Best Tax Software (2026): Top 10 Compared

ONESOURCE is Thomson Reuters' cloud-native platform for corporate tax, trade and financial reporting, bought by companies to run their own tax function rather than by accounting firms preparing client returns — Thomson Reuters sells a separate product, UltraTax CS, to that different audience. The ONESOURCE name covers a family of modules reached from one login: indirect tax determination and compliance, direct tax compliance and provision, global trade management, statutory reporting, information and ACA reporting, trust tax, and tax data and process management, backed by an AI-assisted research layer built on Checkpoint Edge with CoCounsel.

Thomson Reuters documents efficiency figures rather than raw adoption counts. A Forrester study of seven ONESOURCE Indirect Tax customers found 50 percent time savings in compliance processing, an internal 2022 performance report found a 50 percent decrease in processing time for large-volume returns, and a separate Forrester study of four customers found 68 percent efficiency gains in statutory reporting. A further vendor estimate credits users of ONESOURCE Foreign-Trade Zone management with more than $1 billion in annual duties saved. The platform connects to more than 200 certified technology partners and ERP integrations, and named customers including JLL and Georgia-Pacific are cited using it for month-end reporting and product classification respectively.

Thomson Reuters publishes no list price for any ONESOURCE module; every quote reflects the modules, entity count and ERP integrations a deal requires. ONESOURCE suits multinational or large domestic corporations that want indirect tax, income tax compliance and provision handled by one vendor inside their own tax department. It is the wrong product for an accounting firm preparing returns for many clients, and for any company without a dedicated tax function to manage the module selection an enterprise platform requires.

CCH Axcess Tax is Wolters Kluwer's cloud-based tax preparation platform, sold to accounting firms rather than in-house corporate tax departments, and priced separately from the publisher's on-premise CCH ProSystem fx Tax, its sibling product for firms that prefer to run their own infrastructure. Axcess is the SaaS option: returns, diagnostics and client data live in one cloud environment shared with the platform's document management and workflow modules rather than passed between separate systems.

Wolters Kluwer states that 95 of Accounting Today's Top 100 Firms and 20 of its 25 Fastest Growing Firms use CCH Axcess, and that more than 82 percent of users rated it highest for form coverage in the Journal of Accountancy and Tax Advisor's annual software survey. CCH eSign covers Form 8879 and other client documents, an electronic filing status system tracks returns in real time, and the higher Accelerate and Advantage tiers add CCH Axcess Scan for AI-driven data extraction from source documents including K-1s, plus an AI assistant built into the platform. Specialty returns and consolidated returns carry per-return surcharges of $53.90 and $199 respectively.

No price is shown on the vendor pages. CCH Axcess Tax Essentials, aimed at firms with four or fewer users, is sold online to new customers in packages of 100, 200 or 400 returns or pay-per-return; the packages for growing firms and the enterprise options beyond Essentials are quoted individually. Axcess fits firms that want cloud tax preparation tied to a firm-wide workflow platform and are willing to take a quote; a firm that wants a single all-in published number will not find one on the vendor site.

Sovos is a tax compliance and regulatory reporting company whose Compliance Cloud spans indirect tax determination, e-invoicing and information reporting, sold to finance and tax teams rather than to accounting firms preparing client returns. The vendor states it serves more than 100,000 companies, including roughly half the Fortune 500, and that its platform covers close to 200 countries.

The Indirect Tax Suite groups four pieces: Tax Determination for sales and use tax, VAT, GST and insurance premium tax, calculated in real time across almost 200 jurisdictions and integrated into ERP and ecommerce systems; the Compliance Network, which handles e-invoicing, e-receipts and e-archiving across more than 60 countries under continuous transaction control regimes; Filing & Reporting for VAT, sales tax and SAF-T submissions; and Sovos Intelligence, a newer AI layer built on what the company describes as a unified tax compliance data model. A dedicated SAP Tax Determination product automates calculation for compliant e-invoicing and reporting inside SAP environments specifically, and Sovos cites 16 billion transactions processed in its last fiscal year as evidence of scale. The company also cites third-party research on the site itself, including an EY finding that 74 percent of companies say digital tax compliance has raised their overall tax risk, as the rationale for consolidating compliance under one platform.

Sovos does not publish pricing for Tax Determination or the wider Compliance Cloud; its own product page states plainly that pricing is custom based on the company's needs, quoted against transaction volume, jurisdiction count and modules selected. Sovos fits multinational organizations facing indirect tax, e-invoicing and reporting obligations across several jurisdictions at once, where consolidating those functions under one vendor reduces integration overhead. It is over-scoped for a single-country business with a narrow filing need.

UltraTax CS is Thomson Reuters' professional tax preparation software for accounting firms and enrolled agents preparing returns for many clients — the counterpart, inside the same company, to ONESOURCE, which Thomson Reuters sells separately to in-house corporate tax departments rather than preparer firms. UltraTax handles individual, business, fiduciary, exempt-organization, estate and gift returns from a shared client database, so data entered once, such as a K-1 issued to an individual, carries into every related return without re-entry.

