TaxJar Alternatives: Find Out the Best Fit for You

Are you using TaxJar but wishing there was something better out there?

Whether you’re frustrated by TaxJar’s pricing or just wish you didn’t need a Premium subscription to get phone and chat customer service, we’ve got you covered.

First, we’ll start with an overview of TaxJar and its features and pricing – then we’ll break down 8 TaxJar alternatives you might want to consider as your next sales tax software. From features to pricing, we’ll share what’s great about each option and explore the use cases and industries each is best for to help you find the one that’s right for you.

What is TaxJar?

TaxJar is a cloud-based sales tax compliance software that helps e-commerce businesses automate their sales tax management – from calculating sales tax at checkout to tracking your nexus status to filing.

Acquired by Stripe in 2021, TaxJar is focused on U.S. taxes and is focused on managing the manual parts of sales tax compliance like classifying products and filing sales tax in multiple state sales tax jurisdictions. TaxJar supports integrations for popular ecommerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce and potential bookkeeping and accounting software like Intuit Quickbooks and Xero.

How does TaxJar work?

TaxJar integrates with your ecommerce platforms, accounting software, and ERPs to help automate your sales tax compliance.

• Checkout: When integrated with your e-commerce platform, TaxJar will handle real-time sales tax calculations for you. It automatically adjusts the tax rate charged based on where the purchaser lives, where you have economic nexus, relevant exemptions, and what is being purchased.
• Nexus insights functionality: TaxJar will track your progress towards achieving sales tax nexus is states you sell and and alert you when you do.
• Sales tax reports: TaxJar provides you with a number of sales tax reports – including state-by-state reports, exempt item reports, and up-to-date collection date.
• Filing and remittance: TaxJar can handle multi-state filing for you to ensure they’re filed on time.

How much does TaxJar cost?

TaxJar has 2 pricing plans: Starter and Professional.

The Starter plan is designed for new businesses and marketplace sellers and starts at $19 per month but doesn’t offer real-time calculations or help with reporting and filing. The plan includes just 200 orders per month, only 3 data import integrations, and email support.

The Professional plan is designed for small-to-mid-sized businesses and offers real-time calculations and reporting and filing for up to 10 states. It starts at $99 per month and also only includes 200 transactions a month but offers up to 10 integrations, and phone and chat support.

Both plans increase in cost depending on how many orders your business processes in a month. TaxJar’s pricing is one of the reasons people often look for TaxJar competitors.

Reasons Customers Prefer TaxJar Competitors

While TaxJar meets the needs of many businesses, there are a few pain points that customers often report in TaxJar reviews that cause them to explore TaxJar competitors.

Pricing: “It can be a bit expensive if you are a business with thousands of transactions per month.”

Support: “Poor to nonexistent support (phone support goes to voicemail 99% of the time and callbacks never occur, emails take 3-5 days for responses and often need engineering to answer further questions which take a further number of days or weeks for a response).”

Over-remittance issues: “When they autofile for your company, they will happily remit any amount ($10s of thousands of dollars!) more than you collect and not send any kind of alert or make any kind of contact informing you of this atrocity.”

Errors calculating taxes: “We discovered that the software was not calculating tax rates correctly, so we had to stop using it.”

Faulty plug-ins: “I updated my software, since then this plugin isn’t working. What that means is, this software did not collect a single tax from customer. I file my taxes quarterly. In January I logged in to get the report, that’s when I discovered that tax jar is not collecting any taxes.”

1. TaxCloud

Link: TaxCloud

Pricing: Starter: $199/annually ($16.58/month), Premium: $799/annually ($66.58/month), Custom.

Overview: TaxCloud’s sales tax compliance platform will automatically calculate sales tax rates in 13,000+ sales tax jurisdictions across the U.S., collect the right amount from every customer, file your return with 100% accuracy, and even manage audits for you.

Benefits: TaxCloud is 6x to 12x cheaper than TaxJar with 1,200 orders included in it’s Starter plan and 2,400 orders included in its Premium plan. TaxCloud also offers all it’s customers chat and phone support and has more features like audit support that other sales tax filing services don’t offer.

Who it’s best for: Medium-sized e-commerce businesses.

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?

Founded in 2008, TaxCloud has been helping ecommerce companies for 15+ years. Here are a few great reasons to switch:

• Calculates sales tax rates in over 13,000+ US jurisdictions
• Cheaper pricing
• A better fit for SMB that sell in the US
• Customer support from real humans (phone and chat)

2. Avalara AvaTax

Pricing: Volume based pricing that’s not listed online. $349 for sales tax registration.

Overview: Avalara offers a number of tax compliance products. Avalara AvaTax is a cloud-based sales tax automation software that helps you stay on top of sales tax rates and changes.

Benefits: Avalara’s software helps with tax rates across multiple countries including the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Avalara can also help with sales tax registration and business licenses.

