APIs · head to head
Formance vs Rowy
Formance
APIs
Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software
- From
- Free
- Rated
- -
Rowy
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheet interface for Google Cloud Firestore with cloud functions written in the browser
- 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.; Rowy every Firestore limit is inherited, including the one megabyte per document ceiling and roughly one sustained write per second per document, which surprises users who expect spreadsheet behaviour.
- They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Rowy covers Firestore backed grid.
- Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.
Where they differ
Only the attributes on which Formance and Rowy actually diverge.
Identical on both: starting price (Free), pricing model (Open source, no licence fee), free tier (Yes), user rating (Not yet rated).
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 Rowy
- Firestore backed grid
- Browser authored cloud functions
- Typed columns
- Runs in your Google Cloud project
- Role based access
- Form view
- Open source
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 Rowy
- A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot Rowy
- A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot Rowy
- A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot Rowy
Rowy
- A Firebase application that needs an internal admin interface without building onenot Formance
- Operations staff correcting production records in Firestore without developer involvementnot Formance
- Attaching a small transformation or notification function to a field change without a full deployment pipelinenot Formance
- A content team populating documents that a mobile application reads directly from Firestorenot 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.
Rowy
- Every Firestore limit is inherited, including the one megabyte per document ceiling and roughly one sustained write per second per document, which surprises users who expect spreadsheet behaviour.
- Firestore has no joins, so linking tables in the grid is a convenience layer rather than a relational feature and reports across collections still need a separate query.
- It is useful only to teams already on Firebase, so choosing it effectively locks the operational tooling to one cloud vendor.
- Query costs are billed by document read, and an unfiltered grid on a large collection can generate a bill that a spreadsheet user has no intuition for.
- Development activity has slowed relative to the broader category, so evaluate current maintenance before making it load bearing for internal operations.
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
Rowy
Free- Open source self hostedFree
- No licence fee
- Deploys into your own Google Cloud project
- You pay Google Cloud for Firestore reads, writes and 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 Rowy if
- You need firestore backed grid.
- You want to start without paying.
- You also want browser authored cloud functions.
Questions people ask
- Is Formance or Rowy better?
- Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and Rowy at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
- Which is cheaper, Formance or Rowy?
- Formance starts at Free and Rowy at Free.
- Does Formance or Rowy run on more platforms?
- Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. Rowy runs on Web.
- 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 Rowy is typically brought in for.
- What can Formance do that Rowy cannot?
- Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. Rowy covers Firestore backed grid, Browser authored cloud functions, Typed columns, Runs in your Google Cloud project.
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.
Rowy: Where is my data stored?
In your own Firestore instance inside your own Google Cloud project. Rowy does not hold a copy.
Formance: Does Formance move money?
No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.
Rowy: What does it cost to run?
No licence fee. You pay Google Cloud for Firestore reads, writes, storage and function invocations, and an open grid on a big collection reads a lot.
Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?
Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.
Rowy: Can it do joins across collections?
Not really. Firestore does not support joins, and no interface layer can add them.
Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?
Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.
Rowy: Is there a row limit?
Not from Rowy. The limits that bite are Firestore document size and per document write throughput.
Rowy: Is it suitable if I am not on Firebase?
No. It is specifically a Firestore interface.
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