TaxCloud vs Avalara: 2026 Comparison
Avalara users switching to TaxCloud pay roughly 30% for the same features and connectivity. Save time and minimize compliance headaches, affordable integrations, no lock-in contracts, and dedicated U.S.-based support.
- Built for mid-market brands
- No per-user or seat fees
- Pay-as-you-grow pricing
Why TaxCloud?
Built for mid-market ecommerce and SaaS brands
TaxCloud is designed to support growing U.S. and Canadian businesses without in-house tax teams. Our platform focuses on core sales tax needs and automation while avoiding unnecessary complexity during setup and deployment.
Faster support and stress-free onboarding
Handling taxes isn’t something you have to do alone. Our team can work with you as a resource partner to make sure that tax collection and filings are accurate. We’ll answer questions, provide support, and can make your transition to the TaxCloud platform completely stress free.
Pricing that scales with you
Know what you’re paying for without sales reps, evolving quotes, and upsells. TaxCloud pricing is public, and all core functionality is included with every plan. Costs scale with your business, so you’ll never pay for more than you need.
Avalara
TaxCloud
Features included with standard plans
Avalara
TaxCloud
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✅ (No AI bots)
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Partner service only
What you get with TaxCloud
Less time spent managing sales tax
TaxCloud is built for brands that want to minimize time on tax compliance. Our platform automates the core compliance work, so that teams can stop managing filings and focus more on business growth. The TaxCloud team also keeps the system updated and oversees the filing process to ensure that sales tax calculation and collection is accurate and returns are filed on time.
Avalara is built for companies who have the staff to manage their own tax duties. While it’s more configurable, manual intervention is sometimes required to keep tax collection accurate, and the entire submission process is done with minimal human oversight. This creates a heavy operational load for smaller brands without in-house experts and tax teams.
Transparent pricing without lengthy commitments
TaxCloud provides transparent pricing that scales predictably as usage increases, so you’ll never pay for more than you need, and you’ll know what you’re actually buying! Long-term contracts also aren’t required. While annual commitments are available and can lower costs, month-to-month and pay-as-you-go options are available for added flexibility. Additional services (such as state registrations) can be purchased on an as-needed basis.
With Avalara, it’s difficult to know what you’re paying for and why. Pricing is hidden behind custom sales quotes and contractual commitments that make it difficult to switch plans or adjust coverage. This inflexibility causes headaches for teams trying to expand into markets or adapt to unexpected changes.
Built for U.S. and Canadian brands
TaxCloud specializes exclusively in U.S. and Canadian markets. Our experts focus on compliance and configurations that are optimized for the market where domestic brands conduct the most business.
On the other hand, Avalara is built for massive, global entities — and it shows in their complicated interface. The system is filled with bloat and extra features that mid-market and smaller brands will never use. Setup is unnecessarily complex, error-prone, and confusing because the system is set up to support the needs of much larger organizations.
Easier setup and faster time-to-value
TaxCloud is built for speed and execution. Most teams can go live during a free 30-day trial by adding business details, importing transactions, and integrating with major online marketplaces. If you have complex migration needs, our onboarding experts can provide extra support for a smooth transition.
Because Avalara gates product access behind sales calls and commitments, implementation quickly becomes a nightmare. Teams can’t interact with the systems before committing, and deployment sometimes needs expert support due to the dependencies and complex setup required. It’s a time sink that can be overwhelming for smaller teams with limited time to spare.
Active enrollment for SST-eligible brands
TaxCloud maximizes savings by enrolling qualified businesses in the Streamlined Sales Tax (SST) program. This reduces filing costs and submission workloads across 24 states, minimizing your tax burdens and simplifying compliance. Because TaxCloud also becomes your Certified Service Provider in SST states, our in-house team can manage the entire process on your behalf.
Even though Avalara offers SST enrollment, several customers have reporting that reps failed to discuss eligibility with them or failed to expand their SST registrations as new states joined the program, leaving them with higher costs and unrealized savings.
Real support from real people
With TaxCloud, you’ll always have access to U.S.-based, human support who can actually help. Our staff is knowledgeable and can be accessed without purchasing specialized support plans or premium-tier packages.
