Frappe Books vs Hospitable Ledger
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted budgeting & finance options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Frappe Books
Free desktop accounting for small businesses
VS
Hospitable Ledger
Plain-text accounting toolkit and CLI
| Feature | Frappe Books | Hospitable Ledger |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Budgeting & Finance | Budgeting & Finance |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | BSD-3-Clause |
| Language | TypeScript | C++ |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 256 MB | 64 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal, source | bare-metal, binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 4,874 | ★ 6,011 |
| First released | 2020 | 2003 |
| Replaces | QuickBooks, Wave | QuickBooks, Quicken |
Why pick each one
Choose Hospitable Ledger if…
- Extremely portable data
- Scriptable and version-controllable
Frequently asked questions
Is Frappe Books or Hospitable Ledger better?
Neither is universally better. Hospitable Ledger has the larger community, while Frappe Books is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Frappe Books and Hospitable Ledger free and open-source?
Yes. Frappe Books is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Hospitable Ledger under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Frappe Books and Hospitable Ledger with Docker?
Frappe Books: check the project docs for container support. Hospitable Ledger: check the project docs for container support.