Form coverage spans 1040, 1041, 1120, 1120C, 1120S, 706, 709, 990 and 5500, plus more than 371 electronic-filing state and local return types. An instant tax preparation checklist flags fields with a prior-year entry but no current-year input, and multiscreen support shows data entry, forms, prior-year input and diagnostics across up to four monitors at once. UltraTax is part of the CS Professional Suite alongside Accounting CS, Accounting Payroll CS and Practice CS, and Thomson Reuters reports customers seeing more than 50 percent time savings from that suite-wide data integration. Add-on integrations include 1040SCAN for automated document import, SPbinder for digital workpapers, Onvio Firm Management, and CoCounsel Tax, an AI research assistant; firm partner Frank Stitely is quoted crediting the product's balance of ease of use, training simplicity and depth of functionality.

Thomson Reuters publishes no price for UltraTax CS; its own product page states that custom pricing depends on the number of users, tax returns, and states and jurisdictions served, and a separate Per Return Pricing license exists for firms below full-license volume, also quoted rather than listed. UltraTax fits established firms filing a meaningful volume of returns across entity types that want one vendor for tax, accounting and practice management.

Longview Tax is insightsoftware's corporate tax provision and reporting product, bought by in-house corporate tax departments to calculate income tax provision — not by accounting firms, and not for indirect tax or return filing, which the product does not cover.

Output includes a draft income tax disclosure with supporting schedules: the foreign-versus-domestic pre-tax income breakout, the national-and-foreign current-and-deferred tax split, the statutory-to-effective rate reconciliation, and the net deferred tax asset, liability and valuation-allowance detail an auditor expects. Three defined roles, Tax User, Tax Reviewer and Tax Administrator, control who prepares, reviews and maintains the system, and dedicated input apps exist for Pillar Two reporting as that standard phases in. A Longview Add-In for Excel, with write-back functionality, lets tax staff pull data into a spreadsheet, adjust it, and push changes back rather than re-keying figures.

insightsoftware does not publish pricing for Longview Tax; deployments are quoted against entity count and user seats. Longview Tax fits mid-sized and large corporate tax departments that want provision automated and tied to the close calendar rather than rebuilt in spreadsheets each quarter.

Lacerte Tax is Intuit's professional tax preparation software for established accounting firms handling more complex returns than the company's lower-tier ProConnect Tax typically serves; both are sold to preparer firms, with Lacerte positioned above ProConnect on form depth and diagnostic count. It is Windows desktop software, run locally, through Intuit's own hosting tiers, or through a third-party host, rather than a browser-based product.

Intuit's pricing page confirms 25,000-plus built-in diagnostics and 7,200-plus automatically calculating forms, financial-institution download from more than 275 banks, and automated K-1 package delivery by secure email link. Two access models exist. Pay-per-return requires an annual PPR license, discounted to $599 per year against a standard $813, which unlocks per-return billing: individual returns with one state cost $105 each, business, partnership, estate, trust and exempt returns with one state cost $148 each, and gift and estate returns cost $99 each, with additional-state add-ons at $103 and $98 for individual and business returns respectively. Firms wanting unlimited or bundled returns instead build a custom annual license through Intuit's sales team, and Intuit Tax Advisor and Intuit Sign, for tax planning reports and digital signatures respectively, are bundled into every plan at no extra charge.

Separately, hosted remote access is billed per user per month: a single-user Solo tier runs $80 monthly, and multi-user Business and Advanced tiers list standard rates of $107 and $133 per user per month for four or more users, with lower introductory rates for the first two months. Only the Advanced hosting tier supports running QuickBooks Desktop alongside Lacerte in the same hosted environment. Multi-user access to the non-hosted desktop product requires an additional $499-per-user network license. Lacerte suits mid-sized firms with complex, form-heavy returns and volume enough to justify a license rather than the pay-per-return rate.

CCH ProSystem fx Tax is Wolters Kluwer's on-premise professional tax preparation software, the cornerstone of the CCH ProSystem fx Suite and the tax-only sibling to the cloud-based CCH Axcess Tax from the same publisher — both serve accounting firms, not the in-house corporate tax departments that buy a platform like ONESOURCE or Longview Tax. Firms that want deep tax preparation and research without adopting Axcess's broader document management and client-collaboration modules choose ProSystem fx Tax instead, running it on infrastructure the firm controls.

Wolters Kluwer describes the product as delivering thousands of automatically calculating forms and schedules across federal, state, county and city entities, feeding a Digital Tax Workflow that carries a return from client engagement through review and billing. It integrates with named modules from the same suite: CCH ProSystem fx Scan for document import, Document for digital file storage, Engagement for workpapers and trial balances, Planning for multi-scenario tax planning, Fixed Assets for depreciation, and Xpitax for outsourced return preparation. The vendor markets multi-tiered Premier Customer Services support alongside standard phone, chat and email help included at no extra charge, and cites firms such as Gifford & Cox, LLC, a Great Plains practice, relying on it to manage multistate taxation complexity across its client base.

