Two accounting packages, two completely different buying models

Zoho Books vs Busy: a subscription you stop paying, and a licence you buy once

An Indian business running this comparison is usually weighing one question that a price table cannot answer: do I want accounting software that updates itself in a browser, or software that sits on my own machine and keeps working when the branch internet does not. Those are different products with different economics, not two tiers of one product. We read both vendors’ own pricing pages in full on 4 October 2026. Zoho Books publishes five per-organisation plans on two billing cycles. Busy publishes a perpetual licence line, a subscription line, and three different subscription prices that do not agree with each other, which we print side by side rather than quietly picking one.

NoxOrigin makes neither of the two products compared here, and that is the honest version of the disclosure. We publish this page and we are a vendor, so we are naming our interest anyway: NoxOrigin appears in this article only as a short, clearly-bounded note at the end, where we say plainly that it is not a general ledger, does not do double-entry bookkeeping, and does not file GST returns. If you are here to choose between two accounting packages, our product is not a candidate and this page does not treat it as one. Last verified: 4 October 2026. Every Zoho Books figure on this page comes from Zoho Books’ own India pricing page, and every Busy figure comes from Busy’s own pricing page or its own homepage. We found a real disagreement inside Busy’s own pages and we have published all three versions of the subscription price rather than choosing the tidiest one. We have run no trial of either product, so nothing here is drawn from hands-on use.

Evidence and method

What we verified, and what we could not

What we verified

Zoho Books, from its own India pricing page at zoho.com/books/pricing/, titled “Zoho Books Plans | Accounting Software Pricing in India”. We read all five plan prices on both billing cycles, the per-organisation price label, the toggle state the page opens in, the default user count for every plan, both add-on prices, the free plan’s contents, and the page’s single tax sentence.

We also recorded what that page does not say, because an absence is a finding. The strings “e-way bill” and “GSTR” each appear zero times in the HTML we received, so this page publishes no e-way-bill and no GSTR-return figure or capability for Zoho Books.

What we could not verify

One price, and one naming question. We could not reconcile Busy’s own subscription price: the table inside its pricing page, the plan cards on that same page, and the FAQ on its homepage give three different answers, and we publish all three. We also could not find the phrase “on-premise” anywhere on Busy’s pricing page. It prints “Perpetual”, and its homepage separately draws the line as BUSY Desktop against BUSY Online. We use “on-premise” here as shorthand and say so rather than putting words in Busy’s mouth.

Separately, the busy.org hostnames serve a redirect loop that returns HTTP 301 pointing at itself, so they contributed nothing. Every Busy figure here comes from busy.in, which we read successfully. We did not disable certificate verification anywhere in this task.

Dimension by dimension

What each one actually is

The most important row on this page is the second one. Zoho Books is priced per organisation per month and you can stop paying it. The Busy line this page is about is a perpetual licence with no renewal figure attached to it. Everything else in the table follows from that difference, and reading the price rows without it is how buyers end up comparing two numbers that mean different things.

