check them. And it compares the one axis we are competent to judge: what each is like to connect other systems to. If nothing else will ever touch your ledger, skip to the pricing and ignore the rest.
If your accountant strongly prefers one, listen to your accountant. An integration inconvenience is a one-off engineering cost. The wrong accounting package is a daily one.
The two price lists meter different things
Xero’s Australian plans are Grow at $78, Comprehensive at $107 and Ultimate 10 at $143 a month, all “in AUD and include GST”, with a 90 percent discount for the first three months for new customers running to 30 September 2026. The tiers are metered by payroll headcount — 2, 5 and 10 people — and by online bill payments — 5, 10 and 15 a month, then $0.35 each — with no per-user licence fee on core accounting (Xero Australian pricing, fetched 3 September 2026).
QuickBooks Online’s Australian plans are metered by users: Simple Start allows 1, Essentials 3, Plus 5 and Advanced 25. Intuit’s page leads with a 70 percent discount for six months, showing Simple Start at $9.90 a month and Advanced at $37.50 a month for that period, which puts the regular prices at $33 and $125 (QuickBooks Australian pricing, fetched 3 September 2026). A June 2026 breakdown lists all four regular prices as $33, $60, $84 and $125 including GST (Rounded, June 2026).
So a business with one owner and one bookkeeper is cheaper on QuickBooks at $60 than on Xero at $78. A business with six people who all need a login is cheaper on Xero at $78 than on QuickBooks Plus at $84 with a five-user cap it has already broken. Count logins before you count features.
GST and BAS: both do it, the difference is payroll
Both products track GST and lodge BAS from inside the product on every plan. Xero lists “GST tracking” and “BAS lodging” across Grow, Comprehensive and Ultimate; QuickBooks lists “GST tracking & e-lodge BAS” across all four of its plans (both pricing pages, fetched 3 September 2026). On the quarterly obligation that actually matters to a trade business, neither has an edge we can point to.
Payroll is where they part. Xero includes payroll for 2, 5 or 10 people in the plan price, rising through Ultimate 20, 50 and 100 with “$2 per person after 100” to a maximum of 200. QuickBooks sells payroll separately, “powered by Employment Hero”, at $6 including GST per active employee paid in the month, with Single Touch Payroll and Beam superannuation included (QuickBooks Payroll, fetched 3 September 2026).
Three crews, on the published figures above. This is the sum worth doing with your own headcount before any demo.
- KNDR·01Owner plus bookkeeper, no payrollQuickBooks Essentials, $60 with three logins. Xero Grow, $78. QuickBooks by $18 a month, and the two-payroll allowance on Grow is wasted.
- KNDR·02Four on the tools, two loginsXero Comprehensive at $107 covers five on payroll. QuickBooks Essentials at $60 plus four employees at $6 is $84. QuickBooks by $23, as long as nobody else needs a login.
- KNDR·03Eight on the tools, six loginsXero Ultimate 10 at $143 covers payroll for ten and every login. QuickBooks needs Advanced at $125 for six logins, since Plus caps at five, plus eight employees at $6 — $173. Xero by $30, and the gap widens with every hire.
What each API publishes, from documentation we have built against
Xero publishes four limits: 5 concurrent calls, 60 a minute and 5,000 a day per organisation, and 10,000 a minute across all your connected organisations. It sends webhooks on six record types, signed with an HMAC, retried for 24 hours and replayed for up to 31 days if your endpoint was down. Since 2 March 2026 the API is a paid, tiered product: free to five connected organisations, then $35, $245 or $1,445 a month (Xero API limits and Xero pricing and policy updates, fetched 3 September 2026).
QuickBooks Online publishes 500 requests a minute per company, 10 concurrent a second, batches of 30 and 40 batch requests a minute, with HMAC-verified webhooks and a ChangeDataCapture endpoint that gives you a 30-day delta pull when webhooks have been down (Intuit API limits and ChangeDataCapture, fetched 3 September 2026). It also silently overwrites read-only fields with no error, blocks webhook delivery behind an unacknowledged event, and offers a query language with no OR and no joins. All of that is in Intuit’s own documentation and all of it has bitten us.
