Hospitable Ledger vs Beancount
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?
Hospitable Ledger
Plain-text accounting toolkit and CLI
VS
Beancount
Double-entry bookkeeping in plain text with a query language
| Feature | Hospitable Ledger | Beancount |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Budgeting & Finance | Budgeting & Finance |
| License | BSD-3-Clause | GPL-2.0 |
| Language | C++ | Python |
| Setup difficulty | Hard | Hard |
| Min. RAM | 64 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | bare-metal, binary, source | binary, source |
| GitHub stars | ★ 6,011 | ★ 5,881 |
| First released | 2003 | 2008 |
| Replaces | QuickBooks, Quicken | QuickBooks, Xero |
Why pick each one
Choose Hospitable Ledger if…
- Extremely portable data
- Scriptable and version-controllable
Choose Beancount if…
- Released under the GPL-2.0 license
- Mature project with 5.9k GitHub stars
- Written in Python
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
Frequently asked questions
Is Hospitable Ledger or Beancount better?
Neither is universally better. Hospitable Ledger has the larger community; both share a hard setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Hospitable Ledger and Beancount free and open-source?
Yes. Hospitable Ledger is licensed under BSD-3-Clause and Beancount under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Hospitable Ledger and Beancount with Docker?
Hospitable Ledger: check the project docs for container support. Beancount: check the project docs for container support.