Dext alternatives: 12 tools compared (October 2026)

Shortlist: which Dext alternative fits which situation

GetMyInvoices

Fits German small and midsize businesses whose invoices arrive through supplier portals and email inboxes. Plans run from €19 per month for 20 documents to €179 for 500, with sync accounts for DATEV, sevdesk and Lexware Office. The security page names Germany as storage location and lists ISO/IEC 27001 certification.

Candis

Fits midsize German companies that need approvals, cost centers and a DATEV handover, not just capture. Plans start at €389, €599 and €789 per month depending on document volume, with unlimited users and entities. The AI invoice check against Section 14 of the German VAT Act is part of Max.

Pennylane

Fits small companies and their tax advisors who want capture, bookkeeping and e-invoicing in one EU hosted platform. Pennylane supports XRechnung and ZUGFeRD and includes e-invoice sending in its free Starter plan.

Nanonets

Fits accounts payable teams with high volumes that want to build their own extraction workflow. After $50 in free credits it costs $100 per month for 100 credits, charged per block run from $0.02 to $0.30. EU data residency is part of the Enterprise tier.

The real Dext price once add-ons are counted

Dext's business pricing page lists one entry plan. Starter costs $25.21 per month when billed annually, $302.50 a year, and covers 250 documents per month for 5 users. Annual billing is up to 20 percent cheaper than monthly. A free trial with full access to the main features is available.

The base plan includes a small monthly allowance for extras: 10 sheets of bank statement extraction, 5 documents with line items and 5 supplier statements. Beyond that the add-ons are priced separately. Line item extraction and supplier statement extraction each start at $20.50 per month or $0.50 per document, bank statement extraction at $13 per month or $0.32 per document, and storage beyond 100 MB from $4 per month.

AI Assist, Dext's bookkeeping agent, lists at $10.50 per month as a promotional rate until October 31. A business that adds line items, bank statements and AI Assist to Starter pays more than twice the headline price. That is still cheap for many firms, but it changes the comparison with flat tools.

The four numbers below are the ones to put next to any alternative's entry price.

Sources: [1]

New owner, same product: what the IRIS deal changed

IRIS Software Group completed its acquisition of Dext on December 23, 2024. At that point Dext served 12,000 accounting and bookkeeping firms and 700,000 businesses. IRIS said Dext would keep its focus on the products its customers use, and Dext's chief executive joined the IRIS global executive team.

For customers little has changed on the surface so far. The stated goal of the deal is an end-to-end offer for accountants that combines both platforms. Firms that use IRIS practice software may welcome that; firms that run a different practice system should watch how far the integration pulls Dext toward the IRIS stack.

AI Assist is the main product change since then. Dext's help center, updated on August 27, 2026, describes it as an agent for categorization, field updates and line item processing. Each client gets a trial of up to 50 applied suggestions. It works on costs and sales items only; the bank workspace is still in development. Dext states that customer data is not used to train external AI models.

Sources: [2][3][4]

Which alternative for which bookkeeping setup

Start with who does the books. When an external tax advisor posts the entries, the job is collecting documents completely and passing them on. When an internal finance team approves and books invoices, the job is a workflow with approvals and cost centers. Dext sits between both; the alternatives lean clearly to one side. Settle this before any demo, because it changes which features you compare at all. A tool for practices is judged on client management and handover, a tool for finance teams on approvals, roles and posting logic.

For collection, GetMyInvoices is the closest German counterpart. It downloads invoices from supplier portals and inboxes, reads them with text recognition and syncs them to DATEV, sevdesk or Lexware Office. Entry plans are priced by documents fetched per month, with 5 percent off for annual payment, and a Fraud Risk Assistant is available at €6 to €130 extra per month.

For workflow, Candis covers the whole path from invoice receipt to DATEV export, with unlimited users and entities and implementation included in the price. Contracts run 12, 24 or 36 months, and downgrades need three months' notice before the term ends. That is a larger commitment than Dext and suits companies whose invoice volume justifies €389 a month or more.

Pennylane and Nanonets cover the edges. Pennylane replaces capture and the ledger at once, which suits small companies without an existing accounting system. Nanonets is a document processing platform for AP teams, billed by usage, without seat licenses. The table compares all five at their lowest paid tier, and the quiz after it checks the facts that come up in vendor calls.

Sources: [5][6][7][8][9]

German rules that decide the shortlist

In Germany a capture tool is also an archive, and two laws shape what it has to do. Section 147 of the Fiscal Code requires accounting vouchers to be kept for 8 years and books and annual statements for 10 years. Receipts and invoices in Dext count as vouchers, so the archive has to stay complete and readable after you cancel.

The second law is the e-invoice. Section 27(38) of the German VAT Act lets businesses issue paper or other formats until December 31, 2026, and those with prior year turnover up to €800,000 until December 31, 2027. From January 1, 2028 structured e-invoices are the rule for all domestic B2B sales. A tool built around photographed receipts then handles a shrinking share of incoming invoices.

That is why the German alternatives stress e-invoice formats and DATEV more than scanning. Pennylane processes XRechnung and ZUGFeRD and archives documents in line with the German bookkeeping rules known as GoBD. GetMyInvoices stores its data in Germany, on AWS in Frankfurt and Google Cloud. Ask any vendor, Dext included, to show how an incoming XRechnung ends up in your books.

Sources: [10][11][7]

The capture category in our directory

Our directory lists 92 tools for bookkeeping and document capture, Dext among them. 22 state an EU hosting option, 36 offer a free trial and 13 a free plan.

The category mixes three kinds of product: full ledgers with capture built in, such as Xero or sevdesk, pure capture tools like Dext and GetMyInvoices, and AP platforms for larger teams such as Rossum or Basware. Filter the explorer by company size to separate them roughly, or by headquarters to see how the European share of EU hosting compares.

For a German business the useful cut is EU hosting plus a public price, which leaves mostly domestic vendors. The wider accounting category adds tools for payables, receivables and the month-end close.

Sources: [1][9]

Moving ten years of receipts out of Dext

Export before you cancel, and export more than you think you need. A capture tool holds the original image, the extracted fields and the status of each document. The new tool will import the fields, but the image and the link to the posted entry are what an auditor asks for.

Do the switch per client if you are a practice, starting with clients whose fiscal year ends soon. Keep Dext running for open periods until they are posted and closed, and archive each client's export in a system you control. In the EU, the Data Act has applied since September 12, 2025 and requires cloud providers to support switching; switching charges are banned from January 12, 2027.

Finally, repoint every inbound channel. Supplier emails, bank feeds and the forwarding address on invoices all have to point to the new tool on the same day, or documents land in the old one after cutover.

Sources: [12][10]