Avalara Alternatives: Find Out the Best Fit for You
In search of a better sales tax compliance software solution than Avalara?
If you’re struggling to get through to a customer service rep or feeling like you’re paying too much for sales tax support, we can help!
We’ll do a deep dive into Avalara, its features, and pricing. Then, we’ll share eight great alternatives to Avalara for your sales tax software needs. By highlighting their unique features, we’ll walk you through each option’s strengths. Lastly, we’ll explore the specific industries and scenarios where each Avalara alternative shines to help you find the perfect fit.
What is Avalara?
Avalara is a publicly traded company that offers a cloud-based software platform designed to automate and streamline tax compliance processes for businesses of all sizes. Essentially, it acts as a comprehensive solution for managing sales tax calculation, reporting, and compliance.
By integrating with a wide range of accounting, e-commerce, and ERP systems, Avalara simplifies sales tax calculation and remittance. Its features include real-time tax rate calculation, automated filing and remittance, as well as compliance monitoring and reporting.
Additionally, Avalara offers various services beyond sales tax management aimed at the needs of global businesses including VAT compliance, excise tax management, and cross-border tax solutions.
How does Avalara work?
Avalara plugs into the business systems, ecommerce platforms, accounting software, and ERPs you already use to help automate your sales tax compliance in the U.S. and around the world.
- Rate calculation: Avalara automates sales tax calculation with Avalara’s software that uses geolocation and product classifications to determine the accurate rate.
- Returns filing and remittance: Avalara automates sales tax returns preparation and filing. This allows businesses to remit taxes to multiple global tax jurisdictions with one payment.
- Sales tax registration: Avalara automatically tracks your sales to help you determine when you’ve met Nexus thresholds in different jurisdictions then registers you for sales taxes in those jurisdictions.
- Certificate management: Avalara collects, stores, and allows you to easily access exemption and compliance documentation.
Learn more about the features Avalara offers.
How much does Avalara cost?
Avalara doesn’t share their pricing information online since they sell their services by feature and offer volume-based pricing. That means that smaller businesses will pay more per transaction for Avalara than larger businesses.
Many Avalara customers speak on review sites about how expensive their sales tax solutions are or recount being sold services they don’t need.
The only two prices Avalara lists online are:
| Service | Price |
| Sales tax registration | $349 per location |
| Business licenses | $99 per location |
| Single state filing | $42-$54/filing + activation fee |
Reasons Customers Prefer Avalara Competitors
Avalara customers have some similar complaints about the company’s suite of tax products. Here are some of the pain points customers share in Avalara reviews that cause them to consider Avalara competitors.
Pricing
“High cost. No benefit. Avalara only files what you file with them. This is useless service at a high cost. Just file your tax yourself as they do nothing unless you file the income and tax with them first.”
Support
“The customer support. We’re multiple months into having the same type of order’s tax miscalculated and I’m still fighting to get any help on it, meaning hundreds of orders are being charged incorrect sales tax.”
Not calculating taxes
“I discovered that all my returns for the last three quarters of 2023 had been filed with a $0 sales tax liability. They had deducted ALL of my sales as non-taxable. Not only did I have to go back and amend over 50 tax returns, I owed thousands in penalties and late fees.”
Inaccurate tax rates
“The accuracy of the tax rates is questionable to the point of us having to double check rates on state websites to verify that the correct tax rate is being charged. We were also unable to successfully integrate Avalara with QuickBooks.”
1. Best Overall Avalara Alternative: TaxCloud
Website: TaxCloud
Pricing:
- Starter: $199/annually ($16.58/month)
- Premium: $799/annually ($66.58/month)
Overview: TaxCloud’s sales tax compliance platform simplifies tax calculations across more than 13,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the United States. It ensures accurate tax collection from every customer, handles tax return filing, and provides audit management services.
Benefits: TaxCloud is 30% cheaper than Avalara with the same features. TaxCloud also has no lock-in contracts and human support throughout the entire setup process.
