Avalara AvaTax connects to the software that businesses already have and delivers sales tax decisions based on precise geo-location in more than 12,000 taxing jurisdictions in the U.S.
N/A
TaxJar
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
TaxJar offers automated sales tax reporting and filing. According to the vendor, capabilities include: Accurate, Detailed Sales Tax Reports: TaxJar’s local jurisdiction reports show sales and sales tax collected not only for each state, but for local jurisdiction (counties, cities, special jurisdictions, etc). Users can also sort data by any date range. Estimated Sales Tax Reports: Users can see a comparison of what they actually collected versus what…
$19
for up to 200 orders/month
Pricing
Avalara
TaxJar
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Starter
$19
for up to 200 orders/month
Professional
$99
for up to 200 orders/month
Premium
Custom
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Avalara
TaxJar
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
Optional
Additional Details
—
30 day free trial. No obligation, no activation fees. Upgrade, downgrade or cancel anytime. Pricing based on order volume.
Transactions are equal to
-Orders imported into TaxJar with one or more line items
-SmartCalcs API pushed sales tax calculation
If you go over your transaction limit during a single month, we will charge you the difference between the plan you’re on and the next highest plan. The next month you’ll start back on the original plan that you subscribed to, and the process will repeat itself again. This is all done automatically. Your plan will never be interrupted and you will not have to speak with a salesperson.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Avalara
TaxJar
TrustRadius Insights
Avalara
TaxJar
Highlights
Research Team Insight
Published
Avalara and TaxJar are popular tax compliance software products. Using these tools, businesses can automate tax compliance while also ensuring taxes are filed correctly and on time.
Avalara is often used by medium to large businesses to handle tax filing and reporting. These businesses appreciate Avalara’s flexible pricing that allows organizations to pay for the number of transactions and features they need. Businesses with many other technologies can also make good use of Avalara’s many integrations.
TaxJar is more popular with smaller businesses that utilize TaxJar’s simple API and interface. These companies benefit from TaxJar’s strong automation tools with popular ecommerce products like Shopify and Amazon. Using TaxJar makes it easy for non-technical staff to set up and manage tax compliance.
Features
Avalara and TaxJar both offer all the expected features of tax compliance software, but they also have a few features that set them apart.
Avalara has many integrations that allow it to seamlessly fit into almost any business without interrupting the existing software infrastructure. Avalara also offers flexible pricing options, so businesses can purchase the plan that matches the number of transactions they make. This makes Avalara an affordable choice for businesses that make a small number of transactions but still want to automate tax compliance.
TaxJar has fewer integrations compared to Avalara, but the integrations that exist contain powerful automation tools. Businesses using popular ecommerce products like Shopify can export data directly to TaxJar without downloading any CSV files. This makes TaxJar usable for businesses without in house technical staff.
Limitations
Though Avalara and TaxJar provide strong features for tax compliance software, each one also has some limitations that are important to consider.
Avalara requires users to manually import tax data in CSV files, which may need reformatting depending on the integration. This can be a problem for companies that are looking for closer to total automation of tax compliance. Many users have reported slow customer support response time from Avalara as well.
TaxJar requires the manual input of tax rates for most countries outside of the United States and the European Union. This can be a major downside to companies that engage in international business. TaxJar only provides email support at the basic pricing, and many users have reported that customer support at the basic price point can be slow or otherwise not useful.
Pricing
Avalara offers three pricing tiers for small businesses, differentiated primarily by the number of yearly transactions they cover. $50 per year covers 250 transactions, $95 per year covers 500 transactions, and $200 per year covers 1500 transactions. Avalara also offers plans for large businesses, but these are priced individually depending on the business in question.
TaxJar offers 2 pricing tiers. The basic pricing tier costs $17.00 per month and includes basic tax compliance features and email support. TaxJar Plus is priced depending on the business and includes extensive support features, advanced integrations, and user management features. TaxJar also provides a 30 day free trial for users who want to try the software before purchasing.
Features
Avalara
TaxJar
Type of tax
Comparison of Type of tax features of Product A and Product B
Avalara
7.4
Ratings
6% below category average
TaxJar
9.3
Ratings
17% above category average
Sales and Use Taxes
9.00 Ratings
9.70 Ratings
Cross-border Taxes
7.40 Ratings
9.00 Ratings
VAT / GST Taxes
5.90 Ratings
00 Ratings
Energy and Fuel Taxes
7.40 Ratings
00 Ratings
Tax Reporting & Compliance
Comparison of Tax Reporting & Compliance features of Product A and Product B
As a non-profit that relies on volunteers, having a system that is easy to use and cost effective is crucial. Alavara fit both of those needs for us. Also, since this is a task that is completed only once a year, it needs to be simple to use, which Alavara is. And lastly, since the IRS rules are often complicated and change regularly, it is helpful to have a vendor that stays current with the changes and incorporates them into the process which Alavara does.