Dimension	Zoho Books (verified 4 October 2026)	Busy, perpetual line (verified 4 October 2026)
What the vendor calls the buying model	A subscription with two billing positions. The page’s toggle reads “Yearly pricing now active. Switch to monthly pricing”, so the yearly position is the default a reader sees.	“Perpetual”, as one of two buttons on the page, the other being “Subscription”. The page attaches no per-year suffix to the perpetual model and does attach one to the subscription model. The page never uses the word “on-premise”.
What the price is charged against	The organisation. Both price positions are labelled “Price/ Org/Month” and “Price/Org/Month Billed Annually”. Adding people is a separate add-on, not a higher tier.	The licence, at one of two user positions. The page toggles “Single User” against “Multi-User”, and Standard and Enterprise additionally toggle “Regular” against “SQL”.
Published price list, monthly cycle	Standard INR 899, Professional INR 1,799, Premium INR 3,599, Elite INR 5,999, Ultimate INR 9,599. All per organisation per month.	No monthly figure is published, because a perpetual licence is not sold monthly. The closest thing on the page is the separate subscription line, priced per year, which we print in its own row further down rather than mixing it in here.
Published price list, yearly cycle	Standard INR 749, Professional INR 1,499, Premium INR 2,999, Elite INR 4,999, Ultimate INR 7,999. Per organisation per month, billed annually. These are the five numbers a reader sees without touching the toggle.	Not applicable, and we want to be explicit about that rather than leave an empty cell for you to fill in. The Busy page adds a per-year suffix only in subscription mode.
Perpetual licence price	Not offered. Zoho Books sells no perpetual licence, and we publish no figure for one because the page contains none.	Single user: Basic INR 11,000; Standard INR 16,500, or INR 10,500 on the SQL variant; Enterprise INR 22,000, or INR 14,500 on the SQL variant. Multi user: Basic INR 25,000, Standard INR 40,000, Enterprise INR 58,000. The rendered cards and the page’s own price table agree on the three Regular figures, so we publish them without a caveat.
The other Busy line, for completeness	Not applicable. This row exists so the Busy column is not read as if INR 11,000 were Busy’s only number.	Busy’s subscription line, which its own FAQ calls BUSY Magic and which it says has four plans and no perpetual option. We print its three conflicting prices in the row below.
Subscription price, and a disagreement we cannot resolve	Not applicable to Zoho Books, whose own subscription figures are in the two cycle rows above.	Three answers from three places on Busy’s own site. The table inside the pricing page: single-user Enterprise INR 10,000, multi-user INR 12,500, INR 18,000 and INR 25,000, with no Power+ entry. The plan cards on that same page: Power INR 12,000 per 360 days and Power+ INR 50,000 per 360 days. The homepage FAQ: “The Start Plan starts at INR 5,000 per year, the Smart Plan starts at INR 8,000 per year, and the Power Plan starts at INR 12,000 per year for single-user access.” We publish all three and resolve none of them.
Free option	Yes, and it is described rather than merely linked: “Invoice Management System New”, “1 User + 1 Accountant”, “Email Support”, with a “Get started for free” route. The page adds “*Add-ons are not supported in the FREE plan, except for Document autoscans.”	Yes, as an edition named Express: “100% Free Billing & Accounting”, priced “Free”, with “No Mobile App”. The page also states “Try BUSY free for 15 days” and carries a “Get Free Demo” link on each paid card.
How many people are included	Published per plan, in Zoho’s own words: “By default, Zoho Books allows you to add three users to the Standard Plan, five users to the Professional Plan, 10 users to the Premium Plan, 15 users to the Elite Plan, and 25 users to the Ultimate Plan.”	Published as a toggle rather than a number, so we do not invent per-tier user counts. The page states that the multi-user Enterprise position “Supports unlimited simultaneous users in multiple offices”, and its multi-user prices are a separate set of figures.
Adding more people	Priced, and both cycles stated: “the Zoho Books user add-on for INR 180 per month or INR 150 per month, billed annually”. On the Premium plan, employees are priced separately: “the employee add-on at INR 75/employee/month or INR 60/employee/month billed annually”.	Handled by moving to the multi-user price set rather than by a published per-additional-user figure. The page’s own code looks for an additional-user amount and none is published for India, so we publish none.
Taxes	One sentence, and we quote it exactly: “*Prices are exclusive of local taxes.” The page publishes no tax-inclusive figure and no breakdown.	One sentence, carried as the tax label on the page’s price table: “*GST to be added to the price”. The homepage FAQ says “GST is charged separately.”
GST, e-invoicing and e-way bills	A feature-area reference and a feature line, and no more. “GST reports and filing” appears in the plan features and the page’s feature navigation names “GST Filing” and “eInvoicing”. The strings “e-way bill” and “GSTR” each appear zero times, so we publish no e-way-bill or GSTR-return capability for Zoho Books.	The deepest published compliance list of anything on this page, and we are quoting vendor claims, several carrying an asterisk whose terms we have not read: “GST e-returns in JSON”, “Direct Upload of GSTR-1/ IFF”, “Auto E-Invoice & E-Way Bill Generation”, “Auto Download & Reconcile GSTR 1/3B/2A/2B”, “Check Party Return Status*”, “Manage multiple GSTINs in one company”, and on Enterprise “Create EWB + E-Invoice upto 20,000”.
Working without a network	Not claimed. We publish no offline or on-premise capability for Zoho Books, because the page makes none.	Claimed repeatedly and specifically, which is the clearest published difference between the two products: “Work in Offline/Online Mode”, “Auto Data Merging of HO/BO (Offline Mode)”, “Easily manage multiple branches/ offices online and offline”, and “Uninterrupted processing safeguards against network issues”.
Scale, branches and control	A browser product that grows by tier. “Enable transaction period locking” and “Bank reconciliation” appear in the plan features. We publish no branch or multi-organisation claim beyond what the page states.	Multi-branch is a named plan position, not a feature line: the Enterprise card is described as “Tailored for Multi Branch Operations”, and the page adds “User-definable Access Rights”, “Post-dated Cheques Management” and “Voucher/Master Approval & Rejection”.
Maturity and reach	A long-established vendor publishing a five-tier India price list, a free plan with a stated user count, and two add-on prices. We publish no customer count, revenue figure or market share for Zoho, because we verified none.	A long-established Indian vendor publishing both a perpetual and a subscription line, a free edition, and a migration path from “Tally or Marg” stated in its own FAQ. We publish no customer count or market share for Busy, because we verified none.

