Pick Zoho Invoice if what you need is invoices out and card payments in, for nothing, from your phone. Pick RunwayDue if the invoice is the last step of something longer: a proposal, a signed agreement, an instalment schedule. And if you want the books sitting underneath all of it in the same product.
Everything below is the reasoning, including the section near the end where Zoho wins.
At a glance
| Zoho Invoice | RunwayDue | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever | Free plan; Pro $15/month billed yearly or $17 monthly |
| Free plan limits | 500 invoices a year, 2 users, 3 projects | 3 clients, 5 invoices and 3 proposals or contracts a month |
| Card payments on the invoice | Yes, on the free plan, through a gateway you connect; Zoho Invoice adds no fee on top, but gateways charge their own, Zoho Payments included | No: your bank details or your own payment link |
| Profit and loss, balance sheet | Not in Zoho Invoice; Zoho Books is a separate product | Included on Pro, with profit and loss on an accrual or cash basis |
| E-signature | Zoho Sign, a separate product | Included on Pro; sold in packs on Free |
| Signed contracts with instalment schedules | No | Yes, counted as committed revenue |
| Mobile apps | iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and smartwatches | None |
| An account left unused | Scheduled for deletion after four to six months of no activity, with reminders first | Kept for as long as the account exists |
Zoho prices and limits checked 25 September 2026, on Zoho's US pages.
Who each one is built for
Zoho Invoice is the front door to Zoho. It is free forever rather than free-for-a-while, and the limits are real limits somebody thought about: up to 500 invoices a year, up to two users, up to three projects (checked August 2026). Inside that box you get quotes, recurring invoices, payment reminders, expense capture, time tracking, a client portal, and online payments by card, ACH and e-wallet. For a solo consultant billing thirty invoices a year, that is a complete answer and it costs zero. The category question underneath this one, and how to test a tool against it, is in how to choose invoicing software when your revenue is not monthly.
What it is deliberately not is accounting. Zoho's own knowledge base is blunt about it: you cannot view a profit and loss report in Zoho Invoice, because creating accounts is not supported there. Books live in Zoho Books, which is a different product with a different price list.
RunwayDue is built for businesses whose revenue is lumpy. Project shops, agencies, studios, consultancies. Places where a quiet March is followed by a June that pays for the year, and where the money starts as a proposal rather than as an invoice. The product's shape follows from that: a proposal you write here or upload as your own PDF, a win probability on it, one click to turn an accepted proposal into a contract with dated instalments, each instalment raised as an invoice when you are ready with the schedule line prefilled, and every one of those documents landing in a double-entry-shaped set of books.
The real question: what you adopt when you adopt Zoho
Zoho is enormous (Zoho One advertises 45+ apps) and that breadth is the product. The trade is that the pieces you need for proposal-to-signed-contract-to-books billing are three separate products with three separate subscriptions.
Zoho Books, US pricing checked August 2026: Free ($0, 1 user plus an accountant, up to 1,000 invoices a year, and eligibility is capped at $50K of revenue for the financial year), Standard $20/month or $15/month billed annually for 3 users, Professional $50 or $40 for 5 users, Premium $70 or $60 for 10, then Elite and Ultimate above that. Bank feeds, custom fields and API access start at Standard.
Zoho Sign is separate again: its own free tier of 5 envelopes a month for a single user, then per-user paid plans (checked August 2026). The Zoho Books integration with Zoho Sign requires connecting a Zoho Sign organisation, and what it signs is invoices and quotes.
None of that is a criticism. It is how a suite works, and the suite is why people choose Zoho. But it is worth pricing honestly before you start, because the thing you are adopting is an ecosystem, not an app. The reason to do that is if you want the rest of it too.
RunwayDue is the opposite bet. One subscription, one login, one data model.
On the books
Zoho Invoice tracks receivables. RunwayDue Pro tracks both halves: vendors, bills you will pay later, expenses you already paid, receipts on either, and a chart of accounts. Out of that come seven reports: profit and loss on an accrual or a cash basis, cash flow, balance sheet, aged receivables, aged payables, a tax summary, and income by client with a warning when one client is most of your revenue.
