How we compare
Wave vs Muntin Ledger
Wave runs a free accounting product paired with paid add-ons for payments, payroll, and receipts. Muntin Ledger is not free; we charge a small monthly fee in exchange for an audit chain, native apps, and a privacy architecture that keeps your structured ledger in cleartext scoped to your workspace and your scanned documents in encrypted-at-rest storage used only for extraction.
Wave
Muntin Ledger
Row by row
Target user
Muntin Ledger
Owners who scan or drop many vendor invoices each month and want a verifiable record.
Wave
Freelancers and very small businesses who want free books with optional add-ons.
Pricing
Muntin Ledger
Solo $25, Team $60, Accountant $150 + $30 per seat per month.
Wave
Free for core books. Add-ons priced per service (payroll, payments, receipts).
Scope
Muntin Ledger
Invoice read, structured ledger, anomaly flags, post to QBO or Xero.
Wave
Full books, invoicing, payments, optional payroll.
Privacy posture
Muntin Ledger
Scanned PDFs are read once on our infrastructure to extract your ledger; you can then turn on a lock so only your recovery phrase reopens the stored original. The structured ledger stays readable to us by design, scoped to your workspace.
Wave
Standard hosted SaaS. Free tier is supported by add-ons.
Audit chain
Muntin Ledger
Public chain head every six hours; you can verify nothing was rewritten.
Wave
Standard logs.
The honest read
Where Wave wins
If you want a free tool for the basic books and can use a separate scan-the-invoice app, Wave is hard to beat on price. The free tier is real, and the payroll and payments add-ons are well known.
Where Muntin Ledger wins
If you scan more than a handful of vendor invoices each month, our extraction is faster than the Wave Receipts loop, and our audit chain gives you a record that holds up to a reviewer. The native apps land first on iPhone and desktop.
What they will say about us
- ·We are in private beta. Some integrations are not live yet.
- ·We do not run a full ledger; we read the invoice and hand it off.
- ·Our vendor template library is smaller than theirs today. We learn after three confirms.
See also