Where Zoho Books is the better buy

When you want a running cost you can end, at INR 749 a month to start

If the deciding factor is that you want to stop paying at some point, Zoho Books is the better buy and the published entry figure is INR 899 a month, or INR 749 a month billed annually, per organisation. That is a subscription. It is a number you can budget, a number you can hand to a bookkeeper without a conversation about licence keys, and a number that goes away if you leave.

It is also the better buy when the work is on one site, on a browser, and the accounting is ordinary. The page publishes a free plan with a stated ceiling of one user plus one accountant, and it publishes exactly what you pay to add people, which is rarer than it should be: INR 180 a month, or INR 150 a month billed annually, per user add-on. A vendor that prints its add-on prices is a vendor letting you model the bill.

And it is the better buy on update economics. Nothing on the Zoho Books page asks you to reinstall anything to get a new version, because a browser product does not work that way. For a single-location business that is a genuine advantage, and it is the reason we would point most Indian small businesses here first rather than at a licence.

Where Busy is the better buy

Offline branches, a licence you own, and far deeper GST tooling

Two cases, both sourced from the Busy pages rather than asserted. The first is a business with branches where the internet is not something you control. The Busy perpetual cards publish “Work in Offline/Online Mode”, “Auto Data Merging of HO/BO (Offline Mode)” and “Easily manage multiple branches/ offices online and offline”, and the page attributes a per-year suffix to the subscription model and none to the perpetual model. If your accounting has to keep working when a link goes down, that is not a feature you can add later by upgrading, and no Zoho Books line on its own pricing page claims anything like it.

The second case is heavy compliance, and here Busy is plainly the better buy on the evidence in front of us. Its cards publish “GST e-returns in JSON”, “Direct Upload of GSTR-1/ IFF”, “Auto Download & Reconcile GSTR 1/3B/2A/ 2B*” and “Create EWB + E-Invoice upto 20,000”. On the Zoho Books pricing page the strings “e-way bill” and “GSTR” appear zero times. We are quoting Busy’s own claims, several of which carry an asterisk pointing at terms we have not read, so confirm the current e-invoice ceiling with them. But on published depth, a business whose month involves return reconciliation should not be choosing on price.

And if your reason for looking is that you do not want to pay rent on your accounting software every year, the perpetual line starts at INR 11,000 for a single user and the page attaches no renewal figure to it. Read that as a licence purchase, not as a cheaper subscription, and get the terms in writing.

In India

The India-specific version of this decision

This is an India-only comparison in the useful sense: both products are sold into the same market, both publish in rupees, and both tell you that tax is extra. Zoho Books says “*Prices are exclusive of local taxes.” Busy’s price table carries the label “*GST to be added to the price”, and its homepage FAQ says “GST is charged separately.” That is a real and useful agreement, because it means the two numbers on this page are comparable in one specific way: neither includes your tax. Neither vendor publishes a tax-inclusive total, so anyone quoting you a final figure has added something the vendor did not print.

Per organisation is not per user, and the difference decides the bill

This is the row we would read twice. Zoho Books prices the organisation and sells users as a separate add-on at INR 180 a month, or INR 150 a month billed annually. So a ten-person business on the Standard plan pays INR 899 a month for the organisation and then pays per head for the other people, and the honest way to model it is to add those two lines rather than to look for a tier that already includes everyone. Busy prices the licence and then publishes a second, higher price set for the multi-user position instead of a per-person figure. Neither vendor gives you a single number for “ten people”, and we are not going to manufacture one by multiplying a per-organisation price by a headcount.