Avalara’s support model is built behind lengthy support documentation, AI chatbots, and long wait times. Teams can pay more for dedicated support packages, but this is out of reach for smaller teams, leading to days-long wait times and generic responses from agents who don’t understand your business.
Frequently asked questions
Avalara is a cloud-based software platform helping ecommerce businesses calculate tax rates, prepare returns, and manage their sales tax compliance.
Previously a publicly traded company, Avalara was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2022 and has largely shifted its focus to serving enterprise customers.
In recent years, Avalara has closed down products and services explicitly created for small- to medium-sized ecommerce businesses, including their Avalara Returns for Small Business program, in order to concentrate on services targeted toward large, multinational enterprises.
TaxCloud provides mid-market teams with industry leading features, human-powered support, and lower costs.
For those reasons, TaxCloud is the right choice for mid-market ecommerce businesses ($10M and $100M). However, if you’re a smaller, growing brand, we’re still a good fit if you want to automate sales tax compliance in the U.S. and Canada.
On the other hand, Avalara is the better choice for large, global companies. Often, brands in this category have specialized in-house tax experts who can handle their hands-on integration, customization, and ongoing support needs.
Smaller businesses or those without teams of tax professionals might struggle with Avalara’s self-serve model.
Avalara charges customers with overdue bills 1.5% per month or the maximum rate permitted by law, whichever is lower. If a customer fails to make timely payments, Avalara can also change the payment terms to make them shorter in the future.
If your account is suspended, Avalara may also charge a reactivation fee that’s equal to 50% of Avalara’s current service activation fee or $250, whichever is greater.
It’s easy! We’ll help you when you’re ready to make the switch but here are some things you’ll have to do:
- Download your individual transactions from Avalara.
- Export your sales tax reports.
- Integrate TaxCloud into all your e-commerce platforms and marketplaces.
- List all the states you’re currently charging sales tax in as well as all registration numbers, logins, passwords, and filing frequency.
- Describe the products you sell according to taxability rules.
- Provide us with all your business information needed to register for sales tax in new states.
- Share your banking information for the account you wish to pay sales tax from.
Get a step-by-step walkthrough by downloading our Avalara migration guide!
Personalized onboarding support is also available, if you’d rather offload this responsibility to the TaxCloud team. You can register for an onboarding webinar right here.
On average, migrating customers save 30-50% when switching to TaxCloud. From what we’ve seen, this is primarily due to the high cost and a la carte nature of Avalara’s products.
With Avalara, users explain what they need, and sales reps build a quote tailored to that use case. Unfortunately, Avalara splits core features like returns filings and exemption certificate management into separate products. Combined with selling access to key integrations, this piecemeal approach results in customers paying premium prices.
TaxCloud takes a different approach by offering transparent pricing up front and including all essential features as part of its core product. When selecting a plan with TaxCloud, users get access to a variety of integrations, a premium calculation engine, automated returns filing, exemption certificate management, and more.
The Streamlined Sales Tax program is a state-run program designed to help ecommerce businesses by making sales tax compliance easier for out-of-state businesses.
A small number of “Certified Partners” have been designated by the state-run program to provide support with things like sales tax registration, sales tax calculation and sales tax return preparation at significant cost savings or free-of-charge.
Both Avalara and TaxCloud are SST Certified Partners and can provide the same services to ecommerce companies for free in qualifying member states.
However, several customers have told us that Avalara regularly obscures SST availability from users and has chosen not to enroll customers in the past, saddling customers with higher overhead than necessary.
Yes! Both Avalara and TaxCloud offer integrations with Shopify to enable their customers to use Shopify.
Due to recent changes in how Shopify calculates sales tax, both TaxCloud and AvaTax now rely on Shopify’s tax engine for tax calculations and then pull the data into their platforms to consolidate with sales from other channels.
However, while TaxCloud offers the Shopify integration as part of our standard packages, Avalara sells integration access based on customer need, meaning that customers who expand to Shopify (or another marketplace) will end up needing to pay for the integration in order to use it with Avatax.
Ready to make the switch?
Our team makes onboarding fast, easy, and simple. Get in touch with our team today for a product demo or guidance on transitioning from Avalara to TaxCloud.
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