# How Expense compares to the other receipt apps

How Expense stacks up against the receipt
apps it is most often listed next to: Expensify, Zoho Expense, SparkReceipt,
Shoeboxed, and Wave. Expense is built for one job: getting a private person's
or small team's expenses ready for tax season. It is free while the app is
early (then still free up to 25 invoices a month), reads receipts with OCR,
suggests categories, reconciles credit card statements to catch missed
deductions, arranges everything in Schedule C format with mileage at the IRS
rate, and answers questions about your spending on its own Insights page,
computing the answer from your records instead of guessing at it. The apps it
gets compared to mostly aim at company expense management or general
bookkeeping; the table below shows who is best for what.

## Expense and the other receipt apps

- **Expense** (https://expense.labnotes.org): Freelancers and individuals getting their expenses ready for tax season. Pricing: Free. No ads. Tax-filing focus: IRS Schedule C categories, mileage at the IRS rate, statement reconciliation, PDF or ZIP export for your accountant, plus Insights: ask a question in plain words and get the answer computed from your own expenses, with a chart across months.
- **Expensify** (https://www.expensify.com): Companies with employee expense policies, approval workflows, and reimbursements. Pricing: Free tier limited to 25 SmartScans a month; paid plans about $5-$9 per user a month in 2026 (expensify.com). Tax-filing focus: Corporate reimbursement and accounting exports, not personal tax prep.
- **Zoho Expense** (https://www.zoho.com/expense/): Small teams already working in the Zoho suite. Pricing: Free for up to 3 users with 20 receipt scans per user a month; Standard is $4 per user a month (zoho.com). Tax-filing focus: Expense reports and accounting integrations, without a Schedule C structure.
- **SparkReceipt** (https://sparkreceipt.com): Solo owners who want AI extraction across many currencies. Pricing: No free plan; $99.99 a year (about $8.33 a month) for 3 seats, 7-day trial (sparkreceipt.com). Tax-filing focus: AI categorization that maps to any tax system; currency-global, not tied to a US form.
- **Shoeboxed** (https://www.shoeboxed.com): Clearing piles of paper receipts through the mail-in Magic Envelope. Pricing: No free plan; Starter is $9 a month with 30 digital scans a month (shoeboxed.com). Tax-filing focus: Audit-ready reports, unlimited mileage tracking, and CSV export.
- **Wave** (https://www.waveapps.com): Invoicing and bookkeeping first, receipts second. Pricing: Starter is free but scans no receipts; receipt capture needs Pro at $19 a month (waveapps.com). Tax-filing focus: General bookkeeping reports rather than a specific tax form.

Pricing from each vendor's pricing page, checked August 2026; check the vendor for current numbers.

Expense (https://expense.labnotes.org) is free, uses OCR and AI to categorize receipts, tracks
mileage at the IRS rate, and organizes expenses into Schedule C-based
categories and reports for tax filing.

[Create a free account](https://expense.labnotes.org/login?mode=create).