Let us open with the part that does not favor us. Wave has a genuinely free plan: unlimited invoices, estimates, bills and bookkeeping records, at zero. For a freelancer who mainly needs to send invoices and get paid, that is a real offer and it is hard to argue with a price of nothing.
So the useful question is not which is cheaper. It is what the free tier does not include, and whether the thing you actually need is above or below that line.
Where the line falls
On Wave's Starter plan, receipt capture is a paid add-on at $11 a month or $96 a year, and automatic bank import is not included at all. Both live on Pro, at $19 a month or $190 a year. So a freelancer who wants their receipts read for them is choosing between $96 a year for receipts alone on the free plan, or $190 a year for the full Pro tier.
myClerkBook Basic is $50 a year and reads ten documents a day. Premium is $100 a year and reads a hundred a day, converts across 166 currencies, and runs up to five separate books. Compared against the configuration that actually includes document reading, we are the cheaper product rather than the more expensive one — which is not the impression the word "free" leaves.
| Dimension | myClerkBook | Wave |
|---|---|---|
| Entry priceWave | $5 a month or $50 a year | Free on Starter |
| Reading receipts and invoicesmyClerkBook | Included on every plan, 10 a day on Basic, 100 on Premium | $11 a month add-on on Starter; included on Pro at $19 a month |
| Invoicing and getting paidWave | Not built. This is not an invoicing product | Core strength, with payment processing built in |
| Bank connectionDifferent by design | None, permanently | Optional, on Pro, via Plaid |
| Multiple businessesmyClerkBook | Up to five books on one Premium subscription | Pro is priced per business |
| Multiple currenciesmyClerkBook | 166, stored as entered and converted daily on Premium | Available, oriented to US and Canadian businesses |
| Alerts and automationsmyClerkBook | Email on Basic; email, SMS and WhatsApp on Premium, with a custom builder | Automated invoice payment reminders |
| Full accountingWave | No: a book of account, not double-entry accounting | Double-entry accounting with reports |
Where Wave is better
Who each one is for
- Choose Wave if invoicing and getting paid is the center of your work, you want double-entry accounting, and you operate in the US or Canada where its payments and tax features are strongest.
- Choose myClerkBook if the center of your work is keeping an accurate record, documents read for you, grouped by client or project, across several currencies and several books, and you invoice from somewhere else.
- Running both is common and sensible: invoice in one, keep the book in the other.
- 0
- Bank connections
- 166
- Currencies
- 100
- Parses a day
- 5
- Separate books
No login, no aggregator, no read access. Architectural, not a setting.
Stored exactly as entered, converted daily on Premium.
Receipts, invoices and statements read on Premium. Ten a day on Basic.
Each with its own groups, base currency and alerts, on Premium.
One last thing, and it applies to every comparison on this blog. myClerkBook is not trying to be the product with the most features on the page. It is trying to be the one that never asks you for something it should not need. If automatic bank import is the thing you want most, buy the product that does it well and ignore everything above — that is a real preference and it deserves a real answer rather than a sales rebuttal.