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APIs · head to head

Formance vs Skyflow

Formance logo

Formance

APIs

Open source double-entry ledger and payment orchestration for money-moving software

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Skyflow logo

Skyflow

APIs

Data privacy vault that holds sensitive records outside your own systems

From
On request
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

The short version

  • Only Formance has a free tier, so it costs nothing to try first.
  • 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.; Skyflow reported contracts near 195,000 US dollars a year with a platform fee before usage put this out of reach of early stage companies, which are precisely the ones whose architecture is still cheap to change.
  • They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Skyflow covers Tokenised storage.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 31 August 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Formance and Skyflow actually diverge.

Attributes where Formance and Skyflow differ
AttributeFormanceSkyflow
Starting priceFreeOn request
Pricing modelOpen source, no licence feequote
Free tierYesNo
PlatformsLinux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, APIAPI, Web, Self-hosted

Identical on both: 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 Skyflow

  • Tokenised storage
  • Polymorphic encryption
  • Field level access policies
  • Data residency
  • Secure functions
  • PCI scope reduction
  • Detokenisation gateway
  • Audit trail

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 Skyflow
  • A fintech whose homegrown balances table produced numbers finance could not reconcile and now needs proper double-entry before an auditnot Skyflow
  • A payments team that wants one normalised model across several PSPs so reconciliation is not written separately for eachnot Skyflow
  • A company that wants its ledger under a licence it can keep running even if the vendor disappearsnot Skyflow

Skyflow

  • A fintech that wants card and bank account data out of its own infrastructure so its application servers leave PCI DSS assessment scopenot Formance
  • A company entering India or the EU with data localisation obligations that would otherwise require standing up regional databases and operationsnot Formance
  • A health technology business that needs protected health information isolated from the analytics stack while still supporting aggregate reportingnot Formance
  • An engineering team that wants support agents to see masked identifiers and payment services to see real ones, enforced centrally rather than in every servicenot 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.

Skyflow

  • Reported contracts near 195,000 US dollars a year with a platform fee before usage put this out of reach of early stage companies, which are precisely the ones whose architecture is still cheap to change.
  • Every read of a protected field becomes a network call to a third party, so latency and an external availability dependency enter paths that were previously local database reads, and outage planning has to account for a vendor you do not control.
  • Analytics and joins on vaulted data are constrained; work that was a simple SQL join now happens through secure functions or on tokens, and data teams routinely discover this after the engineering team has committed.
  • Unwinding the vault later is a rewrite rather than a migration because tokens are threaded through every service, so the switching cost climbs steadily and the negotiating position at renewal weakens with each release.
  • Scope reduction is an architectural claim your own assessor must accept, so the audit saving is real only if the implementation genuinely keeps sensitive values off your systems, and partial implementations that leave a cache or a log line in place deliver the cost without the benefit.

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

Skyflow

On request
  • Skyflow Data Privacy Vault$undefined/year
    • Platform fee plus usage by data subject count
    • Priced additionally per data residency region
    • PCI Level 1, SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001 and HIPAA coverage

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.
Formance review

Choose Skyflow if

  • You need tokenised storage.
  • You work on API, Web, Self-hosted.
  • You also want polymorphic encryption.
Skyflow review

Questions people ask

Is Formance or Skyflow better?
Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and Skyflow at On request, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Formance or Skyflow?
Formance has a free tier; the other does not. Paid plans start at Free for Formance and On request for Skyflow.
Does Formance or Skyflow run on more platforms?
Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. Skyflow runs on API, Web, Self-hosted.
Can I use Formance for free?
Yes. Formance has a free tier, so you can try it without paying. Skyflow starts at On request.
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 Skyflow is typically brought in for.
What can Formance do that Skyflow cannot?
Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. Skyflow covers Tokenised storage, Polymorphic encryption, Field level access policies, Data residency.

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.

Skyflow: Does Skyflow really take my systems out of PCI scope?

It can, if card data never touches your infrastructure and the detokenisation happens at the boundary. Your QSA has to agree the design, so validate the architecture with your assessor before signing.

Formance: Does Formance move money?

No. It records and orchestrates movements; the actual payments happen at a PSP or bank you connect.

Skyflow: What does it cost?

Nothing is published. Reported annual contracts sit around 195,000 US dollars, built from a platform fee plus usage by data subject count and additional charges per data residency region.

Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?

Not published. It is an annual subscription quoted per customer.

Skyflow: How does it help with data localisation?

Records can be pinned to a specified region, so an Indian or EU residency requirement is met by the vault rather than by you running regional databases and operations teams.

Formance: Do I have to use Numscript?

Yes for anything beyond the simplest transfers. It is how multi-party transactions are expressed atomically.

Skyflow: Can I still run analytics on vaulted data?

Partly. Aggregates and comparisons are supported through polymorphic encryption and secure functions, but arbitrary joins against other datasets are harder than they were, and this is the most common late surprise.

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