What is the best invoice app?
There is no single best invoice app, and any guide that names one is guessing on your behalf. What there is: a best app for invoicing at your volume, with your payment setup. Asked the other common way, the best app for invoice work is whichever one meters you on something you will not hit. If you want free and unlimited and your clients pay by card, Square Invoices or PayPal Invoicing. If you want free with nobody taking a cut, Zoho Invoice up to 500 invoices a year. If you invoice from a phone on the job and want your own branding, Billgami is our pick and it is ours, disclosed. If you are a contractor who needs estimates, contracts and change orders, Joist. Start from the cost-per-invoice table above rather than a ranking.
Is there a difference between the best invoice app and the best invoicing app?
Not really: people search both phrasings for the same thing, and this guide answers both. If there is a shade of difference, it is that the best invoicing app tends to describe the tool you will use week after week, while the best invoice app is often what people type when they need one document out today. Either way the answer is the same: pick the meter that fits your volume. If you only need one invoice right now, start with a free one, because four apps here are genuinely free rather than free-for-fourteen-days. Zoho Invoice is free for the whole product up to 500 invoices a year with no ads and no cut of your payments, which makes it the strongest pure-free pick. Square Invoices and PayPal Invoicing are free and uncapped to send, but take 3.3% + $0.30 and 2.99% to 3.49% + $0.49 respectively when clients pay. Billgami has a real free tier for invoices, estimates and payment tracking. Bookipi's free plan is real but caps you at 3 invoices a month.
How much should an invoice app cost?
Measured per invoice sent, the honest range across these twelve apps is zero to about $3.30. At thirty invoices a year the paid apps land between $2.00 and $3.33 each; at three hundred a year the same apps land between $0.20 and $1.80. That spread is why the monthly price is misleading. If you send only a handful of invoices a month, paying anything at all is hard to justify when Zoho Invoice, Square and PayPal are free to send.
Which invoice apps are free to send with, month after month?
Zoho Invoice, Square Invoices, PayPal Invoicing and Invoice Ninja's hosted tier all let you send without paying a recurring charge, and Billgami has a free tier plus a $249.99 lifetime option if you want to skip the subscription cycle. The catches differ and they matter: Square and PayPal take a percentage of each payment, Zoho caps you at 500 invoices a year, and Invoice Ninja's free tier caps you at five clients. Free to send is not the same as free to get paid.
What do invoice apps mean by an invoice limit?
It is a cap on how many invoices a plan lets you create, and the unit varies in ways that matter enormously. This is the single thing to check when people ask for the best app for invoice work, or for the best invoicing software for small business use, because it is the constraint that decides your real cost rather than the advertised price. Invoice Simple allows 3 a month on its entry plan. Invoice2go allows 30 a year on its entry plan, which sounds larger but is 2.5 a month. Joist counts estimates and invoices together at 5 documents a month. Billdu does not cap invoices at all and instead caps how many clients you can store. Always check the unit, not just the number.
Do invoice apps take a percentage of my payments?
Some do and some do not, and it is the single largest cost difference on this page. Square Invoices takes 3.3% + $0.30 per card payment. PayPal Invoicing takes 2.99% + $0.49 by card and 3.49% + $0.49 when a client pays by PayPal or Venmo. Tofu adds a 1% platform fee on top of its subscription. Invoice2go, Billdu and Joist all charge card fees that fall as you buy a higher plan. Billgami, Zoho Invoice and Invoice Ninja do not process payments at all, so nothing sits between you and your client's money.
Which invoice app is best for a phone?
Invoice Simple is the most polished pure phone experience and has by far the largest App Store rating count at 122,610. Billgami is built phone-first for service pros and is our own app, disclosed. Bookipi and Billdu are both strong on mobile, and Billdu additionally works offline. Zoho Invoice and Invoice Ninja are web-first with mobile apps attached, so they suit someone who mostly works at a desk.
Which invoice app works offline?
Billgami, Billdu and Tofu work without a connection; Square Invoices and Joist are partial or online-only. This matters more than it sounds if you write invoices in basements, new builds, or rural properties. If you have ever lost a document because you had no signal on site, treat offline as a filter rather than a nice-to-have.
Can I get my invoices out if I stop paying?
Check this before you commit, not when you are cancelling. An invoice is a business record you may need years after the job for a tax question, a warranty claim, or a dispute, and some apps put that history behind an active plan: Joist's recent reviews mention losing access in 14.3% of its negatives, the highest on this page. Billgami exports all invoice PDFs, a records CSV and a payments CSV on every plan including free. Whichever app you choose, pull an export on a schedule and keep it somewhere you control.
Is Billgami the best invoice app on this list?
No, and we are not going to claim it is. Billgami is listed first because it is ours and hiding that would be worse than disclosing it. It is our pick for phone-first invoicing from a job site, and it genuinely wins the lifetime-pricing and offline rows. It loses to Square and PayPal if you want card payments inside the app, to Zoho Invoice on pure free capacity, to Invoice Ninja if you want to self-host, and to Joist if you are a contractor who needs change orders. A roundup that crowns its own product is a sales page wearing a comparison's clothes.
How did you count 8,000 reviews?
It is the sum of the written App Store reviews we hold for the twelve apps on this page: seven deep corpora (Invoice2go 1,607, Billdu 1,378, InvoiceFly 1,106, Invoice Simple 1,000, Joist 1,000, Tofu 897 and Bookipi 530) plus four smaller saved pulls (PayPal 196, Square 149, Zoho Invoice 91 and Invoice Ninja 46). Billgami is ours and contributes none. We also analysed 2,191 more reviews across four smaller apps that are not carded here. The count is derived by a script from the saved files rather than tallied by hand.
Why does one app cost more per invoice as you send more?
Because of a cap, and Invoice2go is the only app here where it happens between two paid tiers. Its Professional plan allows 100 invoices a year at $11.95 a month, which works out at $1.43 each. Send 300 and Professional no longer permits it, so the cheapest plan that does is Premium at $44.95 a month, which works out at $1.80 each. Sending three times as much makes each invoice more expensive, not less. Every other paid app on this page gets cheaper per invoice as volume rises.
Which invoice app has the fewest complaints?
Among the apps with enough recent reviews to compare, Billdu has the cleanest profile: zero cap complaints, zero billing complaints, and the lowest price-complaint share of any paid app at 11.1% of its recent negatives. We are naming a competitor here because that is what the evidence says. The caveat that applies to every row of that table is that sample sizes differ by a lot, so treat the smaller ones as direction rather than precision.
Do I need an invoice app or accounting software?
If you only create invoices and estimates, chase who has paid, and keep PDF records, every app on this page does that and accounting software would be an expensive way to do paperwork. You need real accounting if you run payroll, track inventory, reconcile bank feeds, or hand a general ledger to an accountant at tax time. None of the twelve invoice apps here does any of that, on purpose.
Billgami
Square Invoices
PayPal Invoicing
Zoho Invoice
Billdu
Bookipi
Invoice Simple
Joist
Invoice Ninja
Invoice2go
InvoiceFly