The accrual/cash switch is the one that matters for lumpy revenue, because a business on sixty-day terms sees two wildly different and equally correct numbers for the same month, and only seeing one of them is how people end up confidently wrong.
Two things we say on our own reports page and will repeat here: this is built from your documents rather than from a general ledger of hand-written journal entries, so equity on the balance sheet is derived as assets minus liabilities. And there is no fixed-asset register or depreciation schedule. If you need statutory accounts, you need the real thing. Zoho Books, at Premium and above, has fixed assets.
On signing
E-signature is included on RunwayDue Pro at no extra cost, drawing on the same 250-document monthly allowance as invoices and proposals. On the free plan you buy it in packs: $2 for one document, or ₹100 plus 18% GST in India, which is ₹118 at checkout, and a pack of twenty-five brings it to $1 a document (checked September 2026). It is the same feature at every quantity.
What you get back is one self-contained PDF: the signatures burned into the original, with a certificate of completion bound to the back listing who signed, the email address the link went to, the time to the second with timezone, the network address, their explicit consent to sign electronically, and the SHA-256 fingerprint of the original document. The signer needs no account and no app. You can send that file to a bank without also sending them a login.
The layer no invoicing tool has
The reason RunwayDue exists is a number Zoho Invoice cannot show you, because it has no concept to build it from: what you are going to be paid.
Money here is kept in four layers, in descending order of certainty: collected, outstanding, committed, pipeline. Collected is payments that landed. Outstanding is invoices sent and unpaid. Committed is instalments on signed contracts that have not been billed yet. Pipeline is open proposals, weighted by the win probability you set. They are shown side by side and never rolled into one headline number, because a single figure blending signed work with hoped-for work is exactly how a business talks itself into revenue that does not exist. The forecast stacks them month by month so the uncertain part stays visually distinct from the certain part.
If your work arrives as signed statements of work with payment dates on them, that forecast is the whole product. If your work arrives as an invoice you raise at the end of the month, it is decoration.
When Zoho Invoice is the better choice
Plainly, and with the scenarios attached. If the free tier is what put it on your list, Wave is the other one to weigh, and it is compared here the same way.
You need to take card payments today. This is the big one. Zoho Invoice collects online payments on its free plan, through a gateway you connect, such as Zoho Payments, Stripe, PayPal or Square (checked 25 September 2026). Zoho Invoice adds no fee on top, but the gateway charges its own, Zoho's own gateway included: Zoho Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card payment in the US (checked 29 September 2026). RunwayDue does not: your invoices carry your bank details or your own payment link rather than a card button, and you record the payment when it lands. We take cards at our own checkout, which does nothing for yours. A design studio that wants a client to click Pay on the invoice should use Zoho Invoice this week.
You invoice from a phone, a van, or a client site. Zoho Invoice has apps on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and both smartwatch platforms, with a timer widget and receipt photo capture. RunwayDue is a web app. There are no mobile apps.
You send a lot of invoices and the money per invoice is small. 500 invoices a year, free, beats RunwayDue's free plan comfortably. Ours is 3 clients, 5 invoices and 3 agreements a month. A tutor billing forty students monthly should not be reading this page.
You already live in Zoho. If your CRM is Zoho CRM and your projects are in Zoho Projects, the coherence argument reverses and points at Zoho. Deals flowing from CRM to Invoice without re-keying is worth more than anything on this page.
You need bank feeds, inventory, purchase orders or payroll. RunwayDue has none of the four, and payroll is the one we have decided against rather than deferred. Zoho Books has bank feeds from Standard, and inventory and purchase orders from Professional. Payroll is a separate Zoho product again: Zoho Payroll, sold in the US from $39 a month for the organisation plus $6 per employee, or $29 plus $5 billed annually (checked August 2026). Expenses in RunwayDue are entered by hand: there is no import of any kind, no CSV and no bank feed.
You are buying software that has to still be here in five years. RunwayDue launched in August 2026. There is no track record, no reviews, no community, and it runs one process on SQLite. Small-business scale, not enterprise. Zoho has been shipping finance software for well over a decade. That is a legitimate reason to choose them and we are not going to argue you out of it.