| Xero | QuickBooks Online | |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price, AUD inc GST | Partly Grow $78 a month. 90% off for three months to 30 September 2026. | Yes Simple Start about $33 a month (70% off for six months shows $9.90). One user. |
| Users | Yes No per-user licence fee on core accounting. Tiers meter payroll and bill payments. | Partly Capped at 1, 3, 5 or 25 by plan. The cap is the upgrade trigger. |
| Payroll | Yes Included for 2, 5 or 10 people by plan; up to 200 on Ultimate at $2 a person past 100. | Partly Separate add-on via Employment Hero, $6 inc GST per active employee a month. STP included. |
| BAS lodgement in product | Yes “BAS lodging” on every plan. | Yes “GST tracking & e-lodge BAS” on every plan. |
| API rate limit | Partly 60 a minute, 5,000 a day per organisation, 5 concurrent. 429 with Retry-After. | Yes 500 a minute per company, 10 concurrent a second, batches of 30. |
| Webhooks | Yes Six record types, HMAC signed, retried 24 hours, replayed up to 31 days. | Partly HMAC verified, but delivery blocks behind an unacknowledged event. 30-day delta pull to recover. |
| Australian data residency promised | No Privacy notice names Australia, New Zealand and the United States as processing locations. | No “Intuit-operated and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers.” No country named. |
| Cost to a developer to connect | Partly Free to five organisations, then $35 to $1,445 AUD a month since 2 March 2026. | Partly We have found no published developer fee on Intuit’s developer site and have not paid one. Not a promise. |
Where QuickBooks wins, and we would say so
The API is more generous by roughly eight times on the per-minute figure — 500 against 60 — and we have never paid Intuit a developer fee to use it, where Xero has charged for access above five organisations since March 2026. For a business connecting its own ledger the Xero fee is nil; for anyone building something that connects many, it is a real line in the quote (Xero, fetched 3 September 2026).
The entry price is lower. Simple Start at about $33 against Grow at $78 is not a rounding difference for a sole trader, and Essentials at $60 with three users covers an owner, a partner and a bookkeeper for less than Xero’s cheapest full plan.
And the ChangeDataCapture endpoint is a genuinely good piece of design: a real delta pull with a 30-day look-back, which is your documented recovery path after an outage. Thirty days is your outage budget. Xero’s 31-day webhook replay is the equivalent and it is roughly as good, so call this one close.
Where Xero wins
No per-user fee on core accounting. Adding a sixth person who needs to see the ledger costs nothing on Xero and forces a plan change on QuickBooks. For a growing crew that is the single biggest cost difference between the two and it is easy to miss on a pricing page that leads with a discount.
Webhook behaviour is more forgiving. Xero retries for 24 hours and replays for 31 days; QuickBooks blocks delivery behind an unacknowledged event, so one slow response from your endpoint stalls everything behind it until you clear it. Both are documented. One is a trap for an integration built by someone who did not read the documentation.
Xero also publishes its certifications on its Australian security page — ISO/IEC 27001:2022 and SOC 2 reports (Xero security, fetched 3 September 2026) — where Intuit’s Australian security page names no certification. That does not mean Intuit has none. It means you have to ask.
Neither promises your data stays in Australia
Xero’s privacy notice says personal data “may be transferred to and processed in countries other than the country you live in — such as Australia, New Zealand and the United States” (Xero privacy notice, fetched 3 September 2026). Intuit’s Australian security page says production equipment “is housed in both Intuit-operated and Amazon Web Services (AWS) data centers” and names no country (Intuit, fetched 3 September 2026).
For most trade businesses this does not matter, and we would rather say that than manufacture a concern. If it does matter to you — government supply chain, health records, a client contract that says so — then neither product gives you an Australian-residency promise to point at, and you should ask each vendor directly and get the answer in writing.
It also matters for what we build around either. Our own default hosting is in Singapore and Helsinki, with Australian hosting available when an engagement needs it — that is on ownership and security, and it is the same question you should ask any integrator, including us.
What we have not assessed
Everything you would normally want from a comparison of these two as accounting packages: bank feed reliability, the reconciliation experience, inventory, reporting, the mobile apps, how either handles a messy file, and how quickly either support line answers. We have not tested any of it.
We have not measured either API under load. Everything above is documented behaviour, fetched on one day and linked. Documented is not observed, and when our measured register exists those figures go here with the date they were taken.
We have not compared either against MYOB on this page. Xero versus MYOB does that on the same axis, and the accounting software page covers the wider question of what a trade business needs from any of the three.
The questions people actually ask.
01We are on QuickBooks. Should we move to Xero for the webhooks?
No. A QuickBooks integration built by someone who knows about the blocked-webhook behaviour and uses ChangeDataCapture to recover works fine, and QuickBooks’ rate limit is the more generous of the two. Migrating an accounting file is expensive and occasionally goes wrong. Change ledgers for accounting reasons, and let the integration follow.
02Which is cheaper?
It depends on two numbers: how many people need a login, and how many are on payroll. One or two logins with no payroll favours QuickBooks. Six logins or a payroll of five favours Xero. Run the sum in the payroll section above with your own headcount before you read anyone’s verdict, including ours.
03Why are QuickBooks’ regular prices not quoted from Intuit directly?
Because Intuit’s Australian pricing page, as fetched on 3 September 2026, leads with the discounted figures and does not render the regular ones in the page text. We have derived $33 and $125 from Intuit’s own 70-percent-off figures and cross-checked all four against a dated third-party breakdown. If Intuit puts the regular prices back on the page, we will quote them directly.
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