Compliance is where the two pages genuinely diverge

We are deliberately not telling you what GST law requires of your business, what your deadlines are, or what format a submission must take. That is your chartered accountant’s conversation and it is the one fee worth paying. What we will say is what is published. Zoho Books names “GST reports and filing” as a feature and lists “GST Filing” and “eInvoicing” in its feature navigation, and mentions e-invoices and payments on the Standard plan. It does not use the words e-way bill or GSTR anywhere on the pricing page we read. Busy publishes specific reconciliation and upload features by name. If return reconciliation is a monthly task for you, that difference is worth more than any price gap on this page, and it is the single strongest argument for the Busy perpetual line.

Buy the delivery model, not the feature grid

The most common mistake we see in this category is comparing a browser product to a desktop product as though the feature lists were the whole decision. They are not. A browser product is a running cost that updates itself and is available wherever there is a browser. A desktop perpetual licence is an asset on a machine you control, that keeps working without a network, and that you will have to upgrade, back up and eventually replace yourself. Both are legitimate. Choosing the wrong one is how a business ends up paying a subscription for software it will never use offline, or holding a licence for a single-branch shop that never needed one. Name the situation first, then read the price. Read the Tally versus Zoho Books comparison for the accounting head-to-head, and the Khatabook versus Zoho Books comparison for two Indian bookkeeping products compared the same way.

Who should choose which

Match the product to the buyer situation

A single-location business that wants predictable monthly cost

Zoho Books, and the figure to budget from is INR 899 a month on monthly billing, or INR 749 a month on yearly billing, per organisation, with tax extra. Start on the free plan if the work is light, move up when you need the features, and add people at INR 180 a month each when you need them. Nothing about that requires a conversation with a vendor.

A business with branches where the internet is not reliable

The Busy perpetual line, and this is the clearest case on this page. The cards publish offline and online working, offline merging of head-office and branch data, and uninterrupted processing during network problems. Budget from INR 11,000 single-user or INR 25,000 multi-user, ask which SQL variant suits you at INR 10,500 and INR 14,500, and confirm in writing what the licence does at renewal.

A business whose month involves GST return reconciliation

Busy, on published depth, and we say that plainly because it is not the answer a price comparison would give you. Its cards name GSTR-1 upload, GSTR 1/3B/2A/2B reconciliation, e-invoice and e-way-bill generation and multi-GSTIN handling. The Zoho Books pricing page does not use the words GSTR or e-way bill at all. Confirm the current e-invoice ceiling with Busy, because one of their lines is capped at 20,000 and the asterisk next to it points at terms we have not read.

A business that wants a free tool to start and does not need a ledger yet

Zoho Books’ free plan, which publishes its own ceiling rather than hiding it: one user plus one accountant, with add-ons unsupported except for document autoscans. Or Busy’s Express edition, published as “100% Free Billing & Accounting” with no mobile app. Either is a reasonable place to begin. Neither is a substitute for books that have to survive an accountant, a lender or a statutory conversation, and buying a free tool hoping it grows into a ledger is how people end up re-keying a year of invoices twice.

A buyer who already runs a ledger and is only adding a second tool

Keep the ledger, and pick the tool that matches the gap rather than the one with the longer feature list. If the gap is working when the network is down, that is the Busy perpetual line. If the gap is not paying a recurring software cost, that is a one-off licence to examine. If the gap is simply a modern browser product with a per-organisation price, that is Zoho Books. Adding a second accounting package without removing the first is how duplicate books get created, and duplicate books are worse than no books.

A buyer whose only question is the price

Neither, on price alone, and here is the honest arithmetic. Zoho Books at INR 749 a month billed annually reaches roughly the INR 11,000 Busy single-user perpetual licence in under fifteen months, and then it keeps going. A perpetual licence wins on cash only if you keep it for a long time and only if offline working is what you are actually buying. Price is the last row of this table, not the first, and if you are reading it as the first row you are going to buy the wrong product.