There is also no integrations marketplace, no Zapier connector and no public API here yet. If your billing has to talk to something else, that is a hard stop.
What we will promise instead
Nothing you make in RunwayDue is ever deleted for not paying. Stop paying and the workspace drops to Free: every invoice, proposal, contract and signed PDF stays exactly where it is, still openable and still sendable, and you can still record payment against it. What a plan limits is mostly what you can start, though automatic reminders, recurring invoices and reports stop until you move back up, and bills and expenses become read-only. Self-service export is a Pro feature, but the right to your data is not. Ask on any plan and we send you the lot as files.
There is one more difference here, and it is not about money.
Zoho publishes an inactive-organisation policy. An organisation that goes unused is scheduled for deletion automatically, and their documentation is explicit that all data associated with it is removed. There are reminders first, and logging back in is enough to stop it. The exact window is genuinely hard to quote, because Zoho's own pages give different figures depending which one you read, somewhere between four and six months of no activity (checked 31 August 2026).
We are not going to dress that up as a trap. It is housekeeping, it is announced in advance, and opening the app is enough to reset it. But it is worth knowing if your work arrives in bursts. Four quiet months between projects is ordinary in this business, and quiet is precisely what that policy measures.
RunwayDue has no equivalent. Documents are kept for as long as the account exists, on any plan, however long you have been away. The only things that expire here are sign-in sessions, the mail log and the activity trail, and not one of those is something you made.
Frequently asked questions
Is Zoho Invoice really free?
Yes, free forever rather than a trial, within limits: up to 500 invoices a year, two users and three projects (checked 25 September 2026). Inside that you get quotes, recurring invoices, payment reminders, expense capture, time tracking, a client portal and online payments by card, ACH and e-wallet. RunwayDue's free plan is smaller: 3 clients, 5 invoices and 3 agreements a month.
Does Zoho Invoice have a profit and loss report?
No. Zoho's own knowledge base says you cannot view a profit and loss report in Zoho Invoice, because creating accounts is not supported there; the books live in Zoho Books, a separate product whose Standard plan is $20 a month, or $15 billed annually, for 3 users (US, checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue Pro includes profit and loss on an accrual or cash basis, cash flow, a balance sheet, aged receivables and payables, a tax summary and income by client.
How much does Zoho Sign cost?
Zoho Sign is a separate product with a free tier of 5 envelopes a month for a single user, and per-user paid plans above it (checked 25 September 2026). It also supports certificate-based digital signatures, which RunwayDue does not. RunwayDue includes signing on Pro, from the same 250-document monthly allowance as invoices and proposals, and sells it on Free in packs, from $2 for one document down to $1 a document in a pack of twenty-five.
Will Zoho delete an account I stop using?
It can. Zoho publishes an inactive-organisation policy: an unused organisation is scheduled for deletion with all its data, after reminders, and logging back in stops it. Zoho's own pages give different windows, from four to six months of no activity (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue has no equivalent: documents are kept for as long as the account exists, on any plan, and nothing is deleted for not paying.
What payment options does Zoho Invoice offer?
Online payments by card, ACH and e-wallet on the free plan, through a gateway you connect, such as Zoho Payments, Stripe, PayPal or Square (US, checked 25 September 2026). Zoho Invoice adds no fee on top, but the gateway charges its own, Zoho's own gateway included: Zoho Payments charges 2.9% + 30¢ per domestic card payment in the US (checked 29 September 2026). RunwayDue does not process client payments: its invoices carry your bank details or your own payment link, and you record the payment when it lands.
Does Zoho Invoice have a mobile app?
Yes. Zoho Invoice has apps on iOS, Android, Windows, Mac and both smartwatch platforms, with a timer widget and receipt photo capture, so it fits invoicing from a phone, a van or a client site (checked 25 September 2026). RunwayDue is a web app only.
Can Zoho Invoice forecast revenue from signed contracts?
No. Zoho Invoice works from quotes and invoices and has no signed contract with a schedule of instalments, so there is nothing for it to count before an invoice is raised. In RunwayDue an accepted proposal becomes a contract with dated instalments, and the forecast counts signed but unbilled instalments as committed revenue, separately from collected, outstanding and pipeline.