The best invoice generators, compared
Ten invoice generators compared on the thing none of them advertise: what the free tier actually costs you. Watermarks, caps, and who can really email a client.
Every invoice generator on this page calls itself free. All of them are, up to a point, and the point is different in each — and it is almost never on the page that says "free". This compares them on that: not on feature lists, but on what the free tier eventually asks you for.
Three things turn out to separate them, and none is advertised. Whether the PDF carries somebody else's name on it. Whether "free" means unlimited or means three. And whether the tool can send the invoice to your client, or only hand it back to you.
How this was checked
Every figure below comes from the vendor's own published pricing, help centre or generator page, read on 27 August 2026. Where a fact could not be established without registering an account, this says so rather than guessing — and where a claim is the vendor's rather than something observable from outside, it is described as their claim.
That is a real limitation and worth stating plainly: this is a comparison of what these tools publish, not a stopwatch test of using all ten. Free tiers also change without announcement, which is why the date is at the top of this section rather than buried in a byline. If something here is out of date, it is wrong, and it is worth telling us.
The table
| Tool | Account to make one | Watermark on free | Emails your client | Free limit | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1001invoice | No, on /1time | No | Yes | 3 invoices/mo | $9/mo |
| invoice-generator.com | No | Not stated | Not stated | Unlimited (their claim) | — |
| Wise | No | Not stated | No — you download and send | Unlimited (their claim) | — |
| Wave | No | Not stated | No — PDF is emailed to you | Unlimited generator | Separate product |
| Zoho | No to make, yes to save | Not stated | No, not from the generator | Generator unlimited | Free plan exists |
| Invoice Simple | Yes | Yes | Yes | 3 invoices/mo | $4.99/mo |
| Invoice Home | Yes | Yes | Yes | $1,000 of invoices/30 days | $6.99/mo |
| Canva | Yes | Not on free templates | Yes, from Canva | Design tool, not metered | Free tier |
| Adobe Express | Yes | Not stated | No — download and send | Design tool, not metered | Free tier |
| QuickBooks | Yes | No | Yes | Generator free, product is not | Paid product |
"Not stated" is doing honest work in that table. Several of these publish nothing about watermarks anywhere, which is itself informative: a tool that does not watermark tends to say so, because it is a selling point.
The catch, tool by tool
Invoice Home — the cap is a number, not a count
The one that surprises people. The free tier is not "three invoices a month", it is $1,000 of invoice value every 30 days. Bill one client $1,200 and you are done for the month on your first invoice. Free invoices also carry an Invoice Home watermark, removed on the $6.99 plan. Against that: over a hundred templates, and it genuinely emails clients.
Invoice Simple — three a month, and the PDF is marked
Three invoices a month on the free tier, and watermark-free PDFs are a paid feature. Paid starts at $4.99 and rises to $19.99 for unlimited. The mobile app is genuinely good, which is what it is chosen for.
Wave — it emails the invoice to you
Easy to misread. Wave's free generator does email a PDF, and the address it emails is yours. You then forward it. That is a different product from one that sends to a client and tells you when it was opened, and the page does not draw attention to the distinction. Wave's actual invoicing product does send to clients; the free generator is a separate thing.
Zoho — free to make, account to keep
No signup to produce an invoice, which is unusual and good. But you cannot save it without a Zoho account, and the generator cannot email it at all — sending is the full Zoho Invoice product. Zoho Invoice does have a real free plan, so this is less a catch than a doorway.
invoice-generator.com and Wise — genuinely unlimited, genuinely just a file
Both make invoices with no account and no cap that either publishes, and both end at a download. Wise exports unusually widely — Google Docs, Sheets, Word, Excel, PDF, OpenOffice — which makes it the best of these if what you want is a file to edit rather than a document to send. Neither will chase anything or remember what you sent.
Canva and Adobe Express — design tools that make invoices
Both need an account, both are excellent at making a document look considered, and neither knows what an invoice is. Nothing checks that your numbers add up, nothing keeps the numbering in sequence, and nothing knows you already used INV-014. If the document is going in front of somebody whose opinion of your work is partly formed by how it looks, that trade may be worth it. See invoice numbers for what the sequence is protecting.
QuickBooks — the generator is bait, and that is fine
The free generator exists to introduce you to the accounting product. That is a reasonable arrangement and QuickBooks is genuinely the right answer for somebody who needs bookkeeping, VAT returns and a bank feed rather than a document. It is a large piece of software to adopt for the purpose of sending one invoice.
Which one, by what you are actually doing
| If you... | Use | Because |
|---|---|---|
| Need one invoice, today, and never again | invoice-generator.com or Wise | No account, no cap, no relationship |
| Want the file in Word or Google Docs to edit | Wise | Exports to six formats, not just PDF |
| Care most about how it looks | Canva | It is a design tool that happens to do invoices |
| Send a few a month and want them sent, not downloaded | 1001invoice | Free tier emails the client and has no watermark |
| Need bookkeeping, tax filing, a bank feed | QuickBooks or Zoho | Invoicing is a feature of accounting there, not the product |
| Invoice from a phone, on site | Invoice Simple | The mobile app is what it is built around |
Where we lose
This is our page, so it is worth being specific about the rows we do not win.
- We cap the free tier at three invoices a month. invoice-generator.com and Wise do not cap theirs at all. If three is not enough and you do not want to pay anything, they are the better answer and this is not a close call.
- We do not do accounting. No bank feed, no expense tracking, no VAT return. If you need those, an invoicing tool is the wrong shape of product and QuickBooks or Zoho is the right one.
- We are not a design tool. There are templates and they are good, but Canva will always win a page laid out by someone who cares about kerning.
- We have no recurring invoices yet. You can duplicate last month's; nothing sends itself on a schedule.
What we are actually better at
Two things, and they are the two the table is organised around.
Free means the finished document. No watermark on any plan, including the free one — the PDF from three-invoices-a-month is the same file as the PDF from the top plan. That is not true of Invoice Simple or Invoice Home.
It sends to your client, from the free tier. Not to you. Most free generators end at a download, which leaves the actual job — getting it in front of the person who pays — where it started. How to send an invoice covers why that step is where most late payments are created.
And one that is harder to put in a table: you describe the invoice in a sentence instead of filling in a form. Every other tool here is a form with better or worse styling. Whether that matters is genuinely a matter of taste, which is why it is not a row.
The questions worth asking of any of them
- Free until what? A count, a value, a trial length, or a watermark. All four exist on this page.
- Does it email the client, or email me? The difference is a whole step of work.
- Does it keep the invoice, and can I find it in a year? A tax authority asking about an old invoice is the usual reason to care.
- Does it number them for me, without gaps? In most countries an unbroken sequence is a legal requirement rather than a convention.
- What happens if I stop paying? Whether the invoices you already made stay reachable is worth knowing before rather than after.
If you are earlier than choosing a tool, what an invoice must contain is the eight things any of these has to produce, and how to write one goes field by field.