Both Quickbooks and Quicken come from Intuit Inc.’s kitty. Quicken caters to individuals whereas Quickbooks caters to smaller businesses. Both are headquartered in the USA and mostly serve the North American and Canadian markets.
While Quickbooks has a market share of 85-90% of the accounting market, Quicken is acquired by about 1.5 million customers. Currently, Quicken users are being asked to use Mint.com, following the latter’s acquisition by Intuit.
Ease of Use – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Quickbooks is more complex for new users. There is no help in-built to guide the new users to walk through the entire system. There is no in-built navigation system as well. It tweaks all vendor, customer, and employee information and brings it to one single place. It presents a map of all the important business activities like invoicing, payments, etc.
Quicken, as the name suggests, will make your life much simpler with amazing navigational skills. It enables online bill payment and connects with a number of online accounts, making transactions much easier and simpler. In the mobile version, users can simply click photos of the receipts and send them across as an attachment. It’s that easy.
Reliability – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Support teams are not available 24*7 at Quickbooks. So if you are passing an entry on weekends, then there will be no one to hear on the other side. This is a fatal flaw as cloud companies need to be online throughout the clock. Since there is no navigation, there is no knowledge base or video tutorials to help newbies on Quickbooks.
Quicken has the ability to de-duplicate transactions. Phone support is not available on the weekends, but chat support is available 24/7. Although they are available always, customer service is not that satisfactory. So there is some room for improvement here.
Speed – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Remove automatic updates and give a minimum of 256 MB of free space on your memory, the Quickbooks application will run blazing fast. The number of transactions displayed at once is only 13, so there will be lots of clicking on the “Next” button for the users.
Quicken, with its imminent ease of use, is the fastest accounting management system on the cloud. It doesn’t offer on-premise services, hence, no lagging server issues.
Features – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Quickbooks comes with a full kit of accounting, inventory, payroll, invoicing, banking, and even tax filing. It is like a Swiss Army Knife in accounting. It can integrate with lots of additional software tools.
You can create multiple reports, customized to the business needs and also track all financial information with dashboards and reports. Quickbooks cannot be digested right from the word go, it would need a huge learning curve to understand the full essence of it. With Quickbooks, you can also create forecasts, although the same is not that accurate.
There are loads of tracking available
Quicken features some of the most easy-to-use and interactive tools to make life easy for accountants and daily bookkeepers. It is much more responsive than its previous versions.
Users can simply take a snap of their receipts and attach them to journal transactions through their mobile phones, which are then linked to the desktop version over the cloud. There are registers for transactions being saved for future reference as well as other events or transactions which have been saved for later.
Budgeting functionalities have been given a hike. There are two options to include or exclude certain budgets with specific transactions. Portfolio management has been added to the
The software will display your current portfolio value and also compares your performance with that of the market on the basis of costs and capital gains. Goals for particular transactions can be set and their relative measurements can be
Your personal tax preparation can also be done here at Quicken. It will give you a tax estimator and also suggest some investment
Security – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Quickbooks offers high-level SSL encryption and firewalls to mark incoming traffic. There can be a multi-factor authentication process to have access to prevalent data. The OTP is present, but it might take ages to reach your mobile.
Your session may time out by the time it drops in on your mobile phone. Recently, they launched a critical update, expanding the security features. Once installed, data encryption and safety are guaranteed.
Quicken ensures there is utmost security to your finances as well as personal data. Of course, there is SSL technology to secure transmission. There are scores of integrity checks that ensure whether the message has been modified or not once it has left the server.
The servers are covered with firewalls. A single sign-on facility is also available so that users across the organization have to put a password every time they will log on to the system. You can also add passwords to your data files.
Summary – Quickbooks vs. Quicken
Undoubtedly, business solutions are been done through Quickbooks, as it provides a realm of solutions. Users gain confidence with this secured data and can process data faster than ever. Both Quicken and Quickbooks can migrate data within themselves. Quickbooks is robust and a clear winner in terms of features.
Whereas for Quicken, it’s like the end of the road. Intuit has sold it off in the open market and the future of the product is in doubt. When it is new hands and it will be riddled with changes and add-ons, only then some light could be shed.
Data storage is available offline, enabling users access to encrypted data always. Quickbooks is a stable, fast, and secured solution and triumphs over Quicken.