hledger
Open-source plain text accounting: your books in a text file, reports from the command line
What is hledger?
hledger is open-source plain text accounting: your books in a text file, reports from the command line. ZeroCrew lists it after checking it works for a company with no employees.
hledger keeps your books as double-entry transactions in a human-readable text file that you own, and turns that file into reports such as a balance sheet, income statement and account registers. It runs as one download on macOS, Windows and Linux, with a terminal interface and an official web interface, hledger-web, if you prefer not to edit the file by hand. You can import bank and payment exports such as CSV files using rules you write once, and track several currencies, investments, crypto or time. Because the books are plain text, they fit version control and scripts, and a coding agent can read or edit the file, though hledger itself does not include an AI agent. It is free software under the GPL-3.0 license, developed since 2007.
By Simon Michael and contributors.
Is hledger good for a one-person business?
Yes, one person can run hledger: you sign up and start without a sales call, it's open source, and your agents can use it through its MCP server. ZeroCrew checked this on hledger's own site.
- Start alone
- Self-serve
- Sign up without a demo, says its site
- Can I leave
- Open source
- You can host it yourself
- Connects with
- 23 apps
- Git, Ledger CLI, Beancount, Fava
How big is hledger?
982 websites link to hledger, a domain rank of 383 out of 1,000. ZeroCrew checked the counts on November 9, 2026.
Websites linking and domain rank (0 to 1,000) from DataForSEO.
hledger reviews
Founder reviews of hledger are mostly positive, from 6 public posts ZeroCrew read and checked with a second AI model. Founders praise private, user-owned financial data, flexible plain-text workflows, and robust transaction importing.
What people say elsewhere
Praised for
- Private, user-owned financial data
- Flexible plain-text workflows
- Robust transaction importing
- Useful financial tracking and reports
Complained about
- Time-consuming importing and categorization
- Limited financial visualizations
- Transaction ordering friction
- Truncated output on network drives
Summarized by AI from 6 public posts on Hacker News and Reddit, November 7, 2026. Not reviews from ZeroCrew founders.
- 10 years of personal finances in plain text files Hacker News
- Annual note of gratitude for hledger 🙇🏽♀️ Reddit
- Plain Text Accounting is Pretty Cool Reddit
- hledger sorting all my transactions by date in the file Reddit
- (not) sorting hledger register output by order in the transaction-log? Reddit
- hledger output truncated or missing on shell redirect Reddit
What products are similar to hledger?
Pilot, Puzzle, and Digits do the same job as hledger (bookkeeping). ZeroCrew files every tool by the job it does.
hledger MCP
Yes, hledger has an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and other agents can use hledger for you; the setup steps for each are on its ZeroCrew MCP page. ZeroCrew checked the official MCP registry and hledger's own site.
- MCP serverSet up the hledger MCP server
hledger integrations
hledger connects with 23 apps, including Git, Ledger CLI, and Beancount. ZeroCrew read the list from hledger's own site on November 7, 2026.
- Connects withGit, Ledger CLI, Beancount, Fava, Paisa, dsq, DataStation, Emacs, GnuCash, just, Obsidian, Postgres
Is hledger right for what you're building?
ZeroCrew's Agent Zero checks hledger against its site, what founders say about it, and its competitors. The result: a yes, a no, or a better tool for what you describe. Free.