Full disclosure

Where NoxOrigin fits, which is: barely, and not here

We publish this page and we make neither of the two products compared on it. NoxOrigin is not a cheaper alternative to Zoho Books, and it is not a cheaper alternative to a desktop accounting package. It is a different category of tool, and the honest thing is to say so in full rather than let a platform price imply we are a candidate.

NoxOrigin has no general ledger. It does not do double-entry bookkeeping, a chart of accounts, a trial balance, or a balance sheet. Bank reconciliation and day-end close are assisted-setup maturity rather than something you switch on. It does not file GST returns, TDS, or any return for you. There is no timesheet record and no payroll module; expenses are Nox-Billings only and purchasing lives in Commerce, both of which are scoped custom deployments. There is no change-request record, no milestone record, no deliverable record, no contract editor and no e-signature, so a scope change is a new quote on the same project. Merge policy is a setup decision: detection flags candidates and a human reviews them, it is never automatic. And an invoice and a payment are different records, with “paid” being a projection of allocations rather than a stored flag.

What our platform plans cost, from our own pricing page, is Starter at INR 800 per month for three users in one workspace, Growth at INR 1,600 for ten users, and Agency at INR 5,000 for twenty-five users across three workspaces, and that is the platform only. We publish those figures here only so you can see that we are not pretending to be a third candidate in this comparison, because a platform price against two accounting packages is not a comparison. See the NoxOrigin platform plans in INR if you are curious what the platform is, but for the buying question on this page it is the wrong category.

If the problem that sent you to this page is that your quotes, your projects and your invoices live in three different places and nobody can tell you which client owes what, then naming that problem is more useful than either accounting package, because neither of them is what fixes it. Read the GST billing software versus ERP comparison for the category question, and the Vyapar versus Busy GST billing comparison for two established Indian GST billing products read the same way.

FAQ

Questions buyers ask us first

What does Zoho Books cost?

Five plans, all priced per organisation per month, in rupees, and the page publishes both billing cycles for each one. On monthly billing: Standard INR 899, Professional INR 1,799, Premium INR 3,599, Elite INR 5,999, Ultimate INR 9,599. On yearly billing, which the page shows by default: Standard INR 749, Professional INR 1,499, Premium INR 2,999, Elite INR 4,999, Ultimate INR 7,999. The page labels the two positions 'Price/Org/Month' and 'Price/Org/Month Billed Annually'. The currency is the rupee sign and the page title is 'Zoho Books Plans | Accounting Software Pricing in India', so these are India figures and not converted from anything. Zoho also publishes a free plan, two add-on prices, and one tax sentence, all of which are on this page below.

What does Busy cost, and which of Busy is this page comparing?

Busy publishes two different pricing models on one page, and they are not the same product, so we separate them. The first is labelled 'Perpetual' on the page and carries no per-year suffix: for a single user, Basic INR 11,000, Standard INR 16,500 or INR 10,500 on the SQL variant, and Enterprise INR 22,000 or INR 14,500 on the SQL variant. For multiple users, Basic INR 25,000, Standard INR 40,000, Enterprise INR 58,000. The second is labelled 'Subscription' and carries a per-year suffix: single user Basic INR 5,000, Standard INR 8,000 or INR 5,000 SQL, Enterprise INR 10,000 or INR 6,500 SQL; multiple users Basic INR 12,500, Standard INR 18,000, Enterprise INR 25,000. The subscription line is the one Busy calls BUSY Magic, and Busy's own FAQ states that BUSY Magic has four subscription plans, Start, Smart, Power and Power+, and that perpetual plans are not available in it. One honest caveat about naming: the Busy pricing page never uses the words 'on-premise'. It says 'Perpetual', and Busy's homepage separately describes 'BUSY Desktop can be used for regular accounting operations, while BUSY Online is the cloud-based version'. This page therefore uses 'on-premise' as shorthand for the perpetual desktop line and tells you exactly which label the vendor actually prints.

The Busy page shows two different subscription prices. Which is right?

We could not resolve it, so we publish both rather than picking the one that suits our argument. The price table embedded in the pricing page's own markup gives single-user Enterprise at INR 10,000 for the year and no Power+ entry at all, while the plan cards printed in the same page render Power at INR 12,000 per 360 days and Power+ at INR 50,000 per 360 days. The homepage FAQ says a third thing: 'The Start Plan starts at INR 5,000 per year, the Smart Plan starts at INR 8,000 per year, and the Power Plan starts at INR 12,000 per year for single-user access.' So the homepage agrees with the rendered card on Power at INR 12,000 and disagrees with the embedded table's INR 10,000. All three statements are quoted on this page. Take the number to Busy in writing before you budget on it. The perpetual figures do not have this problem: the rendered cards and the embedded table agree exactly on INR 11,000, INR 16,500 and INR 22,000.

