Invoice Ninja review covering the open-source, self-hostable invoicing platform, its pricing tiers, features, and alternatives like FreshBooks and Zoho.
Invoice Ninja is an invoicing, quoting, payments and time-tracking platform co-founded in 2014 by Hillel Coren and Shalom Stark, with Dave Michael joining as CTO in 2015. The company is a small, entirely bootstrapped team based in Haifa, Israel, with no outside venture funding, having grown the platform to over 200,000 accounts.
The current major version, v5, is a ground-up rewrite of the original v4 codebase, built on a Laravel PHP backend with Flutter and React-based frontends and mobile apps. Source code is public on GitHub under the Elastic License v2, which allows self-hosting and modification but restricts reselling the software as a hosted service to third parties.
Invoice Ninja supports creating and customizing invoices, quotes, purchase orders and credit notes across multiple templates, recurring and subscription billing with automated payment reminders, and a client portal where customers can view and pay invoices online through more than 40 payment gateways including Stripe, PayPal, Square and Braintree.
The platform also includes expense and time tracking tied to projects and tasks, basic inventory tracking, multi-currency and multi-language support, e-invoicing and PEPPOL network connectivity for European tax compliance, and a full REST API alongside native desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux and mobile apps for iOS and Android.
Self-hosting Invoice Ninja is completely free forever with no artificial limits on clients, invoices or features, the only cost being the user's own server. On the hosted cloud side, a free plan is capped at 5 clients, while the Pro plan costs around 14 dollars per month and unlocks unlimited clients, custom branding and API access.
The Enterprise plan is priced per number of users, from around 18 dollars per month for 1-2 users up to roughly 300 dollars per month for 51-100 users, and adds multi-user permissions, bank feed sync and bundled e-invoicing/PEPPOL credits, while a custom-priced Premium Business tier adds a developer concierge and white-glove data migration for larger teams.
Yes, self-hosting is free forever with no client or invoice limits, and the hosted version includes a free plan capped at 5 clients.
Yes, Invoice Ninja can be self-hosted for free via manual install, Docker, or a one-click auto-installer.
Invoice Ninja supports more than 40 payment gateways, including Stripe, PayPal, Square and Braintree.
The source code is publicly available under the Elastic License v2, which allows self-hosting and modification but restricts commercial resale.
Yes, it supports recurring and subscription billing with automated payment reminders.
Common alternatives include FreshBooks, QuickBooks, Zoho Invoice, Wave and the open-source tool Crater.