APIs · head to head
Formance vs Prisma
Formance
APIs
Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
The short version
- Each has a real cost: Formance formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.; Prisma prisma Postgres is billed per operation, with the free tier at 100,000 operations and 500 MB of storage
- They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Prisma covers ORM.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Formance and Prisma actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated), category (APIs).
What each one covers
Drawn from each product's published feature list. An absence here means we hold no record of it - not that the product lacks it.
Only in Formance
- Double-entry ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency
- Payments connectivity
- Reconciliation
- Self-hosted deployment
- Cloud offering
- API and SDKs
Only in Prisma
- ORM
- Query builder
- Auto-migrations
- Node.js
- TypeScript
- GraphQL
- REST APIs
- Node.js support
What people use each for
The jobs each tool is most often brought in to do.
Formance
- A marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditablenot Prisma
- A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot Prisma
- A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot Prisma
- A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot Prisma
Prisma
- Using a type safe ORM and query layer against a Postgres databasenot Formance
- Adding a managed connection pool and edge cache in front of an existing databasenot Formance
Where each one falls short
Documented limitations, not opinions. Every one is a constraint you would hit in normal use.
Formance
- Formance holds no money and provides no regulatory cover, so it must be paired with a payments provider or bank, and buyers occasionally mistake a ledger for a treasury system and discover the gap late.
- Numscript is a domain-specific language your team must learn, and while it makes complex splits expressible it also means transaction logic sits outside the languages your engineers already debug well.
- Self-hosting a ledger that must never lose or duplicate a transaction is a serious operational commitment covering backups, upgrades and Postgres tuning, which is real cost the zero licence fee hides.
- Enterprise pricing is not published, so the difference between the free path and the supported path cannot be evaluated without a sales conversation.
- The company is much smaller than the incumbent alternatives, and while the MIT licence protects the code it does not protect the roadmap, so features on the hosted side may arrive slowly or change direction.
Prisma
- Prisma Postgres is billed per operation, with the free tier at 100,000 operations and 500 MB of storage
- Starter at $10 a month includes 1M operations then charges $0.0080 per 1,000
- Storage overage runs from $2.00 per GB on Starter down to $1.00 per GB on Business, so the unit cost depends on the plan
- Accelerate charges separately per operation and per GiB of query egress beyond the first 1 KiB
- Cache tag invalidations are not included below the Pro plan and are billed per thousand above it
Pricing, plan by plan
Formance
Free- Open SourceFree
- MIT licensed core ledger
- Numscript transaction DSL
- Multi-currency tracking
- Enterprise$undefined/year
- Managed or private deployment
- Payments connectivity and reconciliation
- Support with response commitments
Prisma
Free- FreeFree
- 1M requests/month
- 360 GB-hours memory
- 4 vCPU-hours
- Starter$10/month
- 5M requests/month
- 1M database operations ($8 per million overage)
- 10 GB storage ($2/GB overage)
- Pro$49/month
- 20M requests/month
- 10M operations ($2 per million overage)
- 50 GB storage ($1.50/GB overage)
- Business$129/month
- 100M requests/month
- 50M operations ($1 per million overage)
- 100 GB storage
Which should you pick?
Choose Formance if
- You need double-entry ledger.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API.
- You also want numscript transaction dsl.
Choose Prisma if
- You need orm.
- You want to start without paying.
- You work on Node.js, TypeScript.
- You also want query builder.
Questions people ask
- Is Formance or Prisma better?
- Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and Prisma at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Formance or Prisma?
- Formance starts at Free and Prisma at Free.
- Does Formance or Prisma run on more platforms?
- Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. Prisma runs on Node.js, TypeScript.
- Can I use Formance for free?
- Both have a free tier, so you can try either at no cost before committing.
- What is Formance best used for?
- Formance is most often used for a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable, a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit, a payments team that wants one normalised model across several psps so reconciliation is not written separately for each, a company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappears. Of those, a marketplace splitting a single customer payment between seller, platform fee and tax that needs the split to be atomic and auditable and a fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an audit are not what Prisma is typically brought in for.
- What can Formance do that Prisma cannot?
- Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. Prisma covers ORM, Query builder, Auto-migrations, Node.js.
Answered from the vendors’ own pages
Formance: Is Formance really open source?
Yes. The core ledger is MIT licensed with full source access and no deployment restrictions.
Prisma: How much does Prisma cost?
Prisma is free to start with 1M requests/month. The Starter plan costs $10/month with 5M requests, the Pro plan $49/month with 20M requests, and the Business plan $129/month with 100M requests. All plans have usage-based overages.
SourceFormance: Does Formance move money?
No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.
Prisma: What is Prisma's overage pricing?
Prisma charges $1 per million requests over the included amount (Starter), $2 per million database operations overage (Pro and Starter), and $1.50-$2 per GB for storage overages depending on the plan. All plans include a hard spend limit on by default.
SourceFormance: What does the enterprise version cost?
Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.
Prisma: Does Prisma include data transfer costs?
No, Prisma includes unlimited data transfer with no egress fees on all plans. Prisma ORM remains free across all tiers.
SourceFormance: Do I have to use Numscript?
Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.
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