Which one is cheaper?

They are not the same shape of purchase, which is why a single number would mislead you. Zoho Books is a subscription you stop paying, priced per organisation, starting at INR 899 a month or INR 749 a month billed annually on the entry plan. The Busy perpetual line is a licence you buy, starting at INR 11,000 for a single user, and the page attaches no annual renewal figure to it. Over three years the arithmetic favours whichever one you actually keep: a Zoho Books subscription accrues a running total, a perpetual licence does not. But the perpetual licence is only the right buy if it is what you need, and for many Indian businesses the deciding factor is not the licence at all but whether the accounting runs on a machine you control with the branch internet switched off. That is the row we would read twice before deciding.

Does either one file my GST returns?

We are not going to tell you what the law requires of your business, because that is a conversation with your chartered accountant, not with a marketing page. Here is only what the two pages say. The Zoho Books pricing page lists 'GST reports and filing' as a feature line and its feature navigation names 'GST Filing' and 'eInvoicing', but the strings 'e-way bill' and 'GSTR' each appear zero times in the page we received, so we publish no e-way-bill and no GSTR-return capability for Zoho Books. The Busy perpetual cards publish considerably more: 'GST e-returns in JSON', 'Direct Upload of GSTR-1/ IFF', 'Auto E-Invoice & E-Way Bill Generation*', 'Auto Download & Reconcile GSTR 1/3B/2A/2B*', 'Check Party Return Status*', 'Manage multiple GSTINs in one company', and on Enterprise 'Create EWB + E-Invoice upto 20,000'. Asterisks on the Busy page point to terms we have not read, so treat those as vendor claims rather than verified capability, and confirm the current limit with Busy.

Can I try either of them?

Yes, and both routes are on the vendor pages rather than in our memory. The Zoho Books page carries a 'Start my free trial' call to action on every paid plan and a 'Get started for free' route on the free plan, and the free plan is described on the page as 'Invoice Management System New', '1 User + 1 Accountant' and 'Email Support'. The Busy pricing page states 'Try BUSY free for 15 days' and every paid card carries a 'Get Free Demo' link. Busy also publishes a free edition named Express, described as '100% Free Billing & Accounting', priced 'Free', with 'No Mobile App'. We have run no trial of either product, so nothing on this page is drawn from hands-on use.

Is NoxOrigin a cheaper alternative to either of these?

No, and it is not in the same category, which is why it sits in a short note at the end rather than in the comparison. NoxOrigin does not publish a general ledger, so it is not an alternative to an accounting package. It has no double-entry bookkeeping, no chart of accounts, no trial balance and no balance sheet, and it does not file GST returns or any statutory return. Bank reconciliation and day-end close are assisted-setup maturity rather than a self-serve switch. Expense tracking is Nox-Billings only and purchasing lives in Commerce, both of which are scoped custom deployments. Our published platform pricing is Starter at INR 800 per month for three users, Growth at INR 1,600 for ten, and Agency at INR 5,000 for twenty-five users across three workspaces, and that is the platform only. If you are choosing between two accounting packages, that decision does not involve us at all.

Sources checked

Platform only, and deliberately not comparable to an accounting package. Starter INR 800 per month for three users in one workspace, Growth INR 1,600 for ten users, and Agency INR 5,000 for twenty-five users across three workspaces. NoxOrigin does not publish a general ledger and does not file GST returns. NoxCRM, Nox-Billings and Nox-Tickets are scoped custom deployments with no list price.

Open the source

Related resources

Keep comparing before you decide

Tally vs Zoho BooksThe accounting head-to-head, which withholds Tally figures for the same kind of sourcing reason this page applies to Busy.Vyapar vs Busy for GST BillingBusy read from its own page again, this time against a GST billing product rather than a full accounting package.Khatabook vs Zoho BooksTwo Indian bookkeeping products, with Zoho's published INR plan list read from source.All comparisonsEvery vendor we have compared, and what we could verify about each.