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APIs · head to head

Formance vs Yapily

Formance logo

Formance

APIs

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

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite
Yapily logo

Yapily

APIs

Open banking API infrastructure for account data and pay-by-bank payments across Europe

From
Free
Rated
-
Full reviewWebsite

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.; Yapily production pricing itself is not published; only the resulting typical merchant transaction cost is publicly known, so the underlying platform fee still requires a sales conversation.
  • They diverge on capability: Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Yapily covers Unified open banking API.
  • Prices and features above were last checked on 1 September 2026.

Where they differ

Only the attributes on which Formance and Yapily actually diverge.

Attributes where Formance and Yapily differ
AttributeFormanceYapily
Pricing modelOpen source, no licence feeFree sandbox, pay-as-you-go production
PlatformsLinux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, APIWeb, API

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 Yapily

  • Unified open banking API
  • Account information access
  • Payment initiation
  • Free sandbox
  • Multi-country bank coverage
  • Webhooks and reconciliation tooling

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

Yapily

  • A merchant wanting a lower-cost payment method alongside card acceptancenot Formance
  • A lending or budgeting product needing bank account data for affordability checksnot Formance
  • A business wanting one API instead of separate integrations to each bank's own open banking standardnot Formance
  • A company prototyping open banking features for free in sandbox before committing budgetnot 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.

Yapily

  • Production pricing itself is not published; only the resulting typical merchant transaction cost is publicly known, so the underlying platform fee still requires a sales conversation.
  • Consumer adoption of pay-by-bank still lags card payments, so merchants offering it as a checkout option typically see it used as a secondary rather than primary payment method.
  • Coverage depends on the banks in each country maintaining reliable open banking APIs, and inconsistent bank-side reliability across markets is a known category-wide weakness, not unique to Yapily but not solved by it either.
  • As infrastructure for both account data and payments, a company only needing one of those two capabilities is still evaluating a broader platform than it may need.
  • Regulatory dependence on PSD2 and UK open banking rules means the underlying legal framework, not just Yapily's product, could shift and affect what is possible on the platform.

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

Yapily

Free
  • SandboxFree
    • Free testing environment
    • UK and European bank connections for development
  • Production$undefined/month
    • Pay-as-you-go pricing, exact rates not published
    • Typical pay-by-bank cost of 0.1 to 0.5% or a flat 5 to 30 pence per transaction

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 Yapily if

  • You need unified open banking api.
  • You want to start without paying.
  • You work on Web, API.
  • You also want account information access.
Yapily review

Questions people ask

Is Formance or Yapily better?
Neither clearly leads. Formance starts at Free and Yapily at Free, and user ratings are close enough to be indistinguishable. Choose on capability and platform support.
Which is cheaper, Formance or Yapily?
Formance starts at Free and Yapily at Free.
Does Formance or Yapily run on more platforms?
Formance runs on Linux, Docker, Kubernetes, Web, API. Yapily runs on Web, API.
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 Yapily is typically brought in for.
What can Formance do that Yapily cannot?
Formance covers Double-entry ledger, Numscript transaction DSL, Multi-currency, Payments connectivity. Yapily covers Unified open banking API, Account information access, Payment initiation, Free sandbox.

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.

Yapily: Is there a free way to try it?

Yes, sandbox access is free for development and testing.

Formance: Does Formance move money?

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

Yapily: How much cheaper is pay-by-bank than card payments?

Typically 0.1 to 0.5% of transaction value, or a flat 5 to 30 pence, against 1.5 to 3.5% for card scheme fees.

Formance: What does the enterprise version cost?

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

Yapily: Is production pricing published?

No, production access is pay-as-you-go but exact rates require a sales conversation.

Formance: 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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