Wolters Kluwer publishes no price list for CCH ProSystem fx Tax; the site instead advertises unspecified affordable package options for firms needing 19 licenses or fewer and directs larger firms to a quote scoped by size, module selection and any other CCH products already licensed. ProSystem fx Tax fits larger, established firms that want CCH's form depth and research integration but prefer to manage their own infrastructure rather than move fully to Axcess's cloud workflow platform.

Bloomberg Tax Provision and Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets are related corporate tax products from Bloomberg Tax, sold to in-house corporate tax and accounting teams rather than public accounting firms; each is priced and sold separately but frequently bought together since depreciation data feeds directly into a provision calculation.

Bloomberg Tax Provision is built around a full ASC 740 balance-sheet workflow: the vendor states figures tie out across the process without manual overrides, every change is traceable to the cell level, and typical implementations go live in under two months with no custom schemas, mapping or scripting required. It connects to the wider Bloomberg Tax Suite, so provision data can draw on the same workpapers and research tools rather than a separate import. Bloomberg Tax Fixed Assets is a cloud-based subledger that automates depreciation calculations against built-in, automatically updated federal and state tax law, supports up to 99 books for additional jurisdictions or scenario modeling, and includes Tax Depreciation Modeling to simulate bonus-depreciation and regulatory scenarios without touching production data. A 2023 customer survey the vendor cites found 98 percent of respondents could respond to change more quickly, 85 percent reported a shortened closing period, and 90 percent found the automatic tax law updates extremely useful.

Neither product's price is published; both route to a request-pricing form, with Fixed Assets pricing stated to vary by user count and organizational need. The pairing suits corporate tax departments wanting a provision engine with a direct, audited link to depreciation data rather than a manual handoff between systems. It is a narrower purchase than a full platform such as ONESOURCE or Longview Tax, since neither product covers indirect tax or return filing on its own.

ProConnect Tax is Intuit's browser-based professional tax software, the entry point in Intuit's preparer lineup below the desktop-based Lacerte, sold to accounting firms rather than corporate tax departments. Nothing installs locally; preparers work from any device, and the product connects directly to QuickBooks Online Accountant so a client's trial balance can populate a return without re-keying.

Intuit's own pricing page, current for the 2026 season, lists two structures. Buy-as-you-go individual federal-plus-one-state returns cost $82.46 each, discounted from a $109.95 list rate; buy-as-you-go business returns cost $63.64, discounted from $84.85. Firms that want a fixed annual number instead can buy a bundle: ProConnect Essentials 50 runs $2,478 per year for one user and 50 individual returns in all states, Essentials 100 runs $3,842 per year for 100 returns, ProConnect Plus runs $5,868 per year for two users and 200 returns, and ProConnect Advanced runs from $8,462 per year for multi-user teams and 400 returns, with business returns added for an extra fee on every bundle. Every account additionally requires a User Access license at $210 per user, or $2,100 flat for ten or more users, which unlocks e-filing, printing, reporting, support and the bundled Intuit Sign digital signature tool. The software covers more than 7,200 forms, SmartReturn assembles low-to-medium complexity 1040s from imported data automatically, and ProConnect is built into the wider Intuit Accountant Suite alongside bookkeeping and client insights so a firm works from one login rather than switching systems.

ProConnect suits small and mid-sized firms, particularly those already on QuickBooks Online Accountant, that want cloud access and a published price without Lacerte's deeper diagnostic count. High-volume firms should total the per-return or bundle cost plus User Access fees before comparing it against a flat-rate competitor like Drake Tax.

Drake Tax is the professional tax preparation product from Drake Software, a privately held company operating since 1977 that Drake states now serves more than 70,000 tax professionals, and it markets itself to small and mid-sized firms on cost relative to the CCH and Thomson Reuters lines. The core product is Windows desktop software; Drake Tax Online is a separate browser-based edition for firms that want cloud access without a hosting add-on.

Every Drake Tax product includes all 50 states and federal and state e-filing at no extra charge, hundreds of return diagnostics, free data conversion from most prior software, LookBack and LinkBacks for tracing prior-year and source data, and the Drake Tax Planner for scenario comparison. Desktop licensing splits by return cap and entity type: Drake Tax Pro and Pro 250 include business returns within their return allowance, while Drake Tax 1040 and 1040 150 cover unlimited or capped individual returns and add business returns per return as needed. Desktop tiers for tax year 2026 are published at $2,375 to $3,145 depending on the cap and entity mix chosen, with additional individual and business returns beyond any cap at $49.99 and $74.99 respectively on every tier.

Drake Tax Online prices separately: $299.99 for the first user and $99 for each additional user, then returns purchased as needed at $49.99 per individual and $74.99 per business return, or upfront in bulk at discounts reaching $26.49 per individual return at 50 or more. Drake Tax fits small and mid-sized firms wanting predictable, published cost without CCH or Thomson Reuters' firm-wide workflow tooling. Firms needing browser access without a paid hosting subscription should choose Drake Tax Online rather than the desktop product.