Xero vs QuickBooks vs FreeAgent vs Sage for landlords: which actually fits

Four names come up constantly when you search for MTD software, and honestly, three of them get recommended mostly because they’re the names people already know, not because someone sat down and worked out which actually suits a landlord. I’m going to try to do that properly here. No single winner, because there genuinely isn’t one. But there is a right answer for your specific situation, and it usually isn’t the one with the biggest ad budget.

Xero: built for someone who wants room to grow into it

Xero is the one that does the most, full stop. Five plans, running from a stripped-back £7-a-month tier up to £65 for everything. It handles multi-property landlords properly, copes with self-employment income alongside rent, and if you ever take on payroll or want your accountant plugged straight into your books, it’s the one built for that. It’s also, not coincidentally, the one accountants tend to already know, so if you’ve got a bookkeeper who’s going to be looking over your shoulder, that familiarity is worth something.

Where it stops making sense: a single-property landlord with nothing else going on. You’d be paying for a filing cabinet built for a small office when a shoebox would do. And worth flagging, Xero has another UK price rise scheduled for September 2026, so whatever number you see quoted today, check it’s still current before you commit.

QuickBooks: the cheapest door in for one property and a bit of trade

QuickBooks retired its old Self-Employed product and replaced it with Sole Trader, £10 a month, which is about as low as the mainstream names go. Simple Start sits above it at £14 if you want proper double-entry bookkeeping rather than the lighter version. Both are genuinely mobile-first, which matters more than it sounds; if your plan is logging expenses from your phone at the end of a viewing rather than sitting at a laptop, this is where that experience is smoothest.

The catch, and it’s a real one if you’ve got more than one property: there’s no dedicated multi-property tooling here. It'll technically hold the numbers, but it wasn’t designed for a portfolio, and joint ownership isn’t handled with any finesse either. Fine for the person with one flat and a side hustle. Not the tool for someone managing four tenancies and trying to keep them straight.

FreeAgent: free if your bank happens to be right, then it gets interesting

Here’s the one people sleep on. If you already bank with NatWest, RBS, Ulster Bank or Mettle, FreeAgent is free. Not discounted, free, for as long as you keep the account. That alone makes it worth checking before you pay anyone else a penny. Outside that, it’s a paid product, somewhere around £29 a month depending on what promotion is running, so the free route is doing a lot of heavy lifting in FreeAgent’s case.

Beyond the price, FreeAgent has quietly built one of the better joint-ownership setups of any tool on this list; you set the split once at the property level and it applies automatically across income and expenses, rather than making you recalculate every quarter. If you and a partner or a sibling own something together, that’s not a small feature. It also handles self-employment alongside property reasonably well, running them as connected accounts rather than forcing two separate logins.

Sage: the one worth knowing about purely for the free tier

Sage Sole Trader is a newer product, a 2025 rebrand of what used to be Sage Individual, and it does something none of the other three do: a genuinely, permanently free tier, not a trial. It’s capped, five sales invoices and twenty-five categorised transactions a month, so it suits someone with very simple, low-volume affairs. One property, tidy rent, not much else going on. Above that cap there’s a £7 paid tier.

I’d be careful recommending it for anything more complicated than that, though. Because it’s a newer product built off an older one, some features, CIS handling among them, were still rolling out through mid-2026 last I checked. If your situation has any texture to it, multiple properties, self-employment, joint ownership, I’d actually steer you towards FreeAgent or QuickBooks first and treat Sage as the fallback for the person whose needs are genuinely as simple as the free tier assumes.

So which one, actually

If I had to boil it down to the questions that actually decide it: Do you bank with NatWest or RBS? Check FreeAgent first, the free tier alone probably settles it. Got more than one property, or payroll on the horizon, or an accountant who already works in one of these? Xero. Just the one property and maybe a bit of freelance income, want the cheapest sensible option and you're comfortable on your phone? QuickBooks Sole Trader. Genuinely simple affairs, one tidy property, low volume, and free matters more than anything else? Sage’s free tier, with eyes open about the feature gaps.

None of that accounts for the situations that actually make this harder than a four-way pick, though: a former holiday let, property split between an SPV and your own name, living abroad, or combining rent with a trade. Those change the calculation enough that they get their own guides rather than a paragraph here, and they’re worth reading before you commit to anything on this page.

And if you’d rather answer nine questions and have the list filtered for you than cross-reference four sets of pricing pages yourself, that’s exactly what the selector does. The full comparison has the raw numbers for all eight tools we track, these four plus the landlord-specialist options, side by side.

Quick answers

Is any of these actually free for everyone?

Sage Sole Trader’s free tier is open to anyone, capped at five invoices and twenty-five transactions a month. FreeAgent is free too, but only if you hold a qualifying NatWest Group business account; it’s not open to everyone the way Sage’s is.

Which one is easiest if I'm doing this from my phone?

QuickBooks Sole Trader is built mobile-first and it shows. FreeAgent and Xero both have solid apps, but they’re designed assuming you’ll sometimes sit down at a proper screen too.

Can I switch later if I pick wrong?

Yes, though it’s not instant. Moving historical records between platforms takes some manual tidying, so it’s worth getting the choice right rather than treating it as disposable. If you’re on the fence, the selector is built to cut down on exactly that risk.