Downsides: Avalara doesn’t include city, county, and local tax filings in its basic plans. They also don’t provide consolidated reconciliation reports for your sales taxes.

Who it’s best for: International businesses.

What customers say:

“The amount of time my staff is saved by using Avalara to calculate and maintain Sales tax is enormous. This software accurately calculates tax and we also use it to file the taxes. The software has worked very well for us.”

3. SOVOS Taxify

Pricing: Not listed online.

Overview: SOVOS provides managed services and software to help companies focused on meeting compliance requirements of all kinds. The company’s Taxify offering combines sales tax software with the support of a tax expert on their managed services team.

Benefits: Taxify simplifies sales tax returns for businesses by integrating software with support by a dedicated tax team. This creates a cost-effective way to get managed sales tax support.

Downsides: Some small businesses feel like the price is too expensive and others have reported technical issues such as difficulties with certain addresses and timing out during checkout.

Who it’s best for: Small to medium businesses that want more hands-on help – and who can afford it.

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. Vertex

Pricing: Varies based on features, support, training and customizations.

Overview: Vertex is a cloud-based tax technology company that offers a number of different tax solutions that allow you to do everything from calculate global sales taxes in real-time to monitor thresholds and nexus. They can also help you file and remit your sales taxes.

Benefits: Vertex lets you do business in compliance with 300+ million tax rates and rules around the world. It’s one of the most comprehensive solutions and is enterprise ready.

Downsides: Not every business needs to know the lodging and occupancy tax rates in Egypt or the sales and use tax in Australia. Vertex is likely more powerful than most companies need – and want to pay for.

Who it’s best for: Global enterprises.

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.”

5. Quaderno

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 tax compliance software for online businesses. It handles sales tax, VAT, and GST in jurisdictions around the world.

Benefits: Quaderno tracks your tax liability and nexus thresholds so you know exactly where you need to register to collect taxes and when. It also allows you to calculate tax rates in real-time and file taxes with ease. Want more support? They work with partners who can handle tax preparation and filing for you.

Downsides: Many businesses find their pricing high compared to their competitors and complain of poor customer service.

Who it’s best for: Software as a Service (SaaS) companies.

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.”

6. TaxValet

Pricing: $75/month per state.

Overview: TaxValet isn’t a sales tax software but a team of tax professionals that help you with every aspect of your sales tax compliance. They automate everything for you and actively manage your sales tax reporting.

Benefits: They claim to be more accurate than most sales tax software and to provide you with end-to-end service so you can stop worrying about sales taxes and work on building your business.

Downsides: Depending on how many states you need to file it, TaxValet could cost you more. However, it might be cheaper than some of the more expensive sales tax solutions.

Who it’s best for: Companies concerned with audit liability or tax compliance mistakes.

What customers say:

“Tax Valet has made the process easy for getting sales tax nexus set up in many different states. They take that burden off my hands and it frees me up to be able to run my business.”

7. Anrok

Pricing: Starter: $499/month, Core: $999/month, Growth: Custom pricing.

Overview: Anorak is a global tax compliance software aimed at SaaS businesses that understands the consequences of global workforces (remote hiring can trigger physical nexus) and the consequences of non-compliance. They automate sales tax calculation, filing, and remittance and monitor nexus.

Benefits: Anrok is a great solution for businesses who sell globally and whose hiring strategies potentially trigger tax nexus in jurisdictions they might not otherwise meet sales thresholds for. It helps companies track both physical and economic nexus more easily.

Downsides: Anrok is much more expensive than many of the solutions available. It’s a hands-on service when some companies might not need support for everything they provide and might prefer to pay for it separately, if needed.

Who it’s best for: Global SaaS companies who hire remotely.

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!”

8. Numeral

Pricing: $75 per state filing, $150 per state registration.

Overview: Numeral helps e-commerce companies collect, register, monitor, and remit taxes. Rather than charge a monthly rate, they charge per state filing.

Benefits: Numeral provides an all-in-one service that automates sales tax for you. They estimate that their average customer spends five minutes a month on sales tax compliance.

Downsides: While its filing based pricing might seem like a savings, it depends on how many states you need to file in and your order volume. They estimate that a brand doing $5 million in transactions will need to file in 30+ states. That could cost over $2,250 per month with Numeral. They also don’t offer audit support.

Who it’s best for: Companies with high order numbers but few states to file in.

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.”

Alternatives to TaxJar: What’s best for you?

If you’re sick of overpaying and struggling to get help with sales tax software like TaxJar, the good news is there are a lot of alternatives for your ecommerce business. Which one is right for you depends on your business and needs.

For ecommerce businesses selling into the US, TaxCloud is the best option to get 100% accurate sales tax management that helps with everything from tracking economic nexus to calculating taxes to filing and remitting your returns. Not only will you pay less, you’ll also talk to real human beings when you have a question or a technical challenge. The TaxCloud team is always here to help!