What customers say:
“Very positive experience, it’s easy to talk to the same people any time you have an issue, and not be bounced around through different employees. As the sole developer in a small ecommerce shop, I was in charge of selecting a company to handle our sales tax compliance. I like TaxCloud because they are inexpensive and also because their API is not needlessly complex.” – Justin
Why switch to TaxCloud?
TaxCloud has 15+ years of experience building sales tax software that supports ecommerce companies. Here are a few great reasons to switch:
- Calculates sales tax rates in over 13,000+ US jurisdictions
- 30% cheaper pricing – save $$ every month
- A better fit for SMB that sell in the US
- No lock-in and transparent pricing
- Customer support from real humans (phone and chat)
Get a more in-depth breakdown of TaxCloud vs Avalara.
2. Vertex
Website: https://www.vertexinc.com/
Pricing: Varies based on features, support, training and customizations.
Overview: Vertex is a tax technology software operating in the cloud that provides a range of sales tax solutions. These solutions help with real-time calculation of global sales taxes, monitoring thresholds, and sales tax registration. Additionally, Vertex assists in filing and remitting sales taxes.
Benefits: Vertex allows businesses to stay compliant with around 300 million tax rates and regulations worldwide. It stands out as one of the most comprehensive solutions available and is fully equipped for enterprise-level use.
Downsides: Not every business needs to know the food tax in Belgium or track their sales tax nexus in global jurisdictions. Vertex is likely more powerful – and expensive – than most companies need.
What customers say:
“Vertex does its job and does it well. It has really helped streamline tax calculations for our accounts and creating tax rules is a breeze. The software communicates almost instantaneously with our ERP which allows order processing to flow without delay.”
3. SOVOS
Website: https://sovos.com/
Pricing: Not listed online.
Overview: SOVOS offers both managed services and software solutions to assist businesses in fulfilling their various sales tax compliance obligations. SOVOS’ Taxify service merges sales tax software with personalized support from a dedicated tax expert from their managed services team.
Benefits: Taxify streamlines sales tax return processes for businesses by combining intuitive software with personalized assistance from a dedicated tax team. This approach offers an efficient and budget-friendly method to access managed sales tax support.
Downsides: Small to medium businesses might find the cost overly expensive. Customers have reported technical challenges, such as difficulties with specific addresses and checkout timeouts.
What customers say:
“Best side of Taxify is that you will avoid late fees and audits by automating tax calculation and filing.It will also comply automatically with more than 9,000 changing tax laws and you can focus on growing your business while Taxify handles compliance. For beginners it may be difficult but thanks to customer support you will easily handle problems.”
4. Anrok
Website: https://www.anrok.com/
Pricing:
- Starter – $499/month
- Core – $999/month
- Growth – Custom pricing
Overview: Anrok is tax compliance software designed specifically to support SaaS businesses operating on a global scale. While offering the same sales tax automation support that other similar sales tax compliance offerings provide, Anrok also recognizes the implications of global workforces, where remote hiring can trigger physical nexus, as well as the risks of non-compliance.
Benefits: Anrok is one of the few solutions that explicitly advertises as able to help SaaS companies navigate the tax implications of global workforces.
Downsides: Anrok comes with a higher price tag compared to other solutions. This is because it offers hands-on service, which may not be necessary for every company.
What customers say:
“Tracking sales tax manually without a software like Anrok (in excel for example) can leave companies open to huge opportunities for error – and unfortunately mistakes relating to sales tax come with a high price tag!”
5. Numeral
Website: https://www.numeralhq.com/
Pricing:
- $75 per state filing
- $150 per state registration
Overview: Numeral helps e-commerce businesses in collecting, registering, monitoring, and remitting taxes. They have a slightly different pricing model than many other sales tax software solutions. Rather than charging a monthly subscription fee, they charge based on the number of state filings required.
Benefits: Numeral’s comprehensive service automates sales tax processes for businesses allowing them to save time. According to their estimates, the average customer dedicates only five minutes per month to sales tax compliance tasks.
