QuickBooks Payments vs FreshBooks Payments

QuickBooks Payments (Intuit)

B

QuickBooks Payments is Intuit's card and bank-payment service, sold as an add-on to QuickBooks Online rather than as a standalone merchant account. Intuit was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Mountain View, California; money movement is provided by Intuit Payments Inc., licensed as a money transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services, and the card acquiring itself runs through JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A. and Paymentech, LLC under the commercial entity merchant agreement Intuit publishes. Rates are published in full and, as of the figures Intuit dated 30 April 2026, are 2.5% for in-person payments, 2.99% for invoices and other card and digital-wallet transactions, 1% for ACH bank payments, 3.5% for keyed cards, and 2.99% for buy-now-pay-later through Affirm. There is no monthly fee for Payments itself, no minimum and no long-term contract. The defining trade-off is reconciliation: nothing else puts card, ACH, PayPal, Venmo and Affirm volume straight into your books with no matching step, and nothing else in this price band has quite the same reputation for freezing deposits.

FreshBooks Payments

B-

FreshBooks Payments is the built-in way to get paid on a FreshBooks invoice. FreshBooks, the Toronto accounting software company founded in 2003 by Mike McDerment, rebuilt the product on Stripe Connect in 2024, retiring the WePay-powered version in the process, and now runs it as a white-labelled Stripe account you open from inside FreshBooks. It is sold only to businesses in the United States and Canada, on top of a FreshBooks subscription ($23 to $70 a month at list, or the custom Select plan). Published US pricing is 2.9% + $0.30 on domestic consumer cards, 3.5% + $0.30 on American Express and business cards, 1% on ACH with no cap outside Select, 3.5% + $0.30 on anything run through the $20-a-month Advanced Payments add-on (virtual terminal, saved cards, AutoPay), 6% + $0.30 on Affirm and Afterpay, plus 1.5% for cards issued abroad, 2% for currency conversion and $15 per dispute. Card money arrives two business days after the charge once the account is established, but every new account waits seven business days for its first payout, and Stripe's reserves and verification holds apply. There is no monthly fee, no minimum and no contract for the payments product itself. It is convenient and priced at the Stripe standard for small invoices; it is a poor fit for a business collecting large bank transfers, which pay the full 1% with no ceiling.