Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

FreshBooks VS Plotly

Compare FreshBooks VS Plotly and see what are their differences

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FreshBooks logo FreshBooks

The ideal accounting software for small business owners.

Plotly logo Plotly

Low-Code Data Apps
  • FreshBooks Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-11-01
  • Plotly Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-31

FreshBooks

$ Details
paid Free Trial $15.0 / Monthly (5 Billable Clients)
Release Date
2003 January
Startup details
Country
Canada
State
Ontario
City
Toronto
Founder(s)
Michael McDerment
Employees
250 - 499

FreshBooks features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    FreshBooks offers an intuitive interface that is easy to navigate, making it accessible even for users who are not tech-savvy.
  • Invoicing Features
    The platform provides robust invoicing tools that allow for custom invoices, automatic payment reminders, and recurring invoices.
  • Time Tracking
    FreshBooks includes built-in time tracking features that are useful for freelancers and businesses that bill clients by the hour.
  • Expense Tracking
    Users can easily log and categorize expenses, which simplifies the process of tracking and reporting business expenses.
  • Multiple Payment Options
    FreshBooks supports various payment methods, including credit cards and ACH transfers, making it easier for clients to pay invoices.
  • Customer Support
    The platform provides excellent customer service through multiple channels, including phone, email, and live chat.
  • Mobile App
    FreshBooks offers a mobile app that allows users to manage their finances on the go.

Plotly features and specs

  • Interactivity
    Plotly offers highly interactive plots that allow users to pan, zoom, and hover over data points for more information. This enhances the user experience and provides deeper insights.
  • High-quality visualizations
    It provides aesthetically pleasing and highly customizable charts, making it suitable for publication-quality visuals.
  • Versatility
    Plotly supports multiple chart types including line charts, scatter plots, bar charts, and 3D plots, making it suitable for a wide range of applications.
  • Python integration
    Plotly is well-integrated with Python and works seamlessly with other popular data science libraries like Pandas, NumPy, and Scikit-learn.
  • Web-based
    The plots can be easily embedded in web applications or dashboards, making it ideal for sharing insights over the internet.
  • Open-source
    Plotly offers an open-source version, which allows users to create and share visualizations without any cost.

Possible disadvantages of Plotly

  • Performance
    Rendering very large datasets can sometimes be slow, which may not be suitable for real-time data visualization requirements.
  • Learning curve
    Even though the library is well-documented, the extensive range of features can have a steep learning curve for beginners.
  • Cost for advanced features
    While the basic functionality is free, more advanced features, such as export to certain formats and additional customizable options, require a paid subscription.
  • Dependency management
    Plotly has a number of dependencies that need to be managed properly, which can sometimes complicate the setup process.
  • Complexity
    For simple visualizations, Plotly might be overkill and simpler libraries like Matplotlib or Seaborn could be more appropriate.

Analysis of FreshBooks

Overall verdict

  • FreshBooks is a reliable and efficient accounting software option, particularly well-suited for those seeking an easy-to-use platform with comprehensive financial management features. Its customer support is also highly rated, providing prompt assistance and troubleshooting when needed.

Why this product is good

  • FreshBooks is widely considered a good choice for small businesses, freelancers, and self-employed professionals due to its user-friendly interface and robust feature set. It simplifies accounting tasks with invoicing, expense tracking, time tracking, project management, and reporting tools. The software also offers integrations with various third-party apps and services, enhancing its functionality and adaptability to different business needs.

Recommended for

  • Freelancers
  • Small business owners
  • Self-employed professionals
  • Service-based businesses
  • Consultants
  • Creative professionals

Analysis of Plotly

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Plotly is a strong choice for those looking to create dynamic and interactive data visualizations, thanks to its range of features and ease of integration with web technologies.

Why this product is good

  • Plotly is considered good because it offers a comprehensive suite of tools for creating interactive visualizations that can be used in web applications, reports, and dashboards. It supports many different types of plots, is easy to use for both beginners and experienced developers, and integrates well with popular programming languages like Python, R, and JavaScript.

Recommended for

    Plotly is recommended for data scientists, analysts, and developers who need to create interactive and visually appealing data visualizations. It's particularly useful for those who work with Python or R and want the ability to embed their visualizations in web applications or dashboards.

FreshBooks videos

FreshBooks Review and Pricing for 2019

More videos:

  • Review - Freshbooks Review: Pros, Cons, and Alternatives
  • Review - FreshBooks Review and Getting Started
  • Review - Freshbooks Review (in 2020)
  • Review - Freshbooks Review - What I think after 2 years of using Freshbooks
  • Review - QuickBooks vs FreshBooks (in 2021)
  • Review - Freshbooks Review (Why I left ๐Ÿคฆ and came Back ๐Ÿ˜ƒ in 2022)
  • Review - QuickBooks vs FreshBooks - Which One Is Winner? (2022)

Plotly videos

Create Real-time Chart with Javascript | Plotly.js Tutorial

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing plotly.py 3.0
  • Review - Is Plotly The Better Matplotlib?
  • Tutorial - Plotly Tutorial 2021
  • Review - Data Visualization as The First and Last Mile of Data Science Plotly Express and Dash | SciPy 2021

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to FreshBooks and Plotly)
Accounting
100 100%
0% 0
Data Visualization
0 0%
100% 100
Invoicing
100 100%
0% 0
Charting Libraries
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare FreshBooks and Plotly

