If you searched "Stintly vs Wave," you're probably a one-person operation that got tired of paying $30 a month to QuickBooks or FreshBooks and started looking at genuinely free options. Wave is the name that comes up first, and for good reason — it has been the default free accounting tool for freelancers for over a decade. Stintly is a newer, narrower tool: a free iPhone app for tracking time, jobs, expenses, and invoices that works with airplane mode on and never asks you to create an account. These two products overlap enough that people compare them, but they were built on different assumptions about what a solo operator actually needs. This comparison lays out where each one is genuinely stronger so you can pick without wasting a weekend on migration.
Quick Comparison
The short version, side by side:
| Feature | Stintly | Wave |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — no subscription, no tiers | Free core accounting; paid payroll, payments fees, optional advisor plans |
| Works Offline | Yes — 100% offline, all features | No — browser-based, requires connection |
| Account Required | No — open app and start | Yes — email signup, password, verification |
| Best For | Solo operators and small crews tracking billable time, jobs, and expenses in the field | Businesses wanting full double-entry books, bank feeds, and formal financial statements |
| Platform | iPhone and iPad (native app) | Web browser; limited companion mobile apps |
| Key Features | Time tracking, job and client records, expense logging, invoicing, mileage, profit view per job | Double-entry accounting, bank connections, invoicing, receipt scanning, payroll (paid), sales tax |
| Data Privacy | Data stays on your device — nothing uploaded, no ads | Data stored on Wave/H&R Block servers; free tier historically ad-supported |
Pricing
Both apps are free, so the honest comparison is about what "free" costs you in practice.
Wave's core accounting and invoicing genuinely cost nothing. You can send unlimited invoices, categorize transactions, and run reports without paying a cent. Wave makes money elsewhere: payment processing (roughly 2.9% + $0.60 per card transaction, higher for AmEx), payroll (a monthly base fee plus per-employee charges, varying by state), and advisory or bookkeeping add-ons. Historically the free tier has also carried ads and upsells, and Wave moved some previously-free conveniences — like bank feed connections and receipt scanning — behind a paid Pro tier. That's a legitimate business model, not a scam, but it means the price you see today isn't guaranteed to be the price in two years. Wave was acquired by H&R Block in 2019, and acquired products tend to drift toward monetization.
Stintly is free with no paid tier, no add-on processing fees, and no upsell path, because it doesn't process your payments or hold your data. It's a tool you download and use.
| Cost | Stintly | Wave (free tier) | Wave (with payroll) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 | $0 + payment fees | ~$20–$40+/mo |
| 1 year | $0 | $0 + payment fees | ~$240–$480+ |
| 3 years | $0 | $0 + payment fees | ~$720–$1,440+ |
If you invoice $60,000 a year and collect all of it through Wave's card payments, you're paying roughly $1,700 in processing fees annually. That's not a knock on Wave — every processor charges something — but it's the real cost of the "free" label, and it's worth knowing before you route all your money through one tool.
Save money. Try Stintly free today. Download Stintly for Free — no account needed, works 100% offline.
Features
Where Wave is genuinely strong: Wave is real accounting software. It runs proper double-entry bookkeeping, which means your balance sheet actually balances and your accountant won't groan when you hand over the file. It connects to your bank and credit card accounts so transactions import automatically. It generates profit and loss statements, balance sheets, cash flow reports, and sales tax summaries in a format a CPA recognizes. It handles multiple currencies. It does payroll with tax filing in supported states. If you have employees, inventory, a business bank account with hundreds of monthly transactions, or an accountant who wants read access to your books, Wave does things Stintly does not attempt.
Where Stintly is genuinely strong: Stintly is built around the actual daily loop of a solo operator — you're at a job site, you did three hours of work, you bought $40 of supplies, and you need that recorded before you forget. Open the app, tap the timer, log the expense, attach it to the client. Later, turn logged hours and expenses into an invoice. See which jobs and clients are actually profitable rather than which ones are just busy. Track mileage between sites. No dashboard tour, no chart of accounts to configure, no onboarding wizard asking about your business entity type.
The philosophical difference: Wave assumes you want a complete general ledger and will do the data entry to maintain it. Stintly assumes your time is the product, your phone is in your hand, and the fastest path from "work happened" to "invoice sent" is what matters. If you've ever opened accounting software, seen an uncategorized transactions queue with 200 items, and closed the tab, you know which assumption fits you.
Stintly is part of a family of tools built on the same offline-first idea, each shaped around a specific trade. If your work is more specialized than generic freelancing, the sibling app may fit better: LawnBook handles lawn care and landscaping routes, recurring service schedules, and seasonal client management; ShineBook covers residential and commercial cleaning operations with crew and recurring-visit tracking; KeyLoft is for landlords managing rental units, tenant relations, and rent tracking; and TrestleBook is aimed at construction and contracting, with job costing and contractor billing built around how a build is actually phased. All free, all offline, same no-account approach.
