Ledfra vs Formance

Where Ledfra is ahead

The ledger produces the statements

It is the first week of the month and your CFO asks for last month's profit and loss. A ledger that stops at balances hands you every account's number, correct to the cent, and leaves the statement to someone else: which accounts are income, where the period starts and ends, and a trial balance that proves the figures agree.

Formance describes itself as the operational system of record underneath your ERP, which takes its roll-ups and does the statutory accounting. Ledfra builds the statements itself. This is the profit and loss from the demo ledger, read straight off its postings:

The balance sheet, trial balance and cash flow statement come from the same postings your code wrote, and a profit and loss run from the ledger's first day ties to retained earnings on the balance sheet by construction.

Reconciled movement by movement

Formance's reconciliation module runs controls on a schedule: it compares the total balance of a group of accounts with another group or with an external cash pool, per asset and per period, and opens a case when they disagree. It is part of Enterprise.

Ledfra reads your Stripe or PayPal balance with a read-only credential and matches each movement to the ledger. A refund your code never posted shows up as that refund, with the processor's own record beside it, not as a total that is off by its amount. See Connect Stripe or Connect PayPal.

Hosted, at prices you can read

Formance's open-source core is free, and you run it on your own infrastructure. Its managed option is part of Enterprise, an annual subscription matched to your scale. Ledfra runs the ledger for you, and its rates are on its pricing page. One posted transaction counts once, however many entries it carries:

Starter

$149 a month, 10,000 transactions

Growth

$399 a month, 30,000 transactions

Early Access

Free for six months, then no more than $99 a month

Never metered

Reports, reads, failed writes and the sandbox

Early Access runs to 31 December 2026. A workspace created before then keeps its rate for as long as it stays active, and you can stop at any time. What the lock covers is set out in the terms.

Statements you can trust start with structure

A ledger that balances can still report the wrong revenue. Book the share of a payment you owe to someone else as income, and every debit still equals every credit while the profit and loss overstates what you earned. Ledfra publishes rules for the structure, starting with only money you keep is income, in How to design your ledger. The figure above follows them, which is why only the commission shows up as income.

Where Formance fits

Formance is built to move money as well as record it. Its connectors reach banks, payment providers and crypto exchanges, and they execute transfers and payouts as well as reading transactions. Ledfra does not move money: it goes through your processor or bank, and your code posts the result.

Its core ledger is open source under the MIT license, so you can read the code, run it on your own infrastructure with the data staying there. Ledfra is a hosted service. If running the ledger yourself is a requirement, Formance is built for it.

If anything here is out of date, write to hello@ledfra.com and we will correct it. To see how the ledger is put together first, start with What is Ledfra? or the Quickstart.