If you aren't a tax professional, this is a must. Trying to manually calculate which county/city/state sales tax is owed will break your brain. Actually, even if you were a tax professional, why would you want to manually do it when you could just have a tool like this to calculate it for you. I wish it was also affordable to have it file for you and there are some crunchy bits, but its pros definitely outweigh the cons.
Has extensive research and documentation on telecommunications industry
Research is always up to date
The ability to ask questions and get clarification on specific situations with no limit as to how you ask a question and often get the answer the same day
I find it virtually impossible to access people when you have issues with anything
In my experience, everything runs through account managers and they are non-responsive and unavailable most of the time.
In my experience, 99% of all communication with anybody at Avalara has to be done via some ridiculous form or via email. Human contact is extremely difficult to resolve an issue that sometimes requires human to human contact.
Continually increase its native integration features with BigCommerce, which recently just opened up more Checkout APIs and Sales Tax APIs.
The Amazon integration is confusing only because Amazon (sometimes?) calculates and collects sales tax on your behalf. It's not clear what's best-- to let Amazon do it for you or for TaxJar to handle it.
I have not been able to find a company that does it better than Avalara. I still have lots of problems, but we are working through them. Based on other demos i have seen and talking with peers in other companies, this is the best.
The UI is simple and straightforward. The site is organized in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners and experts alike. There's also tons of resoruces on Avalara University at your disposal to better understand how Avalara can work best for your business needs. I would recommend Avalara to anyone wanting to investment in the betterment of their business's sales tax function
We do have trouble tying Avalara's reporting back to our POS, but we just got a new POS system and there are bugs we are still trying to work out within the POS system. I do not believe this is an Avalara issue
Avalara is not consistent in giving us information timely. For instance, right now, we have a help desk ticket with them that's been open since October. They are still trying to figure it out and we haven't gotten any feedback on where they are at or what is going on. That seems to me a very excessive amount of time to be working on a problem. Was it forgotten? Is there something bigger going on? Do they need something from us? An update would be helpful.
Also, many times when we call with an issue or concern (wrong tax rate for instance) we generally feel like the help desk assumes it's of our doing instead of theirs and doesn't truely listen when we explain the problem because we end up repeating it over and over as well as sending examples. We expect more respect on our end.
We had a few questions about integrations & onboarding, and support answered quickly and in-depth. They understood our questions - which were a bit technical in nature - and were able to provide an explanation in a timely and specific manner that allowed us to get the system up and running quickly.
The documentation online we informative and helpful. The videos from the Avalara institute and the help tab if we have any questions and the search too were helpful. We like the ease of using the click here for more information tool about nexus and the information for the ECM Pro training were helpful. Whenever we have a question we normally get an email along with the tool as to where to find our answer. We also like that it shows information about nexus status of the states we maybe approaching and we can look more into it.
The implementation team from Avalara was very knowledgable and did a good job of passing along information so that we could maintain the system and be able to make future changes ourselves. We had asked for some custom tax setup and they worked with us to get additional taxes set up that they didn't previously have. They worked with us to pull our documentation on tax rules and make sure those were included. I had hoped more scenarios would be there out of the box to cut down on the configuration time.
TaxJar is integrated with Kaseya autotask, and this integration is very inefficient and was not easy to set up. Neither TaxJar nor Kaseya support was helpful at all, "rude" is the only word to describe that, whereas Avalara has always tried to be helpful and has been very friendly to work with. TaxJar has no similar capability to retain their tax-calculated transactions and file the returns; TaxJar would calculate the taxes in Kaseya autotask and you would still have to manually import the data into TaxJar if you wanted to subscribe and have them file your returns. Needless to say that was a non-starter.
TaxJar is less expensive, simpler to integrate and their billing is straightforward so that you don't have to worry about huge surprises at the end of a month or quarter. They spend a lot less time on sales/marketing but their support is excellent and overall we have had a much better experience with TaxJar.
With regards to ROI, it definitely saves time. And time, as they say, is money. It may be hard to put a particular dollar sign on this, but it definitely has provided a positive return.
It keeps me aware of where I have sales tax nexus that I might not know about otherwise. This is important. Even if I have to check it manually, at least I am made aware of where I need to file.
It allows me to track how much in sales tax we've paid year over year, which is a good indication of how our sales are doing.
