The short version
This is the cleanest trade in the capture market: Hubdoc costs nothing beyond your Xero subscription and will never read a line item; AutoEntry reads line items and charges you double credits for each one. If header capture covers your clients, keep the free tool. The moment line-level coding becomes routine work, Hubdoc stops being free in any meaningful sense, because you are paying in re-keying time.
| Feature | Hubdoc | AutoEntry |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Included with every Xero subscription; no separate charge (as of July 2026). source | Credit packs from Bronze, 50 credits at $13/month, to Sapphire, 2,500 at $469/month, excluding VAT (as of July 2026). source |
| Line-item extraction | Not available, and Xero's product team said in July 2025 it is not in the pipeline. source | Available on every document: an invoice captured with line items costs 2 credits instead of 1. source |
| Document type coverage | Bills, receipts, and statements captured at header level with the source document stored. source | Purchases, sales, expenses, supplier statements (2 credits), and bank statements (3 credits per page). source |
| Publishing | Publishes to Xero as bills or spend money transactions with the document attached. source | Publishes verified documents to Xero and other platforms, including Sage and QuickBooks. source |
| Duplicate handling | Flags likely duplicates on upload; announced on Xero's product blog. source | Duplicate checks run during processing before documents are published to the ledger. source |
| Capacity management | No quota to manage; capture volume rides on the Xero subscription. source | Credits are the quota: unused credits roll over for 3 months (90 days), then lapse. source |
Where ExpenseFlow fits (our stake, disclosed)
ExpenseFlow competes with both of these tools, so weigh this box accordingly. We think the choice between free-but-header-only and paid-per-line is a false one: ExpenseFlow extracts every line of every document by default at a flat per-client price, applies tax treatment through a deterministic rules engine, and syncs approved captures to Xero as drafts after your review. The linked pages hold that claim up against each tool with sources.
Start with the free one, then count what it misses
For a firm already on Xero, the honest starting point is that Hubdoc is sitting there, paid for, one connection away. Any comparison has to beat free. So the useful exercise is not listing features; it is counting the documents in a typical client month that Hubdoc handles completely versus the ones it hands back to you half-done.
Hubdoc handles completely: the one-line receipt, the subscription invoice, the utility bill where a single account code covers the whole amount. Header fields, document attached, published to Xero. Done.
Hubdoc hands back half-done: anything where the lines diverge. The trade supplier invoice with materials at standard rate and fuel at a different treatment. The wholesaler order that splits across cost-of-goods accounts. Hubdoc will capture the total faithfully and leave the splitting to whoever reconciles, because line-item extraction does not exist in the product. This is not an oversight waiting on a roadmap: users asked, and in July 2025 Xero’s product team answered that it is not in the pipeline.
What the credits actually buy
AutoEntry’s pitch is that the missing depth is worth paying for, and its price list is unusually concrete about what depth costs: 1 credit for a header-level invoice, 2 with line items, 2 per supplier statement, 3 per bank statement page. Packs run $13 to $469 a month, and unused credits survive for 90 days.
That concreteness cuts both ways. You can price a client’s document mix to the cent, which finance-minded practices like. You are also billed at the document level for thoroughness: choosing line-level data doubles the cost of every invoice, so the meter quietly pressures you toward the shallower capture on marginal documents. And a heavy statement-conversion job, the kind that makes AutoEntry shine during a cleanup, is priced per page and can eat a small pack in an afternoon.
Simplicity as a feature, and as a ceiling
Hubdoc has almost nothing to configure, which for many small clients is precisely the point: connect, forward the email, publish. AutoEntry sits in the middle of the configuration spectrum, with verification workflows and coding rules but nothing like the supplier-rule sprawl of bigger platforms. Both publish to Xero with attachments, both flag duplicates, and neither makes tax judgments; they capture amounts and lean on the ledger’s tax codes.
The ceiling shows up in the same place for both: neither decides anything. Hubdoc gives you headers to finish coding; AutoEntry gives you lines to verify and publish. The bookkeeper’s review is the engine in either workflow, and the tools differ in how much raw material they hand it and at what price.
A word on switching costs
Moving between these two is unusually cheap as software migrations go, which changes the risk calculus. Neither holds your history hostage: everything either tool published sits in Xero with the source document attached, so a switch only affects documents from the changeover date. Firms commonly trial AutoEntry on a single line-item-heavy client for a month while Hubdoc keeps running for everyone else, then compare the verification time saved against the credit spend on that one client. The reverse experiment works too: demote a simple client back to Hubdoc and see if anyone notices.
The decision in two sentences
Stay with Hubdoc while your clients’ documents are simple enough that header capture plus your own coding beats any subscription, which is genuinely common at the smaller end. Move to AutoEntry when line items and statement conversion become weekly work and the credit bill reads cheaper than the hours; just budget for the 2-credit surcharge on exactly the invoices you care most about, and mind the 90-day rollover.
If choosing between a free tool that cannot read lines and a paid plan wall in front of them is the part that grates, that trade is the one ExpenseFlow was built to remove; its stake in this page is disclosed above and its sourced comparisons against both tools are linked below.