Last Updated on April 16, 2022
Intuit Inc. is an American corporation that specializes in financial software. Specifically, the company develops personal finance, accounting, and tax return software.
The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California. It has more than 10,000 employees.
While Intuit has a GitHub presence with over 100 repositories for numerous open source projects, none of these repositories offer any substantial desktop software. Instead, the repositories focus on tools and libraries for the developer community. None of these projects have attracted significant interest from the open source community.
The company focuses its development efforts on a range of proprietary programs. Intuit refuses to support any platform other than Windows and macOS.
This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Intuit’s products.
Quickbooks is an accounting software package targeted mainly at small and medium-sized businesses.
Quickbooks is proprietary software and not available for Linux. What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. GnuCash
GnuCash is a personal and small-business financial accounting program.
Designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible, GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses. As quick and intuitive to use as a checkbook register, it is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.
2. Ledger
Ledger is a command-line based double-entry bookkeeping application.
Ledger uses text files for input. It reads the files and generates reports; there is no other database or stored state. To use Ledger, you create a file of your account names and transactions, run from the command line with some options to specify input and requested reports, and get output. The output is generally plain text, though you could generate a graph or html instead. Ledger is simple in concept, surprisingly rich in ability, and easy to use.
3. hledger
hledger is an elegant, versatile accounting program, for tracking money, time, or other commodities using plain text records.
There’s a variety of interfaces available. You may prefer the zero-setup web interface (WUI), allowing terminal-free, point-and-click usage.
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Intuit's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Mailchimp manages mailing lists and creates email marketing campaigns and automations to send to customers. |
 | Mint is a personal financial management website. The service offers personalized insights, custom budgets, spend tracking, and monitoring. |
 | TurboTax is a software package for preparation of American income tax returns step-by-step. |
| Quickbooks is an accounting software package targeted mainly at small and medium-sized businesses. |