Best Invoicing Software Services For Small Businesses 2025

If you run a business where you get paid for project-based work or a certain number of hours worked, invoicing software can help you get paid the right amount on time — all while being as efficient as possible.

Below, CNBC Select rounded up some of the best invoicing software for small businesses. Our picks include front-runners for features such as international sales, free trials and more.

Who’s this for? Zoho Invoice, a service from ZohoBooks, offers a free plan that gives you all the basics needed to send invoices. You can create payment terms and quotes that are then converted into an invoice. You also can use Zoho Invoice to send payment reminders, track how long it takes you to complete projects (and automatically calculate the bill), organize billable expenses and more.

Standout benefits: This platform also offers customizable invoicing templates.

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Who’s this for? Stripe Invoicing lets you create invoices in more than 135 currencies and 25 different languages, which may be ideal if you’re accepting clients and sales from around the globe. You can also offer payment options tailored to your customer’s location.

Standout benefits: Stripe has plenty of features to help you automate the invoicing process, including sending the invoice, reviewing the bank statement, matching new customer payments to the appropriate invoice and marking each invoice as paid.

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Who’s this for? If you just want to test the waters, FreshBooks offers a 30-day free trial. According to its website, you don’t have to input your credit card details and you can cancel at any time. After those 30 days, you can choose a plan and get a 60% discount for the first six months.

Standout benefits: FreshBooks lets you request an upfront deposit on your invoices, either as a percentage or a fixed amount. This can help you get partial payment for your services before the work is complete.

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Who’s this for? Most invoicing platforms limit the number of invoices you can send or the number of clients you can send them to (or sometimes both). Square offers the ability to send unlimited invoices, estimates and contracts. And even with its basic plan, Square lets you add as many customers as you want to your invoicing.

Standout benefits: Customers can send invoices through the Square app.

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Who’s this for? If you’re a freelancer or run a service-based business that gets paid based on billable hours, Harvest has features built with you in mind. You can send invoices based on individual projects, and also track your billable project hours. Even better, Harvest also automatically calculates the total amount you’re owed for each project based on the hours you track.

Standout benefits: The Harvest dashboard lets you create a budget with the total number of billable project hours allowed, so you can see your progress and get an immediate idea of how much of that budget you’ve already used.

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Zoho Invoice integrates with many apps to help you manage other parts of your business. For instance, it syncs to some payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal and Square, as well as other apps like Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, Slack, Fundbox, Quickbooks, Clockodo and more.

Cost

Free

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Stripe is well-known as a global payment processing platform with features for businesses of any size. You can also use Stripe to automatically send payment reminders to your clients when the invoice is due (and when it’s past due). Stripe’s technology will also optimize the timing of reminders to help limit instances of unpaid invoices.

Cost

Starts at 0.4% per paid invoice

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FreshBooks offers a host of other services to help you manage your business, including payment processing, time tracking, accounting, payroll, reporting and more.

Cost

Starts at $7.60 per month (60% off for the first six months)

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Square is a popular brand in the small business and payment processing space, and it integrates with accounting software like QuickBooks. At the time of this writing, Square Invoices does not offer the ability to accept multi-currency payments.

Cost

Starts at $0/month + processing rates

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Harvest’s main features include invoicing and payments, reporting and time tracking. In addition to budget monitoring for projects, you can track expenses for each project such as travel costs, materials and supplies, and you can upload receipts.

Cost

Starts at $0; Pro and Premium plans are $11/seat per month and $14/seat per month, respectively

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To determine the best invoicing software for small businesses, CNBC Select analyzed several invoicing service providers. We considered features like:

• Cost
• Payment options
• Number of projects allowed
• Number of clients allowed
• Number of estimates allowed
• Integrations with other business management tools
• Reporting and analytics tools
• Time/project tracking capabilities where appropriate

After reviewing these features, we organized our recommendations by best for free plan, best for international sales, best for freelancers, best for unlimited invoices and best free trial offer.

The fee structures are subject to change without notice.

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