8 Best Free Accounting Software for Nonprofits of 2026

Zoho Books gives a small charity the most complete free cloud ledger on this list, as long as yearly revenue stays under $50K. Zoho's US pricing page lists bank reconciliation, recurring invoices, sales receipts, vendor management, 1099 preparation and filing, and profit and loss, balance sheet and 50+ other reports on the free plan, with 1 user plus 1 accountant seat. The free plan is capped at 1,000 invoices and 1,000 expenses a year, which is plenty for most volunteer-run groups. The gaps matter for nonprofits: automatic bank feeds need the $15 Standard plan, budgets need Premium, and Zoho's help center says reporting tags, which you would use to split income and spending by fund or program, are only on certain plans. Free support is by email, Monday to Friday, 9 am to 9 pm ET. For a charity that wants a cloud ledger an accountant can review without paying anything, it is the safest starting point.

Manager.io is the most capable free option if one person keeps the books. Manager's download page says the Desktop Edition can be used for as long as you like, with all features, no time limits, no usage limits and no ads, on Windows, Mac and Linux, and it works offline. Its guides list bank reconciliations, receipts and payments, expense claims, payslips, fixed assets and a Projects tab that tracks income and expenses for individual pieces of work, which a charity can use to follow a grant or program. The catch is access: Manager says the desktop version is single-user and does not support remote access. When a second volunteer or an outside accountant needs to log in, the choices are the Cloud Edition at a flat 59 USD a month for unlimited users and businesses, or the free Server Edition on your own hardware, which Manager does not help install.

Wave is the simplest free ledger here and the easiest to hand to a new volunteer. Wave's pricing page lists unlimited estimates, invoices, bills and bookkeeping records on the $0 Starter plan, plus online payments at 2.9% + $0.60 per card transaction, a mobile app and a dashboard of cash flow. Its accounting page describes reports with month-to-month and year-to-year comparisons. For nonprofits the limits are clear: bank transactions are imported automatically only on the Pro plan at $19 a month, and inviting admin, editor or viewer users also needs Pro, so a treasurer on Starter enters bank activity by hand and works alone apart from a free payroll manager or Block Advisors tax pro seat. Wave does not document classes or tags, so separating restricted gifts means building separate income accounts. For a club or small charity with few transactions, it is enough.

Odoo is the strongest free option for tracking grants and programs if you can invest some setup time. Odoo's pricing page offers a One App Free plan with unlimited users on Odoo Online, and its FAQ says usage of the chosen app is free forever, including any apps it depends on. Pick Accounting as that app and you get Odoo's analytic accounting, which its documentation describes as a way to distribute costs across one or more analytic accounts when posting entries, with analytic plans and distribution models to automate repeat splits. A nonprofit can treat each grant or program as an analytic account. The documentation also covers analytic and financial budgets. The trade-off is scope and complexity: installing a second app such as CRM or Events moves you to a paid per-user plan, and a volunteer treasurer will need more time to configure it than Wave or Zoho Books. Paid prices showed in euros from our location, so the USD check is pending.

QuickBooks Online is not free at list price, but it can cost very little for a registered nonprofit. TechSoup's Intuit page lists a 1-year QuickBooks Online Plus subscription for 5 users at an $80 admin fee, and Advanced for 25 users at $170, for eligible organizations. That matters because Plus is the plan Intuit's pricing page credits with class and location tracking (up to 40), budgets and project profitability, which is how most small nonprofits split income and spending by program or restricted fund. At list price Plus is $140 a month and Simple Start is $38 a month for 1 user; Intuit also lists QuickBooks Free at $0 a month for getting organized. Classes give program reports, but they are not true fund accounting, so balances by fund take care to maintain. If your auditor or volunteer accountant already works in QuickBooks, the TechSoup route is the cheapest path to Plus.

Aplos is on this list as the step up for charities that find free general ledgers no longer satisfy their funders or auditor. It is not free: Aplos's pricing page starts Lite at $79 a month with 2 users, Core at $129 and Advanced at $229, after a 15-day trial with no credit card. What the money buys is the thing free tools lack. Aplos says every package includes true fund accounting, donation tracking and giving statements, and Lite adds a balance sheet by fund, an income statement by fund, bank reconciliation, custom reports, a board portal and 1099 management. Core adds basic budgeting, accounts payable and receivable and user roles, and Advanced adds budgeting by fund or grant and income and expense allocations. At the time we checked, a YEAREND26 code cut the first 3 months by 50%. Choose Aplos when restricted gifts make tag- or class-based tracking unreliable.

GnuCash is the long-standing open-source choice, and it costs nothing at any size. The project describes it as personal and small-business accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL, for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac and Windows. Its features page lists double-entry accounting, a checkbook-style register, scheduled transactions with reminders, statement reconciliation, a budget tool, customer and vendor tracking, invoicing and bill payment, and standard reports such as the balance sheet and profit and loss. For a charity, the usual approach is to create separate income, expense and equity accounts for each restricted fund, which GnuCash handles but does not set up for you. There is no vendor help desk; GnuCash points users to public mailing lists, IRC and its documentation. It suits a treasurer who is comfortable with accounting terms and wants full control of the data file on their own computer.

ERPNext gives nonprofits the most structured free fund tracking among the open-source tools, at the cost of setup work. Frappe's pricing page says ERPNext is free and open source but needs hosting, with Frappe Cloud sites from $5 a month and pricing that is not per user. ERPNext's documentation describes accounting dimensions that add a field to transactions and ledger entries so reports can be filtered by department or segment; a charity can create a Fund or Grant dimension and make it mandatory on income and expense accounts, so nothing posts without one. The manual also covers cost centers, cost center allocation, budgets, budget revisions and a budget variance report. The trade-off is effort: Frappe notes that after hosting you either start with the default setup or hire a partner for implementation, and the interface is built for businesses with many modules. It suits a nonprofit with a technical volunteer or staff member.