Downsides: While Numeral’s unique filing-based pricing model might seem like a good idea, whether you’ll save anything will depend on how many states you need to file in and your order volume. The Numeral website estimates that a brand doing $5 million in transactions will likely be required to file and remit sales taxes over 30 states. With Numeral, that could cost over $2,250 monthly.
What customers say:
“It takes me a couple of minutes to approve the filings every month and I’ve never paid penalties or late fees ever since.”
6. TaxJar
Website: https://www.taxjar.com/
Pricing:
- TaxJar Starter: $205 annually,
- TaxJar Professional: $1,069 annually
Overview: Owned by Stripe, TaxJar is a cloud-based sales tax compliance software that supports e-commerce businesses by automating their sales tax management in the U.S.
Benefits: TaxJar provides a comprehensive suite of sales tax services for small to medium businesses operating in the U.S.
Downsides: TaxJar’s customers often complain about their customer service. Comparable solutions like TaxCloud are cheaper with more avenues for getting support from real humans. See more.
What customers say:
“We had many issues with TaxJar like late filings which incurred penalties, incorrect tax filing resulting in $5700 more paid in taxes, complexities around state onboarding, and non-existent customer support. Numeral provided complete onboarding, prompt customer service, rapid feature additions based on customer input, and so much more.”
LEARN MORE:
7. Quaderno
Website: https://quaderno.io/
Pricing:
- Startup – $49/month (250 transactions and 3 jurisdictions)
- Business – $99/month (1,000 transactions and 5 jurisdictions)
- Growth – $149/month (2,500 transactions and 10 jurisdictions)
- Enterprise – Custom (2,500+ transactions and 10+ jurisdictions)
Overview: Quaderno is a global sales tax compliance software for online businesses and SaaS companies. It handles the global tax needs of large enterprises including tracking and calculating sales tax, VAT, and GST in whatever tax jurisdictions your customers come from.
Benefits: Quaderno monitors your tax obligations and nexus thresholds, providing clarity on where tax registration is required and when. It facilitates real-time tax rate calculations and seamless tax filing. Need additional assistance? Quaderno collaborates with partners who specialize in tax preparation and filing, offering comprehensive support.
Downsides: Some businesses find Quaderno’s pricing expensive compared to their competitors or complain that the company’s customer service is slow and unhelpful.
What customers say:
“As we started approaching thresholds for various regions around the world our SAAS needed a way to calculate the taxes for each region and track them. We looked at some other tools but many of them were only targeted to one country. Quaderno let’s use calculate EU and US taxes and other regions and tells us as we’re approaching thresholds in each country.”
8. LOVAT
Website: https://vatcompliance.co/
Pricing:
- Start-up: 35€/month (100 transactions, 1,000 € total)
- Standard: 65 €/month (1,000 transactions, 100,000 €)
- Premium: 450€/month (10,000 transactions, 200,000 € total)
Overview: LOVAT is a sales tax solution tailored specifically to address cross-border tax obligations with a particular focus on VAT management. They aim to streamline tax compliance processes and provide personalized, prompt support.
Benefits: LOVAT assists businesses in handling tax compliance across more than 111 countries. Their services include helping with sales tax registration and calculation.
Downsides: LOVAT doesn’t help customers file tax returns. Businesses looking for more support around sales tax filing will need to look for another software product.
What customers say:
“VAT returns are a big deal. If you mess them up, you could face penalties, audits, or even lawsuits. That’s why I trust Lovat to handle them for me. Lovat is a miracle software that automates the entire process of VAT compliance.” – Vadym R
Alternatives to Avalara: What’s best for you?
If you’re sick of waiting until Avalara’s customer service reps get back to you and would prefer a software solution with cheaper and transparent pricing, the good news is there are alternatives out there! Which one is best for your business will depend on your needs.
Are you an ecommerce business selling into the US? TaxCloud is the best Avalara alternative for that. You’ll get 100% accurate sales tax management and support with things like tracking economic nexus, calculating taxes, filing, and remitting your returns. You’ll pay up to 30% less and, if you need help, you’ll also talk to real human beings.
Make the switch today.