Lexware Office alternatives: 12 tools compared (October 2026)

Shortlist: which Lexware Office alternative fits which situation

Accountable

Fits sole proprietors and freelancers who file their own taxes. The Steuern plan costs €29.90 a month plus VAT on annual billing and covers advance VAT returns, the annual returns and a guarantee of up to €500 per return.

DATEV

Fits a GmbH whose tax firm already books in DATEV. DATEV Unternehmen online is free for the company, Belege online costs €3.83 per client and month, and the firm's own fees come on top.

Norman

Fits a GmbH or UG that wants the annual accounts from software. The company Max plan at €52 a month includes VAT filings, corporate and trade tax and the E-Bilanz, while double-entry bookkeeping itself is free.

Candis

Fits growing companies where several people approve invoices. Plans start at €389 a month with unlimited users and companies and pass the data to DATEV.

Zoho Books

Fits German subsidiaries of foreign groups. The German edition supports SKR03 and SKR04, DATEV export and XRechnung, runs in 22 languages and handles several currencies; Professional costs €30 per organization a month on annual billing.

What changed at Lexware Office since 2024: a new name, then new prices

In September 2024 lexoffice became Lexware Office. Lexware says only the name changed: contracts, conditions and data stayed as they were, and the new name was meant to end the confusion between the brand Lexware and a product called lexoffice. The Lexware partner blog lex-blog.de reported the change on September 25, 2024. Old bookmarks and the login kept working.

The price step followed ten months later. An archived copy of the pricing page from July 17, 2025 still lists €6.90, €11.90, €19.90 and €29.90 a month for the plans S, M, L and XL, with a notice that new prices apply from July 31. Since that date the plans cost €7.90, €12.90, €21.90 and €32.90 plus VAT. That is 1 euro more for S and M, 2 euros more for L and 3 euros more for XL, or about 10 percent for the two plans that include bookkeeping.

According to the price list lex-blog.de published in June 2025, existing discounts kept running and were applied to the new prices. Payroll moved in the same step: the add-on starts at €12.90 a month for up to 2 employees and reaches €199.90 for up to 50. The current pricing page advertises 50 percent off for three months, so compare regular prices when you weigh an offer against a rival.

A 10 percent increase alone rarely pays for a migration, because moving the books costs time and adviser hours. It turns into a reason when it meets the limits in the next section, and when the e-invoice deadlines force a decision about the invoicing tool anyway.

Sources: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8]

Where the product stops: one country, one company, the upper plans

The hardest limit is geography. Lexware's help center states that Lexware Office is suitable only for use in Germany. Tax rates of other countries, foreign currencies and online banking outside Germany are not available. That rules it out for a company in Austria or Switzerland, which explains why "lexoffice alternative österreich" appears among Google's search suggestions.

The second limit is structure. Each account holds one company, and data from separate accounts cannot be merged automatically. An owner with a holding company and an operating GmbH pays for two accounts and combines the figures outside the software. There is no group view and no consolidation.

The third limit sits in the plan ladder. S covers receipt capture, the archive and the free login for the tax adviser, and it can receive e-invoices. Creating XRechnung and ZUGFeRD invoices starts with M. The advance VAT return, the cash book, the profit and loss statement and the BWA management report start with L. Only XL adds English and EU invoices, reverse charge invoices for construction work, recurring invoices, automatic receipt intake by email and the public API.

For a GmbH, the year-end closing is a further point. Lexware describes the product as a way to prepare the annual accounts of companies that draw up a balance sheet, with the tax adviser connected digitally; the balance sheet itself comes from the adviser. The fair usage policy adds ceilings of 50,000 receipts and invoices and 50,000 bank transactions per calendar year and 50 payslips per month.

Two points work in Lexware Office's favor. Extra users cost nothing, and the DATEV connection runs two ways: as DATEV cloud services straight into the tax firm's software, or as a DATEV export file. A company that stays small, German and single-entity rarely outgrows the product.

Sources: [9][10][5][11][12][13][14]

Five alternatives for four situations

Each alternative below answers one situation. None of them replaces Lexware Office for every customer, and for a single German company that works well with its adviser, staying is often the cheaper choice. Our comparison Lexware Office vs sevdesk covers the most common like-for-like switch, sevdesk, in detail.

A sole proprietor or freelancer without a tax adviser gets the most from Accountable. Its Steuern plan at €29.90 a month on annual billing includes advance VAT returns, the annual income, trade and VAT returns and a guarantee of up to €500 per return. Businesses under the small business rule already get the annual filings in the Buchhaltung plan at €19.90. Lexware Office passes the profit statement to its partner smartsteuer or to the adviser instead.

A GmbH whose tax firm books in DATEV can send receipts straight into the firm's system. DATEV Unternehmen online is free for the company. DATEV Belege online costs €3.83 per client and month and the bank data service €1.37 per account, according to the DATEV price list as of August 2026. The firm's own fees come on top and are not published. A GmbH that wants to close the year itself looks at Norman instead: its company Max plan at €52 a month covers VAT filings, corporate and trade tax and the annual accounts with the E-Bilanz, the electronic filing of the balance sheet.