Want to try Stintly for free? Download Stintly for Free — no subscription required.
Offline & Privacy
This is the clearest split between the two products, and it's not a marketing distinction — it's architectural.
Wave lives in a browser and syncs to Wave's servers. No connection means no access. That's fine at a desk with reliable wifi. It's a real problem in a basement doing an electrical rough-in, on a rural property with one bar, at a job site inside a concrete parking structure, or on a plane. The common workaround is writing hours on paper and entering them later — which is where hours get lost, rounded down, or forgotten entirely. Most solo operators underbill by more than they realize for exactly this reason.
Stintly stores everything locally on your device. Every feature works with the radio off. There's no sync queue to fail, no "reconnecting" spinner, no session that expires while you're two hours into a job. The tradeoff is honest and worth stating plainly: local-only means no automatic multi-device sync and no web dashboard, and it means your device backup is your data backup. If your phone goes in a lake and you haven't backed it up, that data is gone. Wave's cloud storage genuinely protects you from that.
On privacy: Wave holds your revenue, client list, and bank transaction history on servers owned by H&R Block, a tax preparation company. Their privacy policy governs what happens with it. Nothing about that is nefarious, and plenty of people are fine with it. But if you'd rather your client list and income figures not sit in a third party's database at all, Stintly's model is simply different — there's no account, so there's no server-side record of you to begin with. No ads either, because there's no ad-supported tier to fund.
The right question isn't "which is more secure." It's "what happens to my data if this company changes owners, changes pricing, or shuts down?" With Wave, that's a real dependency. With Stintly, the data is already on your phone.
Who Should Use Wave
Wave is the better choice, honestly, if any of these describe you:
- You have employees or contractors on payroll. Stintly doesn't do payroll. Wave does, with tax filing in supported states. This alone settles it.
- Your accountant needs formal statements. If you're filing as an S-corp, applying for a business loan, or working with a CPA who wants a proper general ledger, you need double-entry books. Wave provides them free.
- You have high transaction volume. Hundreds of bank and card transactions a month is miserable to enter by hand. Bank feeds solve that.
- You work from a desk with reliable internet. If your business happens at a computer, the offline advantage is worth close to nothing to you.
- You need multi-user or multi-device access. A bookkeeper logging in from elsewhere, or you switching between laptop and phone, requires a cloud product.
- You want built-in card payment collection. Wave lets clients pay an invoice by card directly. That convenience often pays for its own fee in faster collection.
Wave has been free and functional for a long time, and dismissing it would be dishonest. For a business with real complexity, it's one of the best value propositions in software.
Who Should Use Stintly
Stintly fits a narrower profile, but fits it well:
- You're solo or a very small crew. No payroll, no bookkeeper, no board. You bill clients and you want to know if you're making money.
- Your work happens away from a desk. Job sites, client homes, vehicles, rural properties, basements. Anywhere the connection is unreliable and the phone is what you have.
- Time is what you sell. Hourly, day-rate, or project work where accurate hours directly equal revenue. A tracker that fails at the moment you need it costs you real money.
- You don't want another account. No signup, no password, no verification email, no marketing sequence, no data breach notification in three years.
- You've abandoned accounting software before. If a chart of accounts and an uncategorized-transactions queue is why you quit last time, a tool that just tracks jobs and hours will actually get used.
- You want per-job profitability, not a balance sheet. Knowing which clients are worth keeping matters more day to day than a formal financial statement you look at once a year.
Worth saying: plenty of people run both. Stintly captures time and expenses in the field where capture actually matters, and Wave (or a CPA at year end) handles the formal books. The tools don't conflict — they solve different halves of the problem.
The Bottom Line
Wave is better accounting software. Stintly is a better field tool. Those aren't competing claims.
If you need double-entry books, bank feeds, payroll, or formal statements for a lender or accountant, use Wave. It's free, it's mature, and nothing in this comparison changes that. Adding Stintly for time capture is optional.
If you're a solo operator whose main problem is that hours and expenses go unrecorded because logging them requires a laptop and a connection you don't have at the moment work happens — Stintly solves that specific problem, free, with no account and no dependency on anyone's servers staying up or staying free. The underbilling that comes from "I'll enter it tonight" costs most solo operators more per year than any accounting subscription.
Start with what actually breaks in your week. If it's tax-time chaos and messy books, that's Wave. If it's lost hours and forgotten expenses, that's Stintly. Both are free, so the only real cost of trying is the thirty seconds it takes to find out.
Ready to switch? Download Stintly for Free — it takes 30 seconds and costs nothing.