FreshBooks Reviews

Top 20 Recurly Alternatives & Competitors in 2025
The system handles basic recurring billing scenarios with automated payment processing and client portal access. FreshBooks provides time tracking and expense management alongside its billing features, creating an all-in-one solution for independent professionals and small service teams. The platform focuses on reducing administrative overhead for businesses with...
Source: unibee.dev
What Are the Best Bill.com Alternatives?
FreshBooks is a cloud-based invoicing software that is user-friendly and designed for small businesses and freelancers. FreshBooks allow you to create and customize invoices easily, track expenses, and accept online payments.
11 Alternatives to QuickBooks in 2024
Want to zoom out and look at the financial health of your business as a whole? FreshBooks can track your expenses for you, generate income statements, balance sheets and cash flow statements, and even generate activity reports that show you which projects are taking up the bulk of you and your teamโ€™s work hours.
Source: www.bench.co
The 10 Best Alternatives to GnuCash for Managing Your Finances
If you're looking for an affordable option and need a cost-effective alternative to GnuCash, FreshBooks is a great choice. It also provides various integrations with other business software, so you can easily connect your accounting tools with the other applications you use.
Top 10 QuickBooks Alternatives (Free/Paid)
Freshbooks is the best accounting tool that is used to run businesses with ease and in a secure way. The tool is used by small businesses to collaborate on different projects. It provides reports related to finance for easy understanding. FreshBooks is a popular cloud-based accounting software tailored for small businesses, freelancers, and self-employed professionals. Known...

Plotly Reviews

Best 8 Redash Alternatives in 2023 [In Depth Guide]
Plotly is specifically designed for companies who want to build and deploy analytic applications like dashboards using Python, Julia, or R without needing DevOps or Javascript developers.
Source: www.datapad.io
5 Best Python Libraries For Data Visualization in 2023
Plotly is a web-based data visualization toolkit that comes with unique functionalities such as dendrograms, 3D charts, and also contour plots, which is not very common in other libraries. It has a great API offering scatter plots, line charts, bar charts, error bars, box plots, and other visualizations. Plotly can even be accessed from a Python Notebook.
Top 8 Python Libraries for Data Visualization
Plotly is a free open-source graphing library that can be used to form data visualizations. Plotly (plotly.py) is built on top of the Plotly JavaScript library (plotly.js) and can be used to create web-based data visualizations that can be displayed in Jupyter notebooks or web applications using Dash or saved as individual HTML files. Plotly provides more than 40 unique...
5 top picks for JavaScript chart libraries
Plotly is a graphing library thatโ€™s available for various runtime environments, including the browser. It supports many kinds of charts and graphs that we can configure with a variety of options.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Plotly seems to be a lot more popular than FreshBooks. While we know about 34 links to Plotly, we've tracked only 3 mentions of FreshBooks. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

FreshBooks mentions (3)

  • How do your employees/subcontractors track time?
    Do you want to tie contractor's logged time to specific clients and projects? I was using a PHP application installed on my own server for years and the developer seems to have all but abandoned it so I've been looking for alternatives. I'm currently testing out Freshbooks and after about a month using it, here are my observations:. Source: over 3 years ago
  • How to bill your clients?
    Take a look at dubsado.com and freshbooks.com for ideas. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Good time tracking/invoice software
    Maybe try freshbooks.com, been using them with a company we do business with and hasn't let me down. Also looks like they have time tracking software. Source: almost 5 years ago

Plotly mentions (34)

  • How to Analyze 47 Million Hacker News Posts: A Data Scientist's Dream Dataset Just Got Better
    Let's dive into some practical examples. First, you'll need to set up your environment with the right tools. I recommend using pandas for data manipulation and plotly for visualization. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Python for Data Visualization: Best Tools and Practices
    Plotly is perfect for interactive visualizations. You can create interactive charts and graphs that allow users to hover, click, and zoom in. Plotly is also great for web-based visuals, making it easy to share your findings online. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Generative AI Powered QnA & Visualization Chatbot
    Front End: A React application that leverages React-Chatbotify library to easily integrate a chatbot GUI. It also uses the Plotly library to display the charts/visualizations. The generative AI implementation and details are entirely abstracted from the front end. The front-end application depends on a single REST endpoint of the backend application. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Build a Stock Dashboard in less than 40 lines of Python code!๐Ÿค“
    In this tutorial, Mariya Sha will guide you through building a stock value dashboard using Taipy, Plotly, and a dataset from Kaggle. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Essential Deep Learning Checklist: Best Practices Unveiled
    How to Accomplish: Utilize visualization libraries like Matplotlib, Seaborn, or Plotly in Python to create histograms, scatter plots, and bar charts. For image data, use tools that visualize images alongside their labels to check for labeling accuracy. For structured data, correlation matrices and pair plots can be highly informative. - Source: dev.to / about 2 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing FreshBooks and Plotly, you can also consider the following products

Xero - Xero is online accounting for your small business.

D3.js - D3.js is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. D3 helps you bring data to life using HTML, SVG, and CSS.

QuickBooks Online - QuickBooks Online is a Cloud Accounting for small business that can be used on iPad, mobile phone or computer to do invoicing, billing, run reports, or even pay employees online.

RAWGraphs - RAWGraphs is an open source app built with the goal of making the visualization of complex data...

Wave Financial - Award-winning financial software designed for entrepreneurs.

Tableau - Tableau can help anyone see and understand their data. Connect to almost any database, drag and drop to create visualizations, and share with a click.