A growing company tends to hit the invoice process first: several approvers, cost centers, more suppliers. Candis handles incoming invoices from €389 a month with unlimited users and companies and passes the data to DATEV Unternehmen online. It is priced for companies with a finance team, sold on terms of 12, 24 or 36 months, and it does not replace the general ledger.

A German subsidiary of a foreign group needs what Lexware Office excludes. Zoho Books runs a German edition with the SKR03 and SKR04 charts, DATEV export and XRechnung and ZUGFeRD files. It offers 22 interface languages, handles several currencies and keeps several companies as separate organizations under one login. Professional costs €30 per organization a month on annual billing for 5 users.

Our directory shows how narrow the German field is. Of the 92 bookkeeping tools we list, 13 name Germany as a strong market and 12 are based there. On September 28, 2026, Accountable from Belgium was the only Germany-focused tool with a head office abroad. The explorer lets you filter the whole niche by head office and company size.

Sources: [15][16][17][18][19][20][11][21]

AI in daily bookkeeping: what each tool ships today

Lexware Office uses AI in two places. Receipt capture reads the amount, document number and date and suggests a booking category under the SKR03 or SKR04 charts of accounts. For bank accounts, credit cards and PayPal, the software pairs receipts with payments, proposes a booking for each transaction and learns from corrections. Lexware claims around 70 percent less manual work. Its product pages describe no chat assistant.

The alternatives reach further. Accountable includes unlimited use of its AI tax assistant from the Rechnungen Plus plan at €9.90 a month on annual billing. Norman runs an AI autopilot in its free plan, raises the usage limits of its assistant with each paid plan and connects to ChatGPT and Claude. Candis extracts invoice data, pre-codes entries, sends approval requests and checks invoices for the mandatory details under Section 14 of the VAT Act.

Zoho Books offers the assistant Ask Zia for tasks and records and lets the administrator choose the AI provider and model. Automatic receipt scans are capped by plan: 50 a month in the free plan, 200 in Professional and 1,000 from Premium. DATEV has offered DATEV Copilot in MyDATEV since May 2026, developed for tax firms rather than for the companies they serve.

For a practical test, upload the same 20 receipts from last month into each trial and count the booking suggestions you would accept without a change. Treat every proposal as a draft that a person confirms.

Sources: [22][15][17][18][23][19][24]

What the options cost per month

List prices only compare well against the same scope. Full bookkeeping with the advance VAT return costs €21.90 a month in Lexware Office L, and €32.90 in XL if you need EU invoices or the API. Both plans include any number of users. Zoho Books Professional costs €30 per organization on annual billing for 5 users, or €40 on monthly billing, and each extra user adds €5 on annual billing. Premium at €50 includes 10 users.

Norman's company Max plan at €52 a month bundles the tax filings a GmbH otherwise buys from an adviser. Accountable's Steuern plan at €29.90 does the same for sole proprietors. Candis starts at €389 a month, since it covers the invoice workflow of a team rather than the ledger, and its final price depends on the number of invoices. DATEV looks cheapest on paper, €3.83 for Belege online plus €1.37 per bank account, but the tax firm's fees for the bookkeeping are the real cost and vary by firm.

The calculator uses published list prices as of September 2026, excluding VAT and promotions, and shows how the number of users changes the monthly bill. It is orientation, not tax advice.

Sources: [5][13][19][17][15][18][16]

Planning the switch: GoBD, retention periods and the fiscal year

German retention rules decide what has to survive the move. Under Section 147 of the Fiscal Code, books, annual accounts and the opening balance sheet are kept for 10 years, booking vouchers such as invoices for 8 years and other tax-relevant documents for 6 years. The 8 years for vouchers apply since 2025, after the Fourth Bureaucracy Relief Act cut the period from 10 years. Each period starts at the end of the calendar year in which the document was created.

During a tax audit the authority may inspect the data, ask for evaluations or demand a machine-readable copy. The GoBD, the tax administration's rules for electronic bookkeeping, add a detail since their second amendment of July 14, 2025: for e-invoices, at least the structured part, the XML data, has to be kept unaltered in its original form. A folder of PDFs is not enough for incoming XRechnung files.

Lexware Office keeps the exit simple. After canceling, the account stays readable for 10 years, and you can export or delete the data at any time. Lexware says this retention is free until further notice and may be charged for in the future. Export anyway: the DATEV export for every year, the receipts with their XML files, the invoice list and the master data, stored outside the old account.

Switch at the start of a fiscal year if you can. Then the profit statement or balance sheet, the annual VAT return and the audit trail come from one system per year, and the new tool starts with balances your adviser has confirmed. Lexware Office is cancelable monthly, so its contract rarely stands in the way; the new vendor's term might, since Candis sells 12 to 36 months and Accountable Max runs for 12. Our review method explains how we check facts like these.

Sources: [25][26][